VIDEO | Celebrity Financial Chief Digital & Data Officer: We Want to Ensure Our Customers Are Financially Literate

(US and Canada) Sanjay Saxena, Chief Digital and Data Officer, Celebrity Financial, speaks with Robert Lutton, Vice President, Sandhill Consultants, about delivering business value, the challenges of a digital transformation journey, and a data analytics leader’s must-have skillsets.

Saxena describes Celebrity Financial as a midsize firm with its first line of business as loans and mortgages but fast expanding into other digital products. He says that the mission is to be a digital-first company and his team‘s main contribution is to build the vision for data in digital. It includes roadmaps, building a solid data foundation, and setting up Celebrity Financial from a data analytics capability standpoint.

Saxena and his team are working with the business side to define the company's digital footprint. He reveals that a core theme for the organization that links all of its offerings is the theme of financial literacy. The aim is to ensure that customers are more financially literate and make better financial decisions.

When asked about the challenges of Celebrity’s digital transformation journey, he says that the first step was to ensure that the company understands what digital-first means beyond the slogan. And the second challenge was convincing the senior leadership to invest a significant portion of the capital into digital.

Sharing his views about data and analytics leaders’ skillsets, he says that leaders in the space should be well acquainted with analytics and willing to engage in detailed analytics conversations with senior business leaders. And a lot of it involves understanding the business problem and providing a view of the analytics solutions to be deployed.

He stresses that leaders need to be able to translate and get the business side to speak to the technology side and vice versa.