Seminar Series

Dr. Chen Wei Xu , Senior Manager, Statistical Modeling
Bank of Montreal , Toronto

Topic: An Overview of Datamining and its Challenges in a Banking Environment

Lecture Notes

ABSTRACT:

We all imagine there is untapped treasure in the infinite bytes of customer data that are available to financial institutions. It is generally believed that the more we understand customers, the better we can fit our products and services to their needs in a profitable way. Great amounts of investment and efforts have been put in place trying to discover the treasure. There are successes, but no one knows how much potential is still untapped. We will focus on the following topics in the talk: (1) What does a bank (or a firm in general) want from data? (2) What is the bank doing now to search for the treasure? This is done through a number of examples. (3) Some of the challenges facing us today. The talk will try to bring a business perspective to the technology world, with the objectives of a) encouraging business thinking while tackling technical problems, and b) illustrating some technical challenges in the business context.

BACKGROUND:

Chen Wei Xu received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Industrial Automation from Zhejiang University, China, and his PhD in Operations Management from University of Toronto. He has worked in the areas of database marketing, data mining, credit risk analysis, customer retention, etc., with TD Bank and more recently with Bank of Montreal as Senior Manager, Statistical Modeling. Current projects include: - Building models to predict customer behavior (e.g., buy product X) - Customer segmentation for marketing and relationship management purposes - Customer retention - Direct mail campaigns (design, execution, measurement,...), and so on.