Truist Financial Corp., the operator of one of the country’s largest commercial banks, is revamping its data-management capabilities to benefit clients and employees.
The $545 billion-asset bank recently acquired the data technology firm Zaloni for an undisclosed amount, a move it says will help strengthen data governance, metadata management, analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning capabilities.
Founded in 2007, Zaloni will help the company’s data scientists “move, use and transform” data across the organization easily with the potential for cost avoidance over time, Tracy Daniels, chief data officer at Truist, told the National CIO Review.
“There are things that we do that are more manual that this will help us automate. There are things that we do in a more descriptive manner that we are looking to do in more of a predictive manner that this platform will help us do,” she said.
Working with its venture capital arm Truist Ventures, the bank identified the Zaloni Arena platform as an investment that will help deliver better financial experiences, Scott Case, chief information officer at Truist, said in a statement.
With Zaloni, Truist gains critical skill sets that the bank “can leverage from an existing entity that has been operating with a certain velocity,” Daniels said.
Founder and chief product officer Ben Sharma, Ashwin Nayak, chief technology officer, and a team of product, engineering, and data professionals will join Truist’s Enterprise Data Office led by Daniels, the company said. The team will be based in Raleigh.
Faster development of products and services might take shape over the long term, but a more immediate result will be the ability to arm tech teams with additional capabilities.
“There’s absolutely the potential for a capacity to be given back to our teams, in terms of how they manage data,” she said. “If it took me a day, a week, a month to be able to find something before … I now feel like I also have greater control.”
Data management is a major pain point for technology decision-makers across industries. In a March 2022 Forrester Research survey of 157 data management decision-makers in North America commissioned by Capital One, 82% cited confusing data governance policies as a key challenge.
“Effective data governance makes data relevant, easy to find, and ready to use and derive business value from,” Salim Syed, vice president and head of engineering for Capital One Software, told Forbes.
Streamlining data governance is a priority for Truist, which was formed in 2019 as a result of BB&T’s $28 billion acquisition of SunTrust.
“This creates a new opportunity for us as we really pivot to creating more powerful data products,” Daniels said.
Charlotte, North Carolina-based Truist has made over a dozen acquisitions since its creation, including the financial games app Long Game in May. On Zaloni, Daniels noted a strong alignment with acquisition opportunities like Long Game, which she said supported better lives and communities for the bank’s customers. Last week, Truist launched an artificial intelligence-enhanced virtual assistant that uses natural-language processing and natural-language understanding to help answer customer questions.
Truist will continue to explore nonbank merger and acquisition opportunities that drive growth, Bill Rogers, the company’s chief executive, told analysts during the company’s second-quarter earnings call in July.
