Heidi Lanford
Chief Data Officer, Fitch Group
Heidi is the Chief Data Officer for Fitch Group. In this role, she is responsible for partnering with the business to transform the way Fitch leverages data across the enterprise to enhance current products, internal applications, and exploit the value of data for new product development. This important initiative is intended to help continue to modernize data collection, platforms, governance, technology and processes. Heidi’s mission is to build a data organization that benefits every Fitch Group business.
Heidi joined Fitch from Red Hat (an IBM company), where she was Vice President of Enterprise Data & Analytics, responsible for building their data and analytics ecosystem, establishing data governance, developing an insights-driven organization and a implementing a global data literacy program. She served as the executive sponsor for Red Hat’s Women in Technology D&I program. Formerly, Heidi has held executive-level positions with Avaya and WPP. She holds a BA in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Virginia, where she sits on the board of their School of Data Science. Heidi also serves as a Scout for HearstLab, where she advises teams of early stage, women-led startups. She has been a keynote speaker and guest lecturer on topics regarding data culture and literacy, applied analytics/data science and women in STEM. Heidi will be based in New York.
