About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Legal & General Data Scientist Details How to Drive Insight, Value and Disruption out of Data

Subscribe to our newsletter

Delivering data driven disruption, innovation and business transformation across a large organisation containing numerous businesses is no mean feat, but it can be done by creating a data strategy and story that appeals to each business and taking an enabling rather than dictatorial approach.

Just five months into his role as director, group data sciences, at Legal & General, Peter Jackson is making an impact. He says: “I was brought in to drive insight, value and disruption out of data. Legal & General has been an organisation since 1836, most challenger banks have been around just five years. We are in a different world, so how do we compete?”.

The answer is through data driven transformation based on data strategy and a story that appeals to 80-100% of each business. Jackson acknowledges the need to deliver value quickly to keep everybody listening and has already created a database for its clients based on old mainframes.

He has also moved data out of a Hadoop and Cloudera environment into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, where applications are being applied to the data. Jackson comments: “Having done that, we can see more value, we can start to use machine learning for predictive analytics, and we can share data.” Despite these gains, there is no end game. Jackson concludes: “We have to develop data capability that can cope with data we don’t know about yet. There will be another disruptor in four years’ time – we don’t know what it is, but we will need to be ready to compete.”

Find out more about Peter Jackson’s approach to data driven business transformation at Legal & General at next week’s A-Team Group Data Management Summit in London.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: In data we trust – How to ensure high quality data to power AI

Artificial intelligence is increasingly powering financial institutions’ processes and workflows, encompassing all parts of the enterprise from front-office to the back-office. As organisations seek to gain a competitive edge, they are trialling the technology in variety of ways to streamline and empower multiple use cases. Some are further than others along the path to achieving...

BLOG

Rethinking Data Management in Financial Services: Virtualisation Over Static Storage

By Thomas McHugh, Co-Founder and Chief Executive, FINBOURNE Technology. In Financial Services (FS), data management has long been centred around traditional database storage. However, this approach is fundamentally misaligned with the nature of FS data, which is process-driven rather than static. The industry needs a shift in perspective – one that prioritises virtualisation over rigid...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...