Data is the backbone of today’s enterprise. As the era of data products unfolds, companies face the mounting challenge of managing it in large volumes while ensuring control and sustained usability.

Capital One Financial Corp. is leading the way as a financial industry example, orchestrating a symphony of data products and platforms to fuel its decision-making engine.

“Data products are so much at the heart of what our team gets to work on for Capital One,” said Christina Egea (pictured), vice president of Enterprise Data product management at Capital One. “For us, data products at their core [means] treating data itself as a product, applying product management principles to data, and what that means at Capital One is that we focus … on the end customer that’s using the data and building and curating data assets.”

Egea spoke with theCUBE Research guest host Paul Gillin at the “Supercloud 6: AI Innovators” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Capital One’s concept of data as a product and the pivotal role of automation and culture in the company’s strategy.

Capital One’s take on data products

At the core of Capital One’s data product approach is the meticulous curation of data assets, ranging from application programming interfaces to real-time data streams, tailored to meet the diverse needs of data consumers across the organization. By imbibing product management principles, the company crafts reusable, high-quality data assets that transcend traditional silos, fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making, according to Egea.

With the advent of cloud technology, Capital One has embarked on a journey of data democratization, empowering teams to harness data’s power while maintaining stringent management standards. Central to this endeavor is the balance between centralization and decentralization, where standardization is the cornerstone of data governance.

“We have increasing volumes of unstructured data; we have a proliferation of formats, and we get that data way faster,” Egea said. “It’s increasingly real time. For us, the foundation of being well-managed is where everything starts. We have to know what data we have, where it comes from, why we have it and who can use it.”

The standardization ethos permeates the company’s entire data lifecycle through a three-dimensional approach covering data, processes and management frameworks. Through automation, Capital One maintains standards from the inception of data creation, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency across the organization.

“We work with teams across the company to leverage those products and platforms to make their data available,” Egea said. “Much of the focus in that is standardizing and building platforms that can help us automate and scale the common management requirements for data while letting business teams across the company take ownership and accountability for the actual data itself.”

As Capital One navigates the frontier of artificial intelligence, a symbiotic relationship exists between data management and AI innovation. With a robust data platform as its foundation, the company aims to unlock the full potential of AI, ushering in a new era of personalized and intelligent banking experiences, Egea added.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the “Supercloud 6: AI Innovators” event: 

Photo: SiliconANGLE