Credit Karma’s Ryan Graciano on Data Marts, Data Models, and Disrupting the Credit Landscape

No journey to the cloud is the same. While some will encounter similar obstacles, each journey has its own unique challenges. But what happens when a company born in the midst of a crisis and changing technology, has to innovate just as fast as the changing landscape to keep up?

Ryan Graciano is the co-founder and CTO of Credit Karma, a company that is aligning technology and data to help bring transparency to the credit lending process. On this episode of The Data Chief, Ryan explains how Credit Karma survived early struggles such as the financial crisis of 2008. Ryan also touches on how Credit Karma navigated it’s journey to the cloud, stepping away from the comfort of on-premises data centers to the elasticity of the cloud, and the importance of grooming outside data sources to keep insights consistent. That and more on today’s episode with Ryan Graciano.

Main Takeaways

• Explainable algorithms drive success: As third party datasets become more readily available, there is an evolving need for data professionals to understand where that data is coming from and how it will affect your models. While these datasets can make it easier for models to be spun up quickly, you must be able to account for how and why those algorithms are generating particular answers.
• Clean data leads to reliable answers: Data analysts must spend time making sure the data they are using is not only clean, but reliable. When an analyst uses dirty or untrustworthy data, algorithms will have a tendency to run in an undefined manner, which will lead to high variance in answer quality and consistency.
• Keep data fluency a priority: Even for organizations that believe they are data literate, the process of understanding data at an organizational level is an ongoing one. A best practice for maintaining data literacy is to create a standardized set of how data is recorded and reported internally. When practices like this are standardized, organizations can avoid issues like data bias.

About Ryan

As a co-founder of Credit Karma and Chief Technical Officer, Ryan Graciano has grown the company’s engineering department from a one-man band into a team of hundreds, developing a technical framework to support the company’s rapid growth. His expertise and innovation has helped bring new levels of usability and sophistication to financial services technologies.

Today, Ryan runs an ever-expanding group of engineers tasked with building out new products at pace while stressing a culture of agility and experimentation, even as Credit Karma reaches new levels of scale. As a leader, he serves as a constructive agitator, looking to break down traditional workplace hierarchies and empowering each member of his department with real influence over the future of the product.

Ryan has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and spent five years at IBM before joining Credit Karma.

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