Challenge

The banking industry is rapidly changing and the need to innovate has never been more critical to remain competitive.

Transformation is being driven by new entrants, ease of switching, online banking and many other factors which are changing the way customers manage their money. Banks are speeding up their innovation as a result; many are working with third parties to innovate faster by capitalising on external tech firms' specialised expertise and applications. This approach offers huge potential for banks to tap into additional capability faster and more cost-effectively but faces a significant challenge: the ability to share data.

Recognising the opportunity of bringing in new technology in to the business, Nationwide is increasingly looking to work with fintechs. To do this successfully, the teams need to test the capability of potential vendors using core data assets, which are lengthy and difficult to sign off.

Solution

Nationwide faced a common challenge – and synthetic data was the answer. By creating synthetic data, Hazy enabled Nationwide to unlock value, share data quickly and securely with third parties, and accelerate its innovation programmes.

Using a generative model, Hazy extracted the statistical information and complex relationships contained within Nationwide’s transaction data, creating a synthetic data set that no longer contained any of the original information.

This process eliminated any possibility that the data could be traced back to the source, providing total protection to Nationwide’s customers, and ensuring regulatory compliance.

To deliver the synthetic data efficiently and securely to collaborators, Nationwide built a secure sandbox environment on Azure to host the synthetic data.

Hazy's generator model can be deployed quickly to new sandbox environments and used to generate safe synthetic data the third party can access.

Impact

Nationwide and Hazy solved the historic challenge of creating safe, representative, GDPR-compliant data to share with third parties to generate actionable insights and increase the speed of innovation.

This is a vital driver to remain competitive in an evolving landscape that is being transformed by unforeseen changes to the economy, aggressive new entrants, new regulations such as Open Banking and challenger fintech platform strategies. Hazy’s synthetic data solution has shown it can meet these challenges head on.