20 for the Next 20: Torrie Inouye, Bank of Hawai‘i

For this “fearless” executive VP and chief data officer, numbers offer clues for solving business problems and opportunities to do things differently.

Torrie Inouye
Executive VP and Chief Data Officer, Bank of Hawai‘i

Being a teen is tough enough. Imagine having your dad as your high school physics teacher. For two years. But Torrie Inouye – and her dad – lived to tell.

After graduating from ‘Iolani School, she earned a degree in economics from Stanford and then spent nearly 20 years working in California: at Intuit, National Funding (where she was the company’s first female president) and Union Bank.

When the opportunity at Bank of Hawai‘i arose in 2021, she jumped at the chance to relocate from San Diego, while still keeping her career in high gear. She and her partner have a 4-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl. “It makes me so happy to be back home and see my kids forming relationships with my family and my friends; the village that is starting to surround them.”

She is treasurer of the board at PBS Hawai‘i, which she calls “a pillar in the community. In this day and age, when anyone can create media, it’s hard as a parent to know what to trust to let your children watch without having to look over their shoulder.”

Peter Ho, chairman, president and CEO of Bank of Hawai‘i, calls Inouye “a thought leader. World class, dynamic, incredibly capable. On top of that she is a subject-matter expert in data and analytics. And, she’s a little fearless. She’s not afraid to challenge the status quo with the way we do things as an organization.”

Inouye says her field is “about finding the nugget and insight in the data, having a conversation with a stakeholder and they say ‘oh, I didn’t know that,’ or you see a business problem and go digging and find the answer.” At Bank of Hawai‘i, she oversees 15 people on the analytics team. “Seeing that lightbulb moment in the people I’m working with and developing, such as when they find a shortcut to do something more easily, or a nugget in the data themselves, that energizes me.”

“You can look at information in different ways,” she explains. “You can look at financial statements or earning statements and see a wall of numbers. For me, it’s what is the takeaway? What is the opportunity? It’s a partnership with stakeholders to figure out what we are solving for, then finding the data and visualizing it in a way that makes sense and is instantly comprehensible.”