Payment Data Analytics Specialist at Absa Group Limited (Absa)

Job Summary

• To focus on unlocking tactical and strategic payments data insights, enabling data-driven payments strategies, monetization opportunities and enhance decision making across the organization

Job Description

Accountability: Payment Analytics Strategy

• Set strategic payment analytics direction through the development of a multi-year analytics roadmap and delivery plan
• Ensure that the strategic plan enables the evolution of payment analytics from basic analytics (descriptive & diagnostic) to advanced analytics (Data science) over a medium-term outlook (3-5 years)
• Ensure that the payment data asset build requirements in support of effective transitioning to data science are adequately catered for e.g.  ingestion of new data from a range of alternative sources, integrations into personalization engines, need for AI technologies etc…
• Stay up to date with the latest payment data trends and technologies such as ISO20022, Open Payment APIs, Artificial Intelligence and use to inform internal analytics responses and approaches

Accountability: Analytics & Insights

• Operationalize Absa’s payment data analytics function with immediate focus on establishing and maturing descriptive and diagnostic analytics before advancing to payment data science   
• Expand standard payments business intelligence to provide insights that drive strategic decision making as opposed to only the provisioning of payment reporting and datasets.
• Deliver clearly defined asks to payment MI/BI analysts and data visualization experts within the payment data team in support of analytics execution
• Continuously explore ways to enhance payments business performance by using payments data together with data manipulation and analytical techniques to analyse key indicators such as payments revenue, cost, market share drivers, relationships, trends and identify opportunities
• Analyze payments data across multiple payment rails and dimensions (group, cluster, product) to ensure that cross-rail and organizational impacts are understood
• Develop and implement analytical models and algorithms to support payments business and continuously improve these models and algorithms through experimentation and testing
• Ensure that the appropriate payment performance metrics such as revenue scorecard, market share, BU level payment performance and penetration etc. are catered for as part of the data provisioning, analysis and insights processes

Accountability: Reporting & Communication

• Communicate clear, concise, commercially valuable, data-driven insights and recommendations to business in support of payment business growth and/or operational efficiency improvement
• Partner with business to define requirements informing the build of sustainable,  comprehensive payment analytics & reporting
• Assist MI/BI analysts & visualization experts within the payment data team in creating meaningful visualizations and optimal, easy to understand dashboard designs for consumption within the payments team and business verticals
• Set a standard of reporting used across all payment business areas
• Use available technologies to drive efficient/ streamlined analytics, monitoring & reporting e.g. automated triggers & alerts in Power BI
• Create sustainable channels and communication platforms for data flow within payments businesses e.g. BU manco’s, email etc. to drive payment data analytics integration & consumption

Accountability: Quality Assurance

• Maintain a high standard for payment analytics by ensuring that outputs are constantly quality assured
• Support with the design, development and running of model assessments, validation, enhancement activities and balancing procedures to ensure integrity of payment data

Accountability: Stakeholder Engagement & Collaboration

• Forge relationships and partner with payment business areas to solve challenges through analytics and enable better understanding of payment data & reporting
• Collaborate across internal data pillars to deliver on complex projects. Take on accountability to assess, define and manage project deliverables, milestones, risks and issues
• Work closely with payment business teams to identify and prioritize data-related initiatives
• Manage and prioritize overall payment data analytics demand pipeline
• Collaborate with data engineers to access and manipulate data as needed
• Partner with IT to effectively migrate analytical models from prototype to production
• Partner with internal as well as third party providers of data to expand available datasets
• Partner with analytics teams in payments business verticals to share knowledge and skills and to create a strategic analytics community and roadmap that covers technologies, techniques and standards to ensure uniformity and sustainability in the provision of analytics across the bank
• Develop strong collaborative interlocks with payments data and commercialisation functions to ensure that all strategic delivery is data-led and commercially viable  
• Tightly interlock with payments rail specialists to deliver strategic data insights linked to the performance of Absa’s payment franchise (via rail centric views) into required stakeholders across the Absa group, ensuring that Absa’s payment franchise performance is optimized

Accountability: Analytics Governance

• Ensure that all applicable data risk management standards and policies are adhered to
• Play an active role in the creation, implementation, and maintenance of robust payment analytics model governance to ensure uniformity, sustainability and scalability of all data models produced

Accountability: Training & Development

• Develop a thorough knowledge of payments products and systems
• Leverage available training & development opportunities to advance your specialist payment data analytics skillset into payment data science in line with the evolution of the payment data analytics function

Perform all other duties as reasonably assigned

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: BMI - Business Management and Informatics