Meet our new chief data officer, Steve Pimblett
Q. Hey Steve, welcome to the reinvention! You've been here a few months now, what are your first impressions of The Very Group?
WOW! I absolutely love It. To join The Very Group during the peak period of Black Friday and Christmas was hugely exciting. It's also great to work for a brand that customers love and that friends and family know. From a data perspective, it doesn't get much better.
The Very Group has one of the richest customer-centric data assets in the UK with insights across financial services, retail, e-commerce/digital, logistics and customer services. The only thing bigger than the data set is the ambition to drive value from It. It’s an absolute honour to take on that challenge.
Q. Tell us about yourself, what career path led you to Very?
My chief data officer journey began with a BSc in applied statistics and computing in my hometown of Liverpool. From that point:
I was motivated by the application of data and technology to drive commercial value and customer experiences.
Since then, I’ve held roles as general manager of data at Monesupermarket.com, chief data officer for Betsson.com and at wejo.com too. All these roles helped me to formulate my data > insight > action strategy and develop my interest in digital and customer experience with a data focus.
I then joined The Very Group as the chief data officer in October 2020, with a mission to “rewrite retail” and provide the most personalized digital financial & retail experience in the UK.
Q. What does your team do for our customers?
Our purpose is to “Make good things easily accessible to more people.” We do this by offering our customers over 1,900 brands they love, providing flexible ways to pay, and enabling high levels of personalisation and ease of use. Our data (D>N>A) mission underpinning this allows us to delight customers with trusted data products and services. Specifically, this translates to collecting the right customer data to power every touchpoint to make it a more personalised experience, all whilst keeping customer data safe.
Q. What are your teams currently working on?
As online retail faces unprecedented growth and Very continues to attract new customer segments, the demand for our data function is escalating. We are creating a center of excellence for data platforms, data intelligence, and customer forensics. We will use our center of excellence to mine for growth in our new customer base and look to sharpen our customer classifications, segmentation, and predictive value models.
Q. Why is now a good time to join the business?
It’s a really exciting time to join us! Right now, we are democratizing data at all levels, empowering everyone to access information through self-serve data catalogs, business intelligence, and insights. We encourage data discovery by investing in new products and services to allow our business verticals (aka spokes) to leverage new tools developed by our centers of excellence (hubs). We are supporting and driving collaborative data and analytics by implementing cross-functional shared data labs that encourage hypothesis testing, investigation, research, and data-literate subject matter experts to partner with and train their colleagues.
Lot's to get stuck into, thanks for sharing, Steve!
If you're interested in joining our team of data experts, check out our latest roles in the link below.
