It’s the combination of prescriptive data analytics and predictive analytics that the new head of business data and insights at Union Bank, Una Fox, said is key to driving growth for the bank and its savings-only platform PurePoint Financial.

Fox was appointed to her position in January. In this role, she will be responsible for leading the overall data-driven philosophy of Union Bank and PurePoint. In this interview, Fox explained to Bank Innovation how she plans on using data to construct an actionable business plan to grow the business while providing better customer experience.

One way of doing this, she said, is combining predictive and prescriptive analytics.

“Predictive Analytics has been here for a while,” she said. “But Prescriptive Analytics has the ability to take us even further, while predictive can use existing data to forecast future probabilities.”

Fox is based in the Union Bank office in Woodland Hills, Calif. She reports to Pierre P. Habis, head of consumer banking at Union. Prior to this, she served as vice president, digital marketing and data technology, for The Walt Disney Company. And before that, she worked at Yahoo and KPMG Consulting.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Bank Innovation: As head of business data and insights, what are the top items on your To-Do list?
Una Fox: The first step I’m taking in my role is assessing the analytical maturity of the organization. I’m doing that by spending a lot of time with our executives, partners, and stakeholders, just listening to their needs. Mature analytics, to me, means more than reporting on the current state — it’s about optimization. So I’ll be looking for those business use cases to solve. Where can we use analytics, not just for business as usual, but how can we optimize for growth?

BI: What departments and projects fall under your purview in this position?
Fox: Customer and Marketing Intelligence; Revenue, Sales and Performance Reporting; Operations, Data Governance, and Custodianship

BI: What type of insights and data will you be looking at? Where is this data coming from?
Fox: Sales, operations, households, client behaviors, products, and transactions.

BI: How is data being used to enhance the client experience? How is it used to anticipate their needs and deliver what they want?
Fox: Our ambition is to use signals to make us better to optimize our clients’ experience, whether it’s a mobile product, an online experience or a physical experience in our branches and financial centers.

BI: Is there a marketing component to your job?
Fox: Yes, I work very closely with our head of marketing and her team. My team and I will be building out a data-driven marketing analytics engine in partnership with marketing.

BI: What emerging technologies are you paying attention to in 2019? 
Fox: AI and machine learning are terms that are thrown around a lot, but they do have the potential to solve a lot of problems in the data space, especially if they are used in ways to provide more accuracy in anomaly detection or determine next best action. We’ve had tools for a while now that allow companies to ingest data at a huge scale, but the hard work is in the data prep before analytics can even take place. Sometimes teams spend days and hours scrubbing sets of data. One advantage an AI tool can provide is the ability to analyze a dataset automatically with minimum human effort.

Predictive Analytics has been here for a while and will be a big focus for us and our team, but Prescriptive Analytics has the ability to take us even further. While predictive can use existing data to forecast future probabilities, Prescriptive really does try to be like something of a crystal ball, seeing what the effect of future decisions might be in order to adjust or change path before decisions are actually made.

Data Governance and Trust, Consumer Privacy and Ethics are big areas of focus for us, and I see more tools emerging to help businesses in this space whether its easy tools which allow for seamless business process automation of governance workflows or consumer identity and entity management, these are just some examples.

BI: Lastly, is there a work mantra you follow?
Fox: One of the big lessons I learned in the last few years of my career is that it’s really important to have fun at work. What drives me most is bringing a team together behind a mission and a vision, setting clear goals and objectives, and then realizing those objectives. That can be a very fun experience! I like to surround myself with diverse groups of talented people who are smarter than me, who I can work with and learn from, and who will give me the privilege to manage them for a while in their careers. There’s nothing more satisfying than that.

Union Bank is a full-service bank operating throughout the West Coast, with more than 350 branches in California, Oregon, and Washington. The bank does not disclose how many digital users (mobile and online) it has. As of December 31, 2018, the bank had $152.6 billion in assets. It is a member of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG).

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