Senior / Lead Data Scientist

Our client is the UK’s newest credit card provider that will deliver a range of fair, flexible and easy to use financial services products to UK consumers. We help people make smarter decisions with money, so they can get more out of life.

Joining at the start of our journey, creates a unique opportunity to have a significant impact and influence foundational decisions, whilst creating the opportunity for you to grow in your career alongside the growth of the company.

We have a solid model framework in place, but are nimble enough to explore innovative ways of working and thinking. This role will have a diverse set of responsibilities, with a focus on leveraging data to drive business decisions, improve customer experiences, and creating efficiencies.

Working at a fintech means there is always a lot to do, but you would be part of a wider team that is focused on chipping away at the highest impact areas first, helping develop something great for us and our customers.

Responsibilities

You’ll be leading on credit risk initiatives to ensure the business is able to deliver against the annual operating plan and achieve customer focus and ambitions. This means you’ll be instrumental in the development and execution of credit risk team’s roadmap and looking to prioritise tasks to ensure that delivery is met.

Your day-to-day duties will include, but won’t be limited to:

Model Development and Implementation

• Develop predictive models for high impact areas, e.g. credit decisioning, fraud detection, and customer segmentation.
• Ensure data integrity and quality through rigorous validation and auditing processes.
• Conduct appropriate evaluation of scorecard effectiveness, with accompanying documentation.
• Monitor the ongoing effectiveness of the scorecards to ensure their relevance and need for re-evaluation.

Analytics

• Design and conduct experiments to test hypotheses and improve decision-making, defining expected outcomes and tracking against these.
• Understand wider process and customer journeys, allowing identification for potential improvements that can be quantified through analysis or tests.
• Identify areas where modelling can create uplift in decisions, efficiency and costs.
• Explore new data sources and methodologies to improve the customer journey and decisions.

Controlling Credit risk

• Propose, monitor and analyse credit decisions, taking into consideration the regulatory environment and customer impact.
• Evaluate granular performance against expectations, checking adherence to risk appetite and regulatory requirements.
• Define appropriate pricing and limits, based on risk and return principles, working closely with the commercial team to understand market conditions.

About you

Ways of Working

• Create and feed into structured working, simplifying onboarding of others and functioning of the team.
• Take others with you, by sharing your work, mentoring and creating clear documentation.
• Proactive automation of work, to allow more time for analysis and impactful change.

Your Approach

• Self-motivating, with a natural interest in understanding how things work and fit together.
• Ability to switch from working independently to collaborating across the business with ease.
• Happy to work at a growing company, where one day does not always look the same as the next and everyone rolls up their sleeves to help make things happen.
• Solution orientated with a drive to engage others to deliver solutions improving customer experience and profitability.

Your Experience

• Exposure working with varying datasources (bureau and openbanking data would be a plus).
• Foundational understanding of how credit cards work
• Strong coding skills, with a focus on structure and automation
• Defining and building insightful MI
• Good presentation skills, using the data to tell a story
• Ability to prioritise workload and manage time effectively, communicating proactively
• Excited about defining the foundations and best practices to allow automation and smart solutions for our customers.
• Tools experience that is beneficial: Python (required), SQL, Power BI
• Good experience using XGBoost & Logistic regression models as a minimum

Upcoming projects

• Below is a list of some upcoming projects that you would be leading on / contributing to:
• Building an early intervention scorecard
• Utilisation of a new business risk & growth model
• Building a behaviour score