E71 - Kshira Saagar - On Achieving Organisation-Wide Data Literacy

Kshira Saagar is the first Chief Data Officer (CDO) of Latitude
Financial Services. Latitude is Australia’s biggest non-bank
lender, digital payments, and finance company with over 2.7
million customers across Australia and New Zealand.


At Latitude, Kshira is currently working on enabling the
enterprise to make faster and smarter data-driven decisions.
Kshira oversees all the data science processes and infrastructure
from data collection and governance to algorithmic decision tools
development.


He is also working on developing self-service data analytics
capabilities for the Latitude staff and other advanced and
intelligent analytics products. Kshira is leading a large team of
data scientists, analysts, architects, engineers, machine
learning engineers, data warehouse developers, BI developers and
data governance & risk remediation experts.


Before Latitude, Kshira had performed in different senior and
leadership data roles at Global Fashion Group, Equifax, Fairfax
Media, and Mu Sigma Inc. He has over a decade of experience in
data science solution development and analytics problem-solving
for retail, telecom and insurance markets, including fortune 100
clients. He also has professional data analytics experience in
media, healthcare, aviation, logistics, and FMCG industries.


He is also a Member Of The Board Of Advisors at YouPay, an
alternative payment solution in Australia.


Kshira was recognised as one of the Top Australian analytics
leaders by the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia
(IAPA) for three consecutive years since 2019.


In this exclusive episode, Kshira shares with us how he is
enabling the enterprise to make faster and smarter data-driven
decisions.


The interview starts with Kshira telling a brief history of
Latitude Financial Services.

How it has been helping millions of customers in Australia,
often from behind the scenes.

How without the physical footprint, like the traditional
banks, the company has been growing a loyal customer base

Does being fully digital make the company more data-driven
and agile. If so, then, how?

How does the company face similar challenges as any
traditional company?

How the senior leadership and a smart decision-making process
helps the business to overcome the challenges.

Work that Kshira has been putting in to build the data
analytics capabilities of the company.

Kshira also shares his views on how an organization can build
and support self-service analytics capabilities.

He shares with us a simple framework of TEA – tools,
education, and access.

Self-service not only means access to dashboards but also
open access to discovery and engineering.

Tips and strategies for increasing data literacy and strong
data penetration within the organisation.

Approach and framework for analytics capability development
for a brand new product as well as risk management and avoiding
data bias.

The critical aspects of personalization vs data ethics.

What the company should be doing to make the customers
understand the organizational efforts to protect customer data
and privacy.



If you are a senior manager or an executive leader who wants to
develop centralized data and analytics capabilities and a
centralised chief data office, this is the episode for you.


If you are a data analytics practitioner tasked with building
brand new data analytics capabilities from scratch without any
playbook, you will also benefit hugely from Kshira’s guidance.


BusinessAnalytics, DataAnalytics, MachineLearning, DataLiteracy,
CustomerExperience, DataScience