Chief Data Officer — Consumer-Finance Book

The mandate

A listed consumer lender has invested heavily in cloud infrastructure, catalogues and analytics while reusable business value remains limited. A recent acquisition added different customer, loan and arrears definitions, creating competing reports and duplicated pipelines. Teams can demonstrate technical delivery, but product, credit, finance and servicing leaders still reconcile decisions manually. The economics no longer support data investment without adoption.

The Chief Data Officer will influence approximately CHF 3,300 million in assets and investment and lead about 300 employees and material partners. The remit spans data strategy, governance, engineering, platform, quality, metadata, analytics enablement and data-product management. Technology owns core infrastructure and business leaders own decisions; the CDO must make those boundaries workable.

Integration should begin with decisions that matter. Customer identity, origination, exposure, vintage, arrears and collections need authoritative definitions and lineage to source and ledger. The CDO will prioritise data products with named users, service levels, quality thresholds and adoption outcomes. Pipelines that reproduce an unused report do not qualify as value.

Ownership cannot be delegated to governance meetings. Business data owners must have authority to resolve definitions and accept quality consequences; technical owners must make remediation and service visible. Privacy, consent, retention and model use should be designed into products, especially where acquired data has different permissions.

The portfolio also needs simplification. Duplicate tools, warehouses and vendor contracts must be assessed against migration cost and real consumption. Platform consolidation should follow user and control evidence, not fashion.

Analytics and models need a deliberate interface with data products. The CDO will not own independent model risk, but must ensure training data, features, transformations and monitoring inputs are reproducible and governed. Acquired models should not be rebuilt merely because lineage is inconvenient; nor should historic performance excuse inaccessible or unlawfully reused data.

Data-product economics should include the cost of quality, support and change. A widely consumed product may deserve greater resilience and dedicated ownership, while a specialist extract should not inherit enterprise-platform overhead without reason. Chargeback or showback can reveal demand, but it must not encourage business teams to recreate shadow pipelines to avoid cost.

The CDO will also establish deletion as a managed capability. Integration creates copies in sandboxes, analytics stores and partner environments. Retention obligations, litigation holds and customer rights must reach those copies with evidence, otherwise consolidation will increase rather than reduce privacy exposure.

Why this seat is open

This urgent replacement follows an accelerated transition. Interim responsibility cannot settle post-acquisition ownership, so the board seeks a permanent appointee within six to eight weeks. Confidentiality protects the predecessor and integration choices.

What you will own

• Define authoritative customer, loan, exposure, vintage, arrears and collection data.
• Build reusable products with named users, owners, quality and service levels.
• Steward CHF 3,300 million of assets, investment, risk acceptance and forecasts.
• Integrate acquired data under lawful consent, retention and access rules.
• Measure adoption through decisions and workflows changed, not assets published.
• Simplify platforms, tools and suppliers using lifecycle economics.
• Lead 300 employees and partners with data-product and engineering succession.
• Give the board transparent value, quality, lineage and privacy trade-offs.

The first 12 months

In the first 90 days, map critical decisions to data sources, definitions, users and reconciliation effort. Meet the 30 stakeholders most consequential to reuse, including customers represented through consent evidence, product, credit, finance, collections and engineers. Test lineage for material measures, assess leaders, stabilise regulatory reporting risk and agree board gates for further data investment.

Months four to nine should launch a small set of governed data products, resolve competing definitions and retire duplicate pipelines where safe. Fill leadership gaps and embed business ownership. The first value should appear through removed reconciliation, faster decisions, improved quality, lower vendor cost or demonstrable adoption in a customer workflow.

By year end, trusted products, clear ownership and measurable adoption should become repeatable. Delivery needs to remain within 10% of the approved case, and forecasts must reconcile investment, customer, operating and people assumptions for three quarters. Priority data risks require independently evidenced closure; severe escalation may not remain unresolved beyond 30 days.

What the board will measure

• Decisions and workflows using governed data products without parallel reconciliation.
• Quality, lineage and owner response for critical data elements.
• Duplicate pipelines, platforms and contracts safely retired.
• Privacy and consent controls across the integrated estate.
• Retention of 90% or more critical talent and ready-now cover for 70% of direct reports.
• Quantified reusable business value supported by clean adoption evidence.

The person

You are a Chief Data Officer, Data and Analytics Executive or Data Product Leader with 18–22 years in financial services or a similarly regulated information-intensive business. You have delivered adopted data products, not only platforms and governance frameworks.

Your accountable P&L, budget, book or portfolio has been at least CHF 1,900 million, and you have led 300 or more people. You can evidence post-acquisition data integration whose decision, quality and cost outcomes persisted for two reporting periods.

You can persuade business leaders to own definitions, challenge technology activity without use and explain privacy or lineage in commercial terms.

Compensation and terms

Base compensation is CHF 450,000–620,000 plus annual incentive and LTI. The permanent appointment is onsite in Zurich, supports relocation and can accommodate up to six months’ notice.

Confidentiality

The lender and acquired data estate remain unnamed until confidentiality is established. Rounded facts must not prompt speculative identification.