As more and more companies jump on the Big Data bandwagon, Wells Fargo joins the ranks by hiring a new Chief Data Officer. A. Charles Thomas, a Yale graduate  who has previously worked at Hewlett-Packard and has ran the USAA’s analytics team, will be based in the San Francisco office. He and his team will initially focus on how Wells Fargo’s customers interact with the bank in order to improve its services, aid in suggesting the right products and in identifying fraud.

The banking industry is not the latest to have started becoming interested in Big Data. Bank of America, for example, has started collecting and analysing data generated by sensors worn by their call-center employees to improve productivity. One of the findings, was that, contrary to intuition, employees that spoke more frequently with other colleagues were actually more productive than those who did not.