What if you could quickly and easily see all the relevant background information on a new client before you start the sales or loan process? Master Data Management (MDM) is the new “key to the kingdom,” providing fast access to relevant customer information for both sales and risk management.

“We use MDM as a tool to facilitate the work our risk analysts do,” Pedro Santos, VP and MDM Lead of the CIT Group, Inc. told theCUBE hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris) in an interview at Informatica World 2016 in San Francisco.

Joining Santos for the interview was Adam Sigg, director of Customer Data Solutions at Infoverity, who described MDM as “the most effective net to cast into the data lake to get the good fish.”

Managing risk when dealing with multiple customers

Santos described CIT’s journey from a legacy platform to today’s multi-domain platform that allows flexible definitions with multiple names, addresses and tax ids under one record. CIT offers a diverse range of financial services, from loans to commercial equipment leases for everything from a printer to an airplane, and MDM helps CIT manage risk over multiple, diverse, customers, Santos told theCUBE hosts.

“Risk analysts don’t know they interact with MDM,” said Sigg, but MDM is integrated into the tools they use, and each customer goes through the ID and segment process as soon as they walk in the door, identifying any issues before the transaction proceeds.

MDM best net to cast into data lake

MDM is not Big Data, but it is important to Big Data, said Sigg, who uses the analogy of fishing to describe how MDM works. “You don’t boil the ocean with MDM,” he said, describing MDM as a “magic net” that allows you to capture “only the fish you want and all the relevant fish.” And the data is always current: “Every time you cast the net it’s the most up-to-date, the most effective net,“ Sigg added.

Describing reactions when customers see a report pulled using MDM, Santos said: “Folks are surprised they have all that data from all different sources in one place.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Informatica World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE