Toronto-based Bank of Nova Scotia has entered into a partnership with the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. to create the Scotiabank Centre for Customer Analytics, providing $2.2 million to launch the new research hub.
The new program, which launches next month, will bring together Smith School of Business faculty and students to work with teams from the bank on applied research in customer analytics to serve customers better, says Michael Zerbs, executive vice president and co-head of information technology, enterprise technology at Scotiabank.
“Historically, bank and other financial services institutions have been organized around products [first] and not customers,” Zerbs says. “Data analytics can help us better understand the value of the overall relationship with a customer.”
Understanding what clients value, how those values evolve, and how they want to engage with the bank, will help Scotiabank provide clients with a more “seamless, simple and personalized experience,” Zerb says.
“When customers interact with us, digitally, do we actually understand what works and what doesn’t, where in the interaction are customers engaged, where are the points of frustration, and what we can do better?” he says.
Over the long term, the Scotiabank Centre for Customer Analytics will help advance research in the field, overall, and to boost “critical mass of analytical talent [available],” Zerbs says.
“As an industry, financial services needs much more analytical talent than exists in the market,” he says. “We feel that [the partnership] is an important step at a broad level for the [analytics] community, and will help Queen’s ramp up a notch their already outstanding analytics initiatives.”
Scotiabank and the Smith School of Business will also work together on initiatives that will bring together analytics practitioners, including innovation challenges and conferences, Zerbs says. The bank will also be providing internship opportunities for Queen’s doctorate and masters students in the Master of Management Analytics and Master of Business Administration programs.