Gulf Bank’s data literacy programmes boost business and the wider community in Kuwait

Data literacy is delivering benefits to the Gulf Bank but also the wider society of Kuwait, where the bank operates from. As one of Kuwait's major lending banks, Gulf Bank has begun a data-focused modernisation. Whilst hackathons are ensuring its customers and citizens gain data literacy. 

"We have a vision that we want to be data-driven, and in order to be data-driven, we need everyone in the bank to be data literate," says Mai AlOwaish, Chief Data and Innovation Officer, Gulf Bank. She joined the bank in 2021 to form the data and innovation office, which is part of the bank's 2025 vision to be the leading bank in Kuwait. 

AlOwaish says the data literacy vision is aimed at everyone at every level of the bank, from branch employees to the C-suite executives. 

"At the bank, we believe that data literacy is key for the digital transformation of Kuwait overall. We built our own data literacy programme here at the bank, and we have extended that to the community by performing the datathon," AlOwaish says of how the Gulf Bank saw that its own data journey could be beneficial to its nation and founded a nationwide hackathon. "Datathon is a countrywide competition that includes training on Tableau and also the teaching of data concepts. This is one of several steps that we provide to our community with skills and challenges to help future generations achieve our sustainability goals and strengthen our economy," AlOwaish says. 

"We intend to run the datathon annually after the success of the first edition. We were so proud to see a diverse audience after the success of the first one, including a large number of youths and women," she says. One attendee, Laila Ali, says of attending the datathon: "After doing the data workshop with the Gulf Bank team, I started to learn more. What I love about Tableau is that I am fascinated by human behaviour, and it helps you understand people by looking at trends. 

"Learning Tableau was not difficult; it is a very intuitive tool," she says. "I think soon enough we will be asking for people with data analytics skills as a basic skill, just like we ask people if they can use a computer," AlOwaish says. This is why creating data literacy beyond the bank was important, and how these skills are becoming vital to society as well as financial services providers. 

Internally, the Gulf Bank began developing its data literacy by initially focusing on the bank's business analysts and then rolling out data literacy across the entire bank. AlOwaish says now everybody in the bank knows their responsibilities and role towards data. "We make sure that employees in all departments have the correct concepts on data and they have the correct tools," adds Fouzan Al Sumait, Gulf Bank Data Science Lead. 

In the 12 months since the Gulf Bank introduced data literacy, the bank already sees business benefits. AlOwaish says self-service access to data is "empowering our data and business analysts" and reducing bottlenecks that previously existed as all the data demand was placed on the data science team. 

"Tableau helped us to centralise all our analytics into one place. So there is no more waiting for data; everyone is looking in the same place for insight," she says of how the Gulf Bank has achieved a single version of the truth. 

AlOwaish and the Gulf Bank have delivered data literacy to their colleagues at a rapid pace, and in doing so, it has also extended the data literacy skills of its society. In just one year, the Bank of Gulf is seeing business benefits which improve the bank and prove the importance of data literacy.