Banks will need anthropologists, psychologists and data scientists if they are to successfully exploit their growing data reserves according to Jayne Opperman, general manager technology, retail, commercial and wealth for ANZ. But finding and hiring such people - and "getting them to work alongside bankers and technologists" - will be among the toughest battle banks will face when seeking out nuggets of business intelligence she warned. Speaking yesterday at the FST Media Technology and Innovation conference in Sydney, Opperman said that banks needed to shift their focus away from just managing data to using and analysing it. "This is not about developing predictive models but highly personalised services," she said.She said banks needed to analyse not just transaction data, but data which, for example, described a customer's tone of voice when they called the contact centre in order to understand the behavioural signals that should determine how the bank then interacted with that customer.It demanded a fresh approach and new skills she said. "We no longer need people to manage campaigns but people to manage machines that manage campaigns, and thousands of micro-models each day." While banks enthuse about the potential of big data analysis, it seems that most are still using training wheels.Phillip Godkin, general manager of business banking at St George, another speaker at yesterday's conference, provided a stark example of the lack of progress to date.Godkin, who has banked with St George for 30 years and worked there for 20, recently had occasion to open a new account. "Imagine how excited I was when a folder full of forms landed on my desk and the first thing I needed to fill out was my name. And that's after 50 years' of interaction with the bank," he said.Part of the problem is that data that could be used to populate such forms still remains spread across banks' organisational silos. Andrew Bidese, head of digital strategy for GE Capital, noted that his organisation had three separate customer relationship management systems and ten receivables systems.Given those data silos, "it's really hard to get anything out of it," he noted.Bidese said that the organisation had been working on a technology roadmap for the last six months in an attempt to resolve the issue and develop a strategy to facilitate automated marketing.Most banks are similarly placed, in that they're at the start of their big data journey.Opperman said that while ANZ could now detect patterns of consumer behaviour from its data - for example, recognising when someone looked at a home loan calculator and then deposited a large amount of money in an account - a lot more work was needed to link that insight with a system to "provide the right product at the right price, and [to do it] in a way that's not intrusive."