P CM YOUR GATEWAY TO THE WORLD OF PAYMENTS
Vol 2. Issue 5 May 2016
DATA SCIENCE To Infinity and Beyond
Welcome to Vol.2 - issue 5 We are enthusiastic to release the 5th Issue of the Payments & Cards Network eMagazine for 2016. This month we focus on the increasing importance of data and its impact on businesses in the payments sector. In light of this we present an interview with Nathan Trousdell, Director of Strategy & Corporate Development at Payvision, who talks about Data Science and how it is influencing and shaping the payments industry. In the Startup Spotlight we introduce you to DataCamp, an R, Python and Data Science e-learning platform. Jonathan Cornelissen, Co-founder and CEO, talks about discovering the demand for a learning platform focusing on statistics and programming lanugages like R and starting a successful business in that field. Moreover, in this issue you can read about the launch of Payments System Regulator, a tool enabling payments system to work efficiently, securely and transparently for everybody, especially consumers. We feature the experts Rebekah Moody and Vanita Pandey who discuss the latest trends in cybercrime. And on top of this Clint Wilson explains why teaching children to manage their budget is crucial and how the ParentPay application can assist in this process. Finally, an overview of the hottest job openings we have at the moment. Feel like you need a change or looking for a job opportunity? Get in touch directly by clicking on the jobs. What better way to network and get to know your peers in the industry? Check out our premium event partners and make use of the discounts we have on offer before they run out!
For any questions, suggestions, or concerns, please address them to the editors: Amir Abdin - Duc Dang - Joanna Bak -
amir@paymentsandcardsnetwork.com duc@paymentsandcardsnetwork.com joanna@paymentsandcardsnetwork.com
The Payments & Cards Network team wishes you good reading! 002
Contents thoughtleaders
spotlight
16 6
8
10 STORIES 4
Metro Bank and Engagement with the Payment System Regulator Becky Clements gives us an insight into Metro Bank’s efforts to tackle UK’s
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Spotlight: DataCamp
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Hot Jobs
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Events
We speak to DataCamp, an exciting startup aiming to educate the data scientists of tomorrow.
Payments system challenges.
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Many Faces of Cybercrime
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The Payment Product for Youngesters in the UK
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Expert Interview: How Data is transforming Payments
Rebekah Moody & Vanita Pandey outline the driving cybercrime key trends in the 1st quarter of 2016.
Clint Wilson shines light on how essential financial education is and how he and his company foster youth banking in the UK.
Hottest jobs in the industry! Get in touch directly to get more insight.
Here we showcase the most exciting upcoming events related to FinTechm, Payments and Cards throughout the world!
Nathan Trousdell elucidates the increasing importance of data in the world of payments.
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Thought Leaders Corner by Becky Clements
Metro Bank and Engagement with the Payment System Regulator In the UK we are in a unique position, having an economic regulator that oversees payments the Payment System Regulator (PSR). The PSR’s ultimate aim is to make the payments system work efficiently, securely and transparently for all, especially customers. The PSR, launched in April 2015, recently established a Strategy Forum to ensure that as a regulator, it is not solely dominated by the traditional players. Rather the PSR benefits from a diverse membership, accurately representing a cross section of users - from consumer representatives, to finance technology organisations, to traditional high street banks. This ensures that not only are all stakeholders involved in the payments process being represented, but also gives them an active voice. Only by having all parties represented will there be a level playing field, which will in turn benefit the millions of customers who rely on the ability to make and receive payments in their everyday lives. The Strategy Forum, that Metro Bank is proud to sit on, benefits both challengers and new entrants alike by injecting competition and innovation into the system, enabling a range of organisations of all shapes and sizes to flourish.
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In line with Metro Bank’s outlook, where the customer is centric to all decisions made, the Forum ensures that the interests of all those that use the payments system are put at the very heart of the decisions being made. To help develop these initiatives the Forum has already sought input from a wide range of businesses from the payment community to understand what the main challenges are, looking specifically at those which impact customers’ experiences. With these findings in mind, the Strategy Forum has established four, multi-stakeholder working groups. The aim of these groups is to advance the analysis of these challenges and to develop a series of collaborative solutions that will revolutionise not just the industry, but each and every customer’s experience. The four issues that the Forum is dedicated on resolving are: •
End User Needs
•
Simplifying Access to Markets
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Financial Crime
•
Horizon Scanning.
Thought Leaders Corner The Forum is responsible to develop solutions for a two, three and five year strategies, which will be circulated to the Payment Community in July 2016 for feedback and comment by all members. We are seeking to provide options for a range of issues that the payments industry has seen develop over a number of years (items such as common message types, the benefits of centralised financial crime systems, and - for new entrants and smaller payment service providers - the ability to join payment schemes). Indirect access to payment systems is currently the only option offered to challenger banks and new entrants which can have a detrimental impact on customers, as the service provided does not meet the standard service provided through traditional players with the direct access to UK payments schemes. As the UK’s leading challenger bank, joining the UK Payment Schemes is complex and timeconsuming. The on-boarding process and requirements for a payment service provider to join the scheme requires greater clarity and transparency, as well as requiring long lead time for implementation. Once a provider has worked through the on boarding process, the extensive procedures and regulation are intricate which can create resource and compliance review needs – both of which are in precious resource in smaller organisations. Ultimately, those organisations that rely on access to the scheme, are the exact organisations that are either put off or repelled by these challenges. As a challenger bank, it is refreshing – yet long overdue - to have the same level of influence as the larger financial players. This pioneering involvement will not only allow us to help shape the payments industry for years to come, but will provide equality to all payments service providers, enabling customers to benefit from a more efficient, transparent and secure experience.
Becky Clements As Head of Industry Engagement, Becky Clements is responsible for Metro Bank’s industry payment and card regulatory and change activity, as well as acting as the relationship manager for Metro Bank’s payment third party suppliers. Becky has extensive experience of working within the payments industry and delivering longterm, sustainable value to both customers and business. She sits on both the Advisory Panel and the Strategic Forum for the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR), as well as being a Director of Payments UK and Deputy Chair of the Simplifying Access to Markets Working Group. Becky’s close involvement with the new regulator gives her a unique perspective on the progress and work being taken to improve customers’ payment experience from a challenger banks perspective.
Metro Bank is the UK’s first new high street bank in more than 100 years, focussed on offering unparalleled levels of service and convenience. Launched in 2010 the bank was set up to revolutionise British banking, putting the customers at the heart of every decision made. Metro Bank is a full service banking, offering personal, commercial and private banking services.
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Thought Leaders Corner
by Rebekah Moody & Vanita Pandey
The Many Faces of Cybercrime – A Look at the Key Fraud Trends from Q1 2016 As a technologically savvy consumer, you might think you are fairly adept at spotting potential fraud attempts. We know that banks won’t ask for our full login details, our passwords need to be undecipherable, and we need to make sure that we don’t click on dodgy looking links in emails. Sadly, this may not be enough to protect us from fraud attacks. The cybercrime world is evolving and consumer data is now everywhere. Usernames and passwords can be bought at the touch of a button following numerous data breaches and fraudsters can stitch together complete and convincing identities from a jigsaw of stolen credentials. They create pitch-perfect attacks because they know so much about us, sometimes more than the businesses we transact with. Organizations must become smarter at detecting the full spectrum of possible attacks, from huge automated identity testing sessions, to advanced social engineering attacks that hijack individual accounts. This starts with really understanding the digital identities of consumers so that high-risk behavior can be detected in real-time. We’ve seen some interesting trends emerge in ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network at the start of this year. Authentication is still a core part of our Network traffic, with 86% of transactions coming from returning devices. Trust is critical – consumers expect to be recognized, known and given easy access to products and services without experiencing unnecessary friction.
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However, the dark undertones of fraud attacks continue to take us all by surprise, with 311 botnet attacks detected this quarter alone. Businesses are under attack from a particularly pernicious group of fraudsters who are becoming would-be generals of their very own botnet army, controlling vast networks of bot computers, some of which belong to unsuspecting consumers. These botnet attacks are mass-testing identity credentials, often adopting a low and slow attack speed to appear more like legitimate user traffic and evade rate control measures that have traditionally formed the first line of defense. ThreatMetrix also spotted some new forms of credential testing this quarter. Online businesses provide the perfect way for fraudsters to anonymously test stolen payment credentials, such as credit cards, before making a big ticket purchase. Industries with low digital sophistication are easy targets. We detected a series of $5 payments made with stolen credit cards targeting the charity sector. Identity spoofing had a strong footprint in the FinTech space with fraudsters using cloaking technologies such as proxies or spoofed locations to mask their true identities and locations. This has caused an increase in fraudulent new loan applications. Our other big story this quarter was the continued growth of mobile transactions, particularly prevalent in financial services. Mobile transactions grew 200 percent compared to the previous year and now make up one third of our
Thought Leaders Corner transactions volumes in The Network. Users are really incorporating mobile apps into the daily ebb and flow of their lives. Mobile banking apps, for example, are a key way for users to log in to their account, check balances and transfer money on the move. Some users are logging in almost daily. Many users are now mobile only, reflecting just how reliant we are on mobile devices. Mobile security must be front of mind; attacks are steadily rising and businesses must be prepared for these to increase further.
Rebekah Moody
Although fraudsters may talk a convincing story, there are always glitches in how they transact that sets them apart from the real user. The ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network analyzes the myriad connections between a user’s devices, locations and anonymized personal information as they transact online. This builds a unique and trusted digital identity that fraudsters can’t fake. Leveraging the power of digital identities to establish trusted user behavior is the best way to authenticate user identity and pinpoint behavior that deviates from the norm. This is combined with global threat intelligence about known fraudsters and botnet participation to deliver robust fraud prevention.
Rebekah Moody brings 12 years of marketing expertise to ThreatMetrix, with a proven track record of delivering strategic multi-channel campaigns. At ThreatMetrix she is part of the core Product Marketing team, driving thought leadership, sales enablement, product positioning and messaging. She has penned numerous thought leadership articles and whitepapers that demonstrate her clear, strategic thinking.
ThreatMetrix®, The Digital Identity Company™, is the market-leading cloud solution for authenticating digital personas and transactions on the Internet. Verifying more than 20 billion annual transactions supporting 30,000 websites and 4,000 customers globally through the ThreatMetrix® Digital Identity Network, ThreatMetrix secures businesses and end users against account takeover, payment fraud and fraudulent account registrations resulting from malware and data breaches. Key benefits include an improved customer experience, reduced friction, revenue gain, and lower fraud and operational costs. The ThreatMetrix solution is deployed across a variety of industries, including financial services, e-commerce, payments and lending, media, government and insurance.
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Thought Leaders Corner
The Payment product for Youngsters in the UK ParentPay was conceived by a working parent and ex-teacher who wanted to help her school make life easier for parents. Twelve years on they now offer a complete income management solution to more than 6.000 schools across 200 local authorities in the UK, allowing approximately 2.500.000 parents to make online payments for all their child’s needs including school meals, trips, clubs, fees and uniforms through a flexible and secure web application. ParentPay created and continues to leads the market for online school payments, removing cash from schools, making them safer places for both staff and pupils. They are often called to provide advice to the Department of Education and other UK government bodies while at the same time conducting robust research about parents, schools and online payments. Given their central role in the school’s eco-system and the deep relationships they have formed with schools, parents and children alike, one of the causes that truly matter to them is financial education. Since September 2014 financial education has formed part of the compulsory national curriculum for all
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maintained schools in England, it is part of citizenship for 11-16 year olds and there are stronger links to it in maths for all ages. The importance of financial education for any nation is paramount, as the future financial decisions of today’s young people will dictate to a great extent the future of world economies. Providing them with the economic and social environment to prosper and the competences (financial, social and livelihoods) to thrive has a meaningful impact on the lives of individuals and the communities in which they live. Still, findings from a major UK wide quantitative study they undertook last
year with almost 6,000 parents reveals 70% believe their children have less understanding of money today and 80% of parents feel children spend money too easily. In his mind there is a strong correlation for these attitudes with the fact that despite the shift from cash to electronic payments, parents all too often are educating children with money in its physical form, cash. The ‘kids getting older younger’ phenomenon means children under 14 are maturing at an earlier age. They are exposed to more information, technology, media, entertainment, gaming, and even travel than ever
Thought Leaders Corner Clint Wilson Clint is Chief Executive at ParentPay Ltd. With the business since inception, Clint has established ParentPay as the UK’s leading online payment service for schools. With over 20 years in payment processing and software he has cross-sector experience in a number of fast growing businesses. Clint lives in Somerset with his wife and four children.
before. Born into the digital world, young people are faced with financial decisionmaking at a much earlier age than their parents, be it buying a song download, subscribing to online services, saving for the latest game, topping up their mobile phone, or just paying for the bus journey to school. Despite their digital acumen young people often lack access to electronic money in a form that allows them to participate equally in an increasingly cashless world, while at the same time helping form responsible money management skills. By using cash it is harder to track spending, to have immediate access to their money and to form budgeting skills. Of course carrying cash also has the inevitable safety considerations. So what is the role of existing banking solutions? Can they address the rapidly evolving needs of young people and offer a foundation to becoming financially responsible adults?
Most UK banks do offer accounts from an early age yet most of them do not come with a payment product for minors. Those that do are unable to cater for the inherent parent-child relationship in the design of their offerings. Parents need a safe and secure environment in which they can empower their children, and take advantage of a forum for family discussion that will spark lifelong learning. Children need access to tools to help them learn how to spend, save and budget wisely, learning the value of money and how to manage it responsibly. Offering financial products to young consumers requires commitment and vigilance. To develop payment products that respect and support children’s rights whilst considering parental needs requires looking beyond business-as-usual.
on exciting new products that will help redefine youth banking, supporting financial freedom for young people. They have for many years been at the core of school-parent payments, providing safe convenient services affected millions of children. They are privileged in being able to deploy our accumulated knowledge and experience to new services, which can contribute to the financial competence of tomorrow’s young adults. As they sit on the brink of launching a new child-facing finance service, they do so with the confidence any difference we make to an individual’s financial competence, contributes not only to their future success, but also to that of our economy as a whole.
At ParentPay they are delighted to play a pivotal role in the interactions of the parent-child relationship and to work
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expert interview
How Data Is Transforming Payments Nathan Trousdell is the Director of Strategy & Corporate Development at Payvision, a global online payments processor based in Amsterdam. He works with the founders and department managers across all areas of the firm, including sales strategy, data science and product. He is also responsible for the valuation and analysis of strategic investments and merger & acquisition activity. Prior to joining Payvision, Nathan worked as an Investment Banker in London and Wellington. He has a Bachelor of Commerce in Finance from The University of Otago, and an NZX Diploma in Finance.
Nathan Trousdell Director of Strategy & Corporate Development, Payvision
T
he emergence of Data Science is gradually picked up also in the Payments World. We talk to Nathan from Payvision, a company at the vanguard of driving the importance and real value for customers of data in Payments. What do you think is the role of Data Science in the Payments sector? I think Data Science in the payments sector is multifaceted, with fraud and security being a large part of it on one side, and the optimization of payment processing on the other side. On the fraud side, understanding fraud patterns and trying to bring in obscure data that may help you recognize and catch fraud is incredibly powerful. You can also use Data Science to help your merchant’s process payments more effectively, by diving into authorization and conversion metrics and looking at card holder
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patterns and motivations. Overall, Data Science is helping payment companies provide safer and more reliable payment services to both merchants and their consumers. What role does Data Science play in your firm’s strategy and day-to-day operations? It is an interesting area because in the payments business you sit on a huge amount of information. You have live transactional flow, running into the millions of transactions, and the more data you can collect on these transactions the better understanding you can obtain about your customers and about the process. At Payvision, we work to make business decisions based on a mix of data information and intuition. Many businesses run on gut feeling and experience, and while this intuitive approach to business is important you always back up your decision making with fact and logic. With so many human biases it’s vital to look at data and understand the full picture before making decisions. We at Payvision are evangelists about doing business this way and are quite passionate about getting this approach
more and more into the DNA of our company. We always work to educate people in all departments about the importance of data based decision making, and how it can be leveraged to improve the organizations performance. Picking up the aspect of combining intuitive and data based decision making, do you think adopting to this new environment is a big challenge? It is definitely a learning curve and an educational process. Proving the worth of data through tangible results is important because analyzing it, creating reports and teaching people about how it can help them serve our customers better is time consuming and soaks up resources. However, as I noted before, I think that at Payvision we will never solely rely only on data because there is always a chance you can incorrectly interpret it and act in blind faith. The philosophy that inspires us is to always have curious and critical mind, and be skeptical of everything. It is easy to make a mistake and suddenly lose the value of the data and exercise that you were going through, which needs to be focused on solving real problems, not creating new ones.
Expert Interview There are numerous advantages of using data within the Payments sector. What are the disadvantages in your opinion? The only disadvantage is that it’s really time and resource consuming. This is because the market is highly fragmented especially when you work with a lot of partners, like we do, who may still use old systems with different data sets, styles, information management approaches. To provide a seamless experience to merchants and consumers, and enable them to process and review payments in all regions through a single system, you need to take all of that differing data, clean and consolidate it so it can be used to provide real insights. This is a pretty heavy exercise in terms of resourcing, but we need to face this challenge in order to provide the omnichannel experience that is the future of payments industry. To me, outside of the resourcing issues, and the need to continuously educate people who don’t have a data-driven approach to problem solving, there aren’t any disadvantages. In the long run seeing past those shortterm disadvantages allows you to reap huge long-term benefits.
What is innovation in Data Science for you? Traditionally, innovation comes from being frustrated by old-fashioned ways of doing things, being curious about how it could be done better and then playing with the ideas that come out of that process. Scientists, the chief innovators in society, are themselves people who constantly tinker and play with things. To be innovative within Data Science in the payments world you need that curiosity. You need to look at the payments experience from the merchants and partners perspective, as well as the consumer’s perspective. You need to understand what problems and frustrations they face, and how looking at data in a curious way can impact the problem solving process, and provide new insights into behaviors and motivations.
Do you see real-time analytics also as an opportunity in Payments? In the past companies used to base their decisions on historical data. Now with the technological advancement you can get quality data out of real time analytics. Definitely! With traditional financials, when you do the monthly or quarterly close the data comes from looking back at historical information. However, if you’re able to connect all your data sets and systems together, you’re able to build up a full financial view of the business based on real-time transactional information. This real-time information can serve the finance, sales and management teams and give them instant feedback on business trends. Also, and this is incredibly important in the payments industry, preventing fraud relies on being able to act instantly to cases of fraud before there is a negative financial impact, so you have to be running real-time on transactions. For us moving all of our data systems to being real-time is very high on the agenda of all departments.
Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century
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expert interview What are your expectations from Data Science or how do you think these expectations have evolved over time, in the Payments sector especially? It is interesting because Data Science is like UX and UI designers 5 years ago. There weren’t many of them, nobody really knew what they were doing but they knew it was important. I think Data Science is going through this discovery phase recently too. You can now study Data Science specific courses in universities, when traditionally people came from a computer, engineering, math or physics background, or a mix thereof. In general, Data Science is maturing and by this I mean the technology stacks and the systems are evolving to a point where they can be trusted and are widely used and understood. In the recent years, there were a lot of possibilities discovered in payments, and people figured out what data means to their company and customers, and how to best leverage it. Now it’s the time to push forward and get the real benefits from it. What is you vision where on the future development of Data Science ? I see a continuing improvement in predictive and machine learning models on conversion rates, fraud, and on the optimization of whole omnichannel strategy. There are plenty of areas
we’re looking into, and many of them are sensitive and provide a competitive advantage for our company, hence it’s confidential. As Director of Strategy, I will continue to work together with my team in order to provide our merchants, as well as our own internal departments, with special insights so that they can make actionable changes in the areas they didn’t even know could be improved. I think this is what makes Data Science so interesting; taking a journey of discovery into areas you can already improve, and areas that others haven’t even thought about yet. It’s that curiosity that will drive it into the future. Within payments, people have many habitual patterns that you can extract valuable insights from. We like to think that we are all very different, that we do things differently, but the truth is that we all have many predictable patterns. Our geo-spacial habits, our spending habits, what we like and don’t like etc. As we collect more data on behavior the predictability of such habits will become more reliable, which will drive better decision-making to serve customer needs. What legal and regulatory challenges do you face when utilizing the data? What are the major hurdles in this matter?
Europe is definitely at the forefront in protecting people data privacy, which is great. The second part is about the perception of collecting and using data. How much do people want to give away and expose their privacy? We are living in a world where everything is being tracked. 90% of the existent data was collected in the last two years and I expect that trend will continue. The amount of data that is being stored is growing rapidly, and people are not comfortable with that – they feel it’s very ‘Big Brother’ and could be used against them. For example, if we were tracking payments and looking to link it with a person’s profile both online and offline, then we need to be open about why we are doing it, and have the certainty that the person is protected and the use of the data is positive. In such a case, data could help us to understand what payment methods the customers like to use, where do they like to shop, what kind of things do they like to buy. This information could allow merchants to provide the best deals to the customer as well as the most frictionless and seamless payment experience, both online and in stores.
There are two parts. There are the regulatory hurdles that we face and
Awarded with “Best Acquirer” at MPE Berlin 2016 and ‘Best Merchant Acquirer/Processor’ at the 2015 Payments Awards, Payvision is one of the fastest-growing global acquiring networks in the world. With over a decade’s presence in the global payments market, Payvision has accrued vast knowledge of global acquiring and payments processing for the ecommerce market. Payvision simplifies the complexity of cross-border ecommerce through a highly effective and secure transaction processing platform. By offering banks, PSPs, ISOs and merchants one global acquiring platform, 24/7 support, 150+ transaction currencies, a high-end reporting interface and a solid risk management solution, Payvision strives to support its customers in expanding their geographical footprints and growing their business. For further information, please contact: Floriana Cristea Global Communications Manager E-mail: press@payvision.com; Web: www.payvision.com
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Spotlight Think you have what it takes to start a business in a super-hot market? PCM takes a close look at some of the most innovative and promising startup companies in the payment industry.
startup spotlight
“WE WANT TO BE THE GO TO LEARNING PLATFORM..." Jonathan Cornelissen is one of the co-founders of DataCamp, and is interested in everything related to data science, the programming language “R”, education and entrepreneurship. He holds a PhD in financial econometrics, and is the author of an R package for quantitative finance. DataCamp is the second education start-up he founded, and the first one that went international. In his spare time, he loves to do some programming, especially in Ruby on Rails.. Can you tell us something about your background? Where did the interest in data come from? I have studied Business Engineering in Belgium and decided to choose a major called Business Research, which involved a lot of statistics and data analysis. I fell in love with it and decided to start a PhD in this area. At that time I also got involved in the R community and was teaching R to multiple groups of students. It was an interesting experience but if you are teaching the same exercise lab for the fifth time you receive a lot of similar or exactly the same questions. This made me think that there must be a better way to do this. It was the period when the idea for DataCamp was born. At that point there was an emergence of great online platforms, however most of them focused on teaching web development. We researched the market and found out that there is no real learning platform for R and statistics. There was clearly a gap in the market and we knew that DataCamp was a good idea and it was going to work. What is DataCamp’s vision now? We want to be the “go to” learning platform eventually for all science technologies, as well as all Data Science methodologies. At the moment we are focused on R and Python because they are the largest - they are open source and they are growing a lot. At least the demand is growing a lot. Ultimately, we want to teach everyone the tools they need know to be productive as in a professional work environment. This includes not only the hardcore data scientists but literally everybody who wants to become more data literate and is basically bumping into the limits of Excel because the data sets are getting bigger.
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Jonathan Cornelissen, Co-Founder & CEO, DataCamp
The way we want to do this is very different from traditional learning platforms. Most platforms are very generic and they are all focused on a more passive learning experience. We consider reading a text or watching a YouTube video not attractive. We want to give the learning experience, we want the people to solve challenges, we want our students to be active at least 70% of the time. That way we want to build the engagement and be sure people get through these courses and have the necessary skills they need to be productive in a professional environment. When starting a DataCamp course, do you need to have knowledge about Data Science? We have a variety of courses, from basic ones to more advanced. However, our main focus has been on building great beginner courses, because that’s where the greatest demand is. There is an enormous lack of people with Data Science skills and a considerable amount of companies face a problem of finding professionals with Data Science skills. This situation applies to every industry. The greatest demand in the market is retraining people who might have a technical background (engineering, mathematics, physics etc.) but do not have experience with Data Science, so they would be employable as Junior Data Scientists. Besides that, we also have a lot of people with economics, psychology or sociology background and this is what I really like about Data Science – the diversity of people that come to this field. It also testifies how large this market is going to be. Because it is not only mathematicians, STATs or MAT PhD types, who need to learn this. It is a substantial percentage of the population. Just like you are getting STATs education in almost every university right now. One of the achievements of DataCamp is raising 2 million dollars seed money. The company is now 2 years old, what are the other achievements you accomplished so far? The most I’m proud of is that we already have 350 thousand students on the platform and a large percentage of that have completed courses. This m eans that we were not only able to attract a lot of users, but
startup Spotlight that they are also active on the platform. In total we have now about 13,5 million completed exercises and over 20 million attempts to solve challenges. That’s huge, right? What is more, is that we are now at the point where we can get to work with the best people in academic industry. We have partnerships with companies like Microsoft and university professors from top universities like Duke, Princeton, University of Washington etc.
What are your thoughts on the current state of the industry and what will the most important opportunities be in this regard?
What are your goals for the future?
Data Scientist has been termed as the sexiest job of 21st century. Do you agree? What advice would you give to people aspiring a long career in Data Science?
I think that there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to building up our course library. We would like to add at least 50 courses by the end of 2016. We also aim to double the amount of users we have, which means we would like to grow to 700 – 800 thousand by the end of the year. Eventually, we want to keep growing the company and find great people to join our team. In what way Data Science can have a positive effect on a company’s performance? In my opinion it can have an impact on any aspect of the company. Of course the way in which Data Science might be used vary depending on the company’s structure and needs. It certainly will influence the marketing department and help understand customers better, in terms of their behavior, needs etc. It will help the sales department qualify leads, as well as the finance division to detect fraud. Lastly, I believe it will help the company as a whole to predict the revenue better. What is the role of Data Science in the future? It is being still underestimated how substantial it’s role is going to be. I think that the big transformation in a professional world is already set in motion. My prediction is that every company will either have a Data Science department or scientists managing different teams. The way it will be set up will differ from company to company but I do think it is going to be important for every business. Another trend that I expect to happen is the shift from having an IT department to having a Data Science department. I predict all this to happen within the next 5 years.
If the demand of the Data Scientists will grow, then companies will have to retrain people towards more specific areas. As a result of that, the education field will grow. Recruiting for Data Science positions as well, that’s my guess.
I definitely agree with that and its not only Hal Varian from Google who said it but it is being confirmed by other studies as well. Data Science and applied statistics is definitely a good choice that will most certainly get you a job and most certainly will get you a job that’s well paid etc. The demand for Data Scientists is and will be growing. My advice would be to focus on learning the skills and focus on learning how to communicate the results of your analysis. The biggest challenge is often being able to tell a story and present the analysis, so that it will be understandable for people with less knowledge. Any recent exciting news you would like to share with the payments community? We have recently announced DataCamp courses for groups. It was driven by the fact that many companies need to retrain existing engineers to become more data literate and get Data Science skills. The courses allow either professors or people internally within the companies to teach and train a group of people and monitor the results of their performance. For us as a company this is an exciting new step. So far we have had a lot of success with individuals who want to take a DataCamp course and ultimately get a subscription to our data course library. We are also working on great features to make the tasks even more engaging.
Which of the big data tools will have the biggest impact in the upcoming years, and why? I am quite biased in this matter. Even if behind the scenes, the more advanced technologies like Spark will be used, I still think that either R, Python or both will remain the bridge between all new advanced tools. I once heard somebody say that what HTML did for the web, is what R or Python did for Data Science - giving people an easy way to interface with data. It’s hard to predict to what extent Spark and other tools will win over new technologies, it’s probably going to be a combination of a lot of technologies. We try to think about what is going to be the one, two or three languages that everybody is going to use as an interface to all the other tools. Just like SQL is a standard to creating data basis. Behind the scenes you can have Oracle or Microsoft but the interface is SQL.
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SALES AND BUSINESS
SITE & PAYMENT MANAGER
DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
Uppsala | Sweden
POINT OF SALE PARTNER MANAGER
SENIOR PARTNERSHIP MANAGER
Amsterdam | The Netherlands
Sydney | Australia
SENIOR BUSINESS SYSTEM
IT PROJECT MANAGER
ANALYST
Prague | Czech republic
Prague | Czech Republic
San Francisco | US
RISK PRODUCT MANAGER
Amsterdam | The Netherlands
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events
Events London - United Kingdom The conference, ranked by the FSI sector as a top FS industry event, brings together banking security professionals, regulators, banking and insurance specialists, risk managers, asset managers and administrators to debate the threats to data security to the global financial services industry. 15% discount for Payments & Card Network subscribers, please contact george@drmfsummit.com
10
Discount Code: PaymentsNet20 San Jose, CA - United States
10–11
A two-day showcase of the latest and greatest financial and banking technology innovations from leading established companies and hot young startups. FinovateSpring 2016 will feature Finovate’s signature demo-only format with 70+ companies, as well as networking sessions. Save 20% with the promotional code: PaymentsNet20
Munich - Germany The European Identity & Cloud Conference 2016, is Europe’s leading event for Identity and Access Management (IAM), Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC), as well as Cloud Security. For the 10th time KuppingerCole brings together exhibitors and more than 600 participants including most of Europe’s and the world’s leading vendors, end users, thought leaders, visionaries and analysts.
Manila - Philippines
17–18
020
The Summit will provide comprehensive insights and best practices to broaden your access to the 70% population without access to a formal financial account in the Philippines and the growing population of more sophisticated consumers. You’ll dive in presentations, panel discussions, case studies, break-out sessions, and round table discussions.
10–13
events
Seville, Spain The MRC EU Congress is the most dynamic and esteemed European event for fraud and payments professionals. With an expected attendance of over 500 leading eCommerce experts, the MRC EU Congress is consistently voted better than any other industry event.
18–20
Prague - Czech
19
The event will take place in the heart of Europe with the likeminded people, keen on Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. During the day the participants will demonstrate developments, get acquainted with investors and share experiences with each other. http://bitcoinconf.eu/en
Amsterdam - The Netherlands The event will take place in the heart of Europe with the likeminded people, keen on Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. During the day the participants will demonstrate developments, get acquainted with investors and share experiences with each other.
19-20
Beijing - China
26–27
4th China Omni-Channel Retailing Summit2016 will be focusing on China’s retail O2O around the entire channel push, crossborder e-commerce trend, supply-chain management innovation, personalized digital marketing, mobile payment and traditional retail transformation strategy, exploring new model of Internet + retail to promote trade exchanges and development.
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events
Barcelona, Spain
Discount Code: GESBAR16PCN
The Global E-commerce Summit has proven to be the annual e-commerce event where industry leaders share their experiences and insights. You can be a part of this inspiring environment and benefit from the excellent networking opportunities. Promotional code: GESBAR16PCN
29-1
Accra - Ghana
1-2
The conference aims to make financial inclusion a reality for the masses. Through the event, all the key decision makers in the Banking and Finance sectors will be brought together as a way of facilitating the exchange of ideas, experiences and strategies that they have come across in their careers.
London - United Kingdom After last year’s huge success, Digital Travel returns for it’s second year with an action packed 2-day agenda of interactive case studies, roundtables and workshops. This is the ONLY VP and Director level event for 250+ of the world’s most dynamic digital travel executives from the top Hotels, Airlines, OTAs and Cruiselines.
Discount Code: partner
7–10
7-8
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
This large scale international conference hosts various cities, system operators, energy companies, industrial organizations and technological parties. They come together to share knowledge on how to achieve a Smart City. Projects where climate ambition and energy transition are the main focus point. Amsterdam Smart City is official host of the Smart City Event.
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