Meet Anita! As both Hungarian and Russian, but born and raised in Hungary, Anita came to the Netherlands 1,5 years ago to pursue her master’s degree in Quantitative Finance. After finishing her studies, she kicked off her career within an international bank in Amsterdam via Young Analytics. This leading player in the financial sector acts as an intermediate entity between traders, wherein Anita’s team covers all back office operations of the financial market trades and transactions. Anita has a key position in the team, where she can combine her quantitative and analytical skills in a challenging financial environment. In this blog, you can read her experiences as a data hero and find out more about the start of her data career in Amsterdam.
How did you experience the road to data hero?
‘I already started with data in high school, and continued this during my bachelor’s. I think that data information in general increased a lot during these five years. Many servers are not capable anymore to process this much data. So I believe the importance of data will continue to grow. Luckily, I am good with data and business analytics, which is now needed more than ever. Besides that, I really want to stay in my organization because I get to learn a lot. Maybe in the future I would like to work more towards data management and analytics in a wider context of business development rather than only focusing on client reporting.’
What is the most valuable thing you have learned so far?
‘That is a good question. I think the most valuable thing I have learned so far is that communication is really important. Also for data analytics you need good communication skills, otherwise you won’t get anywhere. Many people think data work is just individual work, without having to work with others, but it’s not. Besides this, when I started here in August, I still struggled to understand the position of the bank in the financial markets, so I learned a lot about that as well. Although I was studying finance and we of course had some classes on this, I didn’t know how this worked in practice. Lastly, I also learned a lot about IT I first had no clue of.’
Are there any problems you’ve encountered along the way?
‘As I mentioned already, communication can be a challenge at times. We have an international team, which is really nice but quite a few of my teammates are offshore and not in the office. I feel that especially during online meetings it is harder to get to the point at times. So this is one difficulty I would say.’
How do you see the future of data development within your team?
‘Well, at my company the data volume is increasing very rapidly, so right now we can process 10 million trades an hour. This is going to be much more in the future, so we have to somehow prepare our applications and databases. Right now we are focusing mainly on short term solutions, but in the long term we have to switch to something more innovative. For us the increase of data is a good thing, because we charge by trade of course. But if we can manage to filter the data, this would really help to create an overview. There are also great data visualization tools that can help with it. I think these are the main developments I foresee.’
When do you think you are a successful data hero and what advice would you give starters?
‘First of all, you have to enjoy what you are doing because if you don’t I wouldn’t say you are successful. Besides this, your accuracy is also very important. You can’t really make mistakes because that would give you a very different result. To upcoming data heroes I would definitely suggest to focus on the hard skills, but to not forget also focusing on your social skills. These are more important than you might think upfront! Also, don’t be afraid to try out new things because you learn from everything.’
