Comerica taps former Meta leader to 'democratize data' across the bank

Comerica Bank has tapped a former leader at Meta to improve the bank's data literacy — in other words, help everyone across the company to understand, analyze and act on data insights.

The Dallas-based bank brought on Jeff Banks in the newly created role of chief data and analytics officer in early March. Banks said he's focused on creating an environment at Comerica where people across lines of business have access to data and the skills to use it to drive decisions.

Banks said Comerica already has strong dashboards and reports with data insights, but he wants to create a culture where employees use data across the company to drive decisions. Once that baseline is in place, he said the next phase would be adding more artificial intelligence, machine learning capabilities and other advanced technologies.

"Machine learning and AI and all of those things are best leveraged when you have a consistent use and arrangement of your data and information," Banks said. "Priority one for me is to create what I would call a library. How do we organize information? How do we make it consumable? ... How do we help instruct and support people as they up their use of a managed data environment?"

Banks said he thinks about the "defensive" part of the data strategy as keeping up with regulatory requirements as data collection and reporting expectations rise. The "offensive" side of the strategy is using data as an asset to increase business, he said.

Regional banks have been enhancing and investing in their data analytics tools and infrastructure for years, but where some fall short is insufficiently monetizing that data, said Jordan Sternlieb, a senior partner at consulting firm West Monroe.

"Over the last few years, [regional banks] have come a long way in terms of cleaning up their data, having a strategy, executing against it, organizing their data, that sort of thing," Sternlieb said. "I think what's key, though, is that there needs to be a champion to be able to better execute upon the data and the insights and the analytics. The integration of data within the business so that the bankers understand it, are literate, know how it relates to their portfolio and are able to actually monetize it."

Banks came to Comerica from Meta, but previously worked as enterprise data officer at USAA for 11 years, and said he always intended to go back to financial services. He said there's a parallel to his new role at Comerica and his previous position at Meta. At the technology giant, Banks said his objective was to create a data structure that used information about advertisers to drive sales, similar to how Meta uses data to target users. At Comerica, where the bulk of the business is commercial, Banks said the end goal is comparable.

Research from an Arizent survey conducted with American Banker showed that 60% of regional and community banks named data and analytics as one of their top technology spending priorities in 2023. In 2022, Comerica spent $39 million on "modernization initiatives," which included migrating to the cloud and updating its core platforms. 

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John Wei, who's been chief technology officer at Comerica since 2021, said on an October podcast that a majority of Comerica's business workload sits on the public cloud. He added that Comerica was a late mover to cloud adoption, beginning about three years ago, but that it had decommissioned two out of three of its data centers, and said in a Youtube video last month that Comerica now uses more than 50 Amazon Web Services.

Sternlieb said bankers, like relationship managers, need to have protocols and playbooks in place so they can uncover sales or account penetration opportunities from data. He added that training should provide bankers with examples for how to leverage data and improve outcomes.

Comerica will train bankers and employees to manage data and use it to make decisions, Banks said, instead of giving them results from big data scans.

"We are a relationship bank," Banks said. "How do we shrink the universe of information in front of our relationship managers to talk about what is the next relevant thing to deepen the relationship with a commercial client? How do you give indicators to say that a relationship may be at risk?"

He said as an example, relationship managers should be able to use data to get a fuller picture of a client, and recommend the next best product or service.

In its second quarter, Comerica lost $3.7 billion of deposits in the three weeks following the run on and failure of Silicon Valley Bank. The bank's collapse drove businesses to prioritize keeping banking balances under $250,000, to ensure Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation protection. Comerica projects total deposits will fall 12% to 14% this year.

Although sharing information across the company for employees to use is key to Banks' strategy, he said another important goal for his new data framework is to apply governance tools to monitor quality of the data. He added that the bank is working on implementing protocols to ensure the data is safe and correct. 

"What's the process by which we inform our operational areas to capture only the right sets of information that's needed to drive forward a business process?" Banks said. "How do we protect information that is captured, and make sure that only goes into the right hands of colleagues that need to drive forward with the given set of information? Those are the kinds of technologies that often go under the radar, but are absolutely critical to lay a great foundation for a data program."