For bankers and businesses, an under-utilized technique is poised to create advanced capabilities. It’s called data visualization.
Miguel Encarnação, head of Data Visualization at Regions Bank, is on the forefront of the movement and regularly espouses the benefits of data visualization while teaching and storytelling through visual data.
“Data visualization is not well understood yet,” said Encarnação. “So I’m doing a lot of evangelizing, explaining to people what data visualization is – and what it’s not.”
Encarnação recently sat down with Ganes Kesari, Chief Decision Scientist and Co-Founder of Gramener, for an interview about “Making Sense of Data with Data Visualization.”
Gramener is a data science company focused on custom Data and AI solution. The interview was part of Gramener’s Data Leadership series.
Machines use zeros and ones and numbers – that’s not consumable for humans that think in terms of patterns and relationships – that’s why we use visualization.
Miguel Encarnação, head of Data Visualization at Regions Bank
Encarnação, who joined Regions in 2020, shared that the data visualization team at Regions is young and one of their challenges is to change the way people look at data and information and introduce new ways of visually representing data.
The goal: make data more consumable and easily understood.
“We’re really using visualization to reduce the complexity of the data,” he stated. “Machines use zeros and ones and numbers – that’s not consumable for humans that think in terms of patterns and relationships – that’s why we use visualization.”
Encarnação discussed how the team had some successes early on where they showed data in tables – a traditional view used by many businesses – and then showed the same data using a Sankey diagram, which shows the flow and progression of data from one stage to another.
“People couldn’t believe how much more they could see and how much quicker they can not necessarily make decisions but converge towards where decisions needed to be made because very often that’s the biggest challenge,” he explained.
Listen to the full interview below and learn how in his role at Regions, Encarnação is driving visual analytics literacy to communicate the business value it creates.
Read more stories about how Regions is innovating through Data