Analytics has taken significant strides in the Banking Sector by creating huge business potential yet posing several critical challenges in terms of implementation. In order to address the common problems identified in implementing advanced banking technologies by leveraging Analytics, Dr. A. S. Ramasastri, Director, IDRBT, put forth the idea of creating a Chief Analytics Officers (CAO) Forum.

Taking this idea forward, the Institute launched the Chief Analytics Officers (CAO) Forum on November 16, 2016 with the participation of Dr. Rajeeva L. Karandikar, Director, Chennai Mathematical Institute, and 23 banking executives from various public and private sector banks.

Speaking on the occasion, the Director, IDRBT highlighted the role of the Institute in improving banking technologies and provided a snapshot of the functioning of the CIO and CISO Forums, which have become a common platform for the bankers to share, discuss and resolve the critical issues faced by the banks in terms of security, implementation of technologies, etc. The Director also emphasized the role of the Chief Analytics Officers in elevating the banks.

The CAO Forum has Working Groups on Data Governance, Business Process Reengineering for Analytics, Risk Analytics, Fraud Analytics, Credit Recovery Analytics, Security Analytics, Operational Analytics, as well as HR Analytics. The initial focus is to publish Standards and Frameworks in these areas for the Banking Sector. The various topics of focus suggested by the bankers include Data Quality, Data Governance, Audit Analytics, Infrastructure Analytics, Cost Analytics, etc.

Dr. Rajeeva L. Karandikar delivered the keynote address on Role of Statistics in the Age of Big Data. He stressed that in the area of Analytics, domain knowledge and source of data are of vital importance. He proposed a new architecture SI layer (Statistical Intelligence) on top of BI (Business Intelligence) layer and explained how various models go wrong. A snapshot of the views shared by bankers is various presented here under::

• Ms. Lalitha Natraj, ICICI Bank, shared how ICICI is using analytics and how their teams are divided into horizontals and verticals
• Mr. Rajesh Kumar R, HDFC Bank explained the analytics work in HDFC bank
• Launched the full-time one year Post Graduate Diploma in Banking Technology (PGDBT), with the first batch commencing from July 04, 2016
• Mr. Balaji of Andhra Bank focused on how they are using SQL and R
• Mr. R. Bhuvan from Indian Overseas Bank illustrated how Data Warehouse is built using Oracle based BI Tools
• Mr. Pankaj Mittal of Axis Bank emphasised usage of analytics in banking and also explained the need of analytics in paving the bank's way forward
• Mr. Devendra Sharnagat, Kotak Mahindra Bank, shared that they first implemented OCRM using Siebel and also analytics for dashboard creation
• Mr. Manas Ranjan Mohanty, State Bank of India highlighted the drastic changes in the size of data when the SBI Associates are merged.

Dr. V. Ravi, Professor,IDRBT, elaborated the objectives of Centre of Excellence in Analytics (CoEA) i.e., to run pilot projects with banks on ACRM problems and to provide consultancy on these projects. He briefed about the use of the software available in CoEA – SAS Enterprise Miner and IBM SPSS Modeler, KNIME, Rapid Miner, the recent development of R User Interface for Banking Analytics (RUIBA). He explained the work done in CoEA especially in the development of Algorithms/Architectures in Data/Text/We Mining, Evolutionary/Fuzzy/Neuro/ b Soft Computing, Global/Multi Criteria Optimization, Time Series Data Mining, Social Media Analytics, Big Data Analytics, StatisticalMachine Learning.