What was the situation?
A consumer-credit business inside a major European banking group runs on data: scoring, fraud, payment orchestration and partner reporting, where the quality of the estate is the quality of the credit decision. The mandate called for an executive seat, not a project.
What did the operator do?
The operator holds the Chief Data & AI Officer seat in interim management. The mandate covers the data and AI strategy, the target platform on Databricks and Snowflake with Airflow orchestration, data-quality contracts and observability with Soda, and graph modelling with Neo4j for entity resolution across customers, merchants and payment flows, together with the governance, the operating model and the AI use-case portfolio that sit above them.
What changed?
The mandate is ongoing: no result is published before it ends. The aim is a single executive owner for data and AI inside a regulated consumer-credit business, with one platform decision, one quality gate and one governed path from raw payment data to a model in production.
Case analysis
An executive data and AI seat inside the consumer-credit arm of a European banking group, held in interim management: strategy, platform, quality and the AI portfolio under one accountable owner. The client is not named while the mandate runs.
Why a seat rather than a programme?
In consumer credit the data estate is the decision engine. Scoring, fraud and partner reporting all resolve to the same question: is this number defensible? A seat answers it with authority; a programme only recommends. The mandate is held as Chief Data & AI Officer, on the executive line, with the platform, the quality contracts and the model portfolio in the same hands.
What is the estate built on?
Databricks and Snowflake carry the platform, Airflow carries orchestration, Soda carries the data-quality contracts and observability so a broken pipeline surfaces before a decision does, and Neo4j carries the graph layer used for entity resolution across customers, merchants and payment flows. The stack is the mechanism; governed, defensible decisions are the outcome.