Dan O’Malley

Dan O’Malley

Dan O’Malley
Title: Chief Digital Officer, Head of Eastern Labs
Age: 37
Experience: 19 years

Dan O’Malley has been working with big data since before they called it “big data.” He describes his first job out of college as essentially professionally practicing calculus and building models for retailers, but it was during his time at CapitalOne that he planted the first seeds of what would eventually become PerkStreet Financial. When PerkStreet closed up shop 18 months ago, O’Malley went looking to build something new in the financial services space, and last fall, he joined Eastern Bank, heading up its new tech incubator, Eastern Labs.

Q: How did you first get in touch with Eastern Bank, and what did those early conversations look like?
A: They reached out to me through a common acquaintance… Honestly, it just started as a conversation: “Tell us more about PerkStreet and your model and what you think about doing next?” And in the course of this conversation, what became clear was that Eastern wanted to invest in digital and technology and was looking for ways to do it, and I was looking to continue building in the financial data world and was talking with a couple banks how to do it and whether they’d be interested in working together.

The more I talked with Eastern the more I realized how serious their level of commitment was to investing in technology. … I really became convinced that Eastern was serious about wanting to do something different. And that lead to conversations about the idea of creating a group, who was tasked with taking all of the data and digital assets of the bank and building things with them, building things and basically running tasks. Coming from CapitalOne, “test and learn” is in my DNA. I was excited about the ability to take a startup-style, minimum viable product “test and learn” approach to testing things in a bank – frankly, you just don’t see a lot of other banks taking that approach.

Q: What areas of opportunity do you see in the next year for Eastern Labs?
A: The first is we just know an incredible amount about our customers through all of the data that our products generate. Banks don’t do enough of that – most don’t do anything with that. You can see whether someone’s account balance is trending up or down, you can see whether a business’s revenues are going up or down based on deposits they made into their account and figure out a consumer’s liquid purchase in certain categories and their transaction history. There’s just incredibly rich information wrapped up in the data.

One of the biggest areas of opportunity we see is to use that to get customer into products that are best suited for them based on what we understand about them – to understand the risk inherent in particular customers, whether it’s high risk or low risk, and to make better decisions about products and terms we might offer them based on that. … And to automate the process of getting them into new products based on already having data about them.

So as a semi-tangible example, you can imagine deciding to make a loan to a customer without ever having to ask them for information simply because you can see that the customer is financially healthy and you can very, very quickly then get somebody into that loan because the application process is almost nothing. You can make a better decision for the bank and you can make a product experience revolutionary for a customer and just incredibly easy. I think banks that figure that out are going to win and banks that don’t. … If you don’t understand how to use data to drive the bank in the future, I just don’t see how you can be a functioning bank.

Q: Do you have any other comments about innovation in the banking sector?
A: I think you really need two things: You need the will to try something that could fail, because if you’re going to build anything new, some of it is going to fail. It may fail for a long time before it’s successful – and it might not be successful at all – but you’ve got to be willing to fail, because new things don’t work right off the block. They just never do. If you don’t have that – if you’re wondering about whether you should invest in innovation or not, you shouldn’t, because it will effectively be a waste of money and time. I think the progress we’ve made in the last 13 months is testament to that, and I think it’s testament to how you can achieve quite a lot if you’re willing to fail, but banks just don’t like to think that way. Eastern’s done a really nice job getting comfortable with that and that’s part of why we’ve done so well.

I think the second thing you need to succeed in innovation is the right team – both having entrepreneurs around who understand how to build, but also the right attitude of the team inside the bank and being open to change. If you’re not open to change, then don’t do innovation. 

O’Malley’s Top Five Smartphone Apps:

  1. Evernote: I’ve fired paper from my life.
  2. Eastern Bank mobile banking: Like most of our customers, the most frequent way I engage with the bank.
  3. Rhapsody: Spotify is hipper, but Rhapsody has more songs.
  4. Audible: I like listening to biographies and thrillers when biking into work.
  5. Slack: The main way we communicate in our team.

Eastern Bank’s Data Guy

by Laura Alix time to read: 4 min
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