Employee Stories

Soumyadip Biswas

Data Analyst careers at Standard Chartered

We interviewed Soumyadip from Standard Chartered’s Retail Analytics team to learn about his career experience in the data field. He explained to us what he does on a day to day basis, why it’s such a rewarding career, and why working as a Data Analyst at Standard Chartered surprised him.

Soumyadip joined Standard Chartered in 2021 for more exposure and experience working across different retail products. He now leads the customer analytics work for a variety of products from Mortgages to Personal Loans, to Credit Card Acquisitions & Forex, to Deposit & Wealth Management and Policy and Collections for the Wealth & Retail Banking business.

Can you describe your role?

I am a Lead – Customer Analytics managing a team of four in Wealth & Retail Banking. My role is to understand, deep dive and solve problems for the business. I look after the data analytics work for a variety of products. We collaborate with Product, Sales & Marketing, as well as the Risk and Modelling teams to implement strategies.

Tell us about a project you worked on that made you proud.

The project I am most proud of working on was to predict income for all the retail banking customers. Previously, we had five different income projections for the same customers based on five different data models. Our objective was to have a common customer income prediction that could be used across all products. We worked on the data and built models that helped us uncover the insights.

The project was successful as the results have helped the products in improving the base expansion and better conversion rate for cross-selling. I am very proud as it made a significant impact to the business. The results were impressive as the accuracy of the prediction was increased by 27%

“I feel extremely lucky and grateful to be a part of Standard Chartered where I have the opportunity to work across different products, collaborate with multiple teams and learn from the amazing leadership. It’s benefited both my professional and personal growth.”

Soumyadip Biswas, Lead – Customer Analytics, Wealth and Retail Banking

Can you share an experience of how your work can be challenging?

Our team works on many sophisticated yet challenging data analytics and modelling projects. One of them was to forecast Personal Loans attrition. We helped the business to identify customers who are likely to attrite so that business could take proactive measures to retain profitable customers.

Forecasting was challenging because of the drastic macroeconomic behavioural change in the past few years resulting from COVID. Customers’ behavioural patterns got disrupted and the usual data variables failed to achieve the forecast accuracy.

Our team had to think of alternate variables that could help us improve the accuracy. We conducted many brainstorming sessions to design the variables and perform multiple Machine Learning algorithms like Random Forest, Gradient Boosting and XG Boost to achieve the desired accuracy and outcome. In the end, we managed to build a model that provided the business with useful insights.

I enjoy working on challenging projects as they enrich my professional experience, sharpen my analytical thinking, and help me grow within the industry. It gives me immense pride and job satisfaction when we are able to solve complex problems.

What was something that surprised you about working as a data analyst at Standard Chartered Bank?

I have had a lot of opportunities to present my work to the senior management team. It was a surprise to me because people at my grade in the banking industry generally don’t get the visibility to the senior management team.

At Standard Chartered, I got to present my work to and received valuable feedback from both the Product Heads and Country Heads. Attending senior leadership meetings gave me the exposure as to how these meetings were conducted, what agendas were discussed and how to present my work to the leadership. I was able to learn how the senior leaders looked at problems and designed strategies to solve them. I was inspired and I used similar ways of thinking and approaches when I had to solve new analytical problems.

Learn more about our career opportunities in the Data and Analytics Team in Wealth & Retail Banking .