#55: Adopting Earth Observation: An End-User Perspective - Mila Luleva, Rabobank

Today, I am speaking with Mila Luleva from Rabobank, a multinational banking and financial services company, where Mila heads the remote sensing team.

You might wonder what a bank is doing with Earth observation data and how they are going about integrating this technology into their processes. That's exactly why I wanted to have Mila on the podcast.

In this episode, we talk about Rabobank and their business, how they use remote sensing, how they make decisions of developing EO solutions in-house vs outsourcing the development, the state of EO and how they benchmark different EO providers, how we can improve the adoption of EO and more.

It was a great discussion and very different from the typical conversations you might have heard here on this podcast - mostly from the EO industry. It was insightful to get the views from the user side and hopefully, you enjoy this as much as I did.

And now, I bring you Mila Luleva.

Rabobank's Website: https://www.rabobank.com

Rabobank ACORN: https://acorn.rabobank.com/en/

They are hiring: https://rabobank.jobs/en/

Mila's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mluleva/

---

[ 01:18 ] Mila's background and overview of Rabobank

[ 04:02 ] What does Rabobank has to do with Earth observation?

[ 09:21 ] An example use case and the EO adoption process

[ 14:35 ] In-house development vs outsourcing EO solution development 

[ 24:17 ] Focusing on data quality and processes - idealistic or necessary?

[ 26:21 ] Roadmap for use of EO within Rabobank

[ 28:32 ] Thoughts on the state of EO - focusing on satellite companies

[ 31:53 ] Growth in downstream EO product companies and how Rabobank engages with them

[ 34:50 ] Benchmarking the different service providers

[ 39:36 ] How to make a case for the adoption of EO 

[ 43:01 ] Wrap-up questions

---