Graduate Business Analyst

Business Analyst x 4
Salary £28,800 – £32,400negotiable
Locations Leeds
Reference BG1076

Our client is a highly successful financial institution who has been operating in the UK for over 10 years and operate both online and through a network of retail stores. They are currently undergoing a period of substantial business growth and investment, including rebuilding all of our products and systems (customer facing, back office and MI systems). Additionally they growing their analytical team and are looking for highly talented individuals who can help take the business to the next level.

Candidates joining our organization will have great exposure throughout our organization (up to Chief Executive level) right from day one and will have the opportunity to build best practice analytical solutions using state-of-the-art industry tools and cutting edge techniques whilst working closely with, and learning from, seasoned industry experts.

All successful candidates will be given personal responsibility and ‘ownership’ for optimizing part of the business from day one and given all the training and support needed to do that. The business does however strongly believe in broadening the skills and experiences of its staff so there will be lots of opportunities to get involved with and ultimately rotate into areas of personal interest.

The role:
You will be reporting directly to an experienced ‘Head of’ within the analytics team the candidate would be working within one of the following areas:

• Credit Risk (broadly focused on who we accept/decline and how much we lend them)
• Decision Science (building statistical regression models to predict key customer behaviors such as likelihood of repaying)
• New product development (designing new financial products for sale to the UK market including understanding and modelling customer outcomes, behavior and profitability)
• Marketing analysis (optimising all of our marketing – including digital, TV, Radio, email, SMS etc..)
• Operational analytics (making our operations run as efficiently as possible – designing what all of our operations colleagues do on a daily basis, prioritizing

Successful candidates will get personal accountability and responsibility for becoming an expert in one of these areas and optimising that aspect of our business (e.g. designing and launching a new product, or optimising our TV marketing spend). Appropriate support will be provided to successful candidates to train them in their area.

Skills required
We are looking for exceptional candidates who have the potential to become a hybrid between a business leader, business analyst and data analyst.
• Candidates will normally have demonstrated ‘excellence’ in many aspects of their personal and professional lives (e.g. high grades from top institution and have excelled in their extra-curricular activity)
• Strong attention to detail and must be able to use rigorous and structured approaches to problem solving and be able to use data effectively to draw conclusions and make considered recommendations
• Massive drive and ambition, willing to take ownership and be responsible for materially improving business performance
• Strong conceptual ability, both for analytical problem for solving and shaping the technical design of solutions (including new products)
• Ability to communicate with stakeholders at a range of levels on both technical and non-technical subjects
ABB or better at A-level, including an ‘A’ in Maths. Other two subjects should usually be numerical too (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Economics etc…)

You will need a good degree 2.1 or above in an applied numerical degree (Physics, Engineering, Stats and Operations Research, numerically heavy Economics courses etc…) from one of the top 10 universities.

Target universities include:

• Oxbridge,
• Imperial, UCL, Kings, LSE
• Warwick,
• Manchester & UMIST,
• Edinburgh,
• Durham
• Surrey, Lancaster and Exeter. Other universities may be considered but only for truly exceptional candidates.

Although all training would be provided any experience and interest in coding (either computer coding such as C, C++, C#, VB,.net, web coding etc…, or data extraction and manipulation coding e.g. SQL, SAS, SPSS etc…) would be highly advantageous.

You must be able to show potential such that we believe that with appropriate training the candidate could:
• be comfortable, ‘white-boarding’ a problem, identifying the key dimensions to consider, how to select the data needed, how to structure that data to drive insights.
• be comfortable with analytical approaches to building and testing hypotheses. Must be able to ‘rule out the impossible/implausible’ as well as proving that which is true.
• be able to ‘tell a story’ through data and the insights it brings – leading an audience to a logical conclusion (and their recommendation) through data and insights presented in the right manor to help the audience follow them.
• be able to go beyond ‘providing data as requested’ and able to guide senior executives to back their recommendation through the selection and appropriate delivery/presentation of the data required to generate insights and draw logical conclusions.
• The candidate will be required to extract their own data from our databases using tools such as SAS and SQL (full training will be provided but a certain level of technical competency will be assessed during the interview process).
• The Candidate must be comfortable dealing with information coming from a range of different types of places, including written, numerical and process flow presentations of information.
• The candidate must have excellent attention to detail and be able to quickly sense check their own and others work
• Must be resourceful in getting the information they need and be willing to proactively seek out SMEs and to develop understanding of business processes & data sources. Where SME’s don’t exist must be comfortable working with a range of stakeholders (e.g. developers and other analysts) to build the information needed from scratch (e.g. reverse engineering from code or outcome data).
• The Candidate will be coached to perform efficient, complex analyses within the SQL environment (merging, aggregating and sorting data), within Excel (using pivot tables & charting data, some knowledge of VBA would be a plus) and most likely using SAS too (for statistical analysis).
• They will become experts at finding ways to difficult to achieve analytical solutions which are robust and help drive the business forwards.
• They must be capable of using analytical problem solving techniques (e.g. developing a series of hypotheses which can be tested, developing mutually exclusive but cumulatively exhaustive groups, be experienced at using data to ‘tell a story’, etc…).
• Must be able to clearly communicate to all levels both within and outside of the organisation.
• Should be comfortable talking both conceptually and specifically and must be able to clearly articulate the output of analysis and its meaning and consequences, including to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Must be able to pro-actively build strong relationships with a wide variety of stakeholders (again both within and outside of the organisation).
• Must be able to operate as a technical expert (in both an analytical data context and in technical processes context – e.g. how does the interest calculation for this product work exactly) but also able to develop a wider commercial awareness of the business, how it operates and how the ‘data’ links to the realities of life.

If you are a graduate and you are interested in developing a career within sales, please send an up to date copy of your CV as soon as possible on the following link

Candidates must be legally entitled to work and live in the UK.