NetGuardians is a FinTech company, so my job consists of developing cutting-edge, innovative, and robust software for banks all over the world. We protect the banks, and their customers against fraudsters and financial crime. I sometimes feel like a guardian angel protecting the innocent.
Name: Jérôme Bovay, 31
Date joined: June 2017
I'm leading the Data Science team. Our day-to-day work is to push the boundaries of analytics and find the value in data.
My role as a data scientist
On the tech side, there are three pillars to my job.
Firstly, I focus on research. As data scientists, we need to be one step ahead of what the company is doing. We keep track of possibilities that are opening up and think about ways they could be used to benefit our clients. That means thinking about the future of analytics and trying new things to see what can be achieved. We collaborate with our banking customers, apply new research, look at the results, take what works and put it into effect.
The second thing I do is maintain and enhance existing tools. We develop the algorithms and scripts and build the analytics that are the foundations of our tools. This involves coding, which makes the job super-interesting. Analytics are great, but to be able to code from time to time gives my job structure. It’s a really good balance.
Finally, I support the implementation of customer projects. This involves helping colleagues solve problems – how to clean data, for example. Right at the start of any project you need good-quality, consistent data. For example, the beneficiary country of a payment must always be written the same way – Switzerland, CH, Suisse. The data science team developed specific, proprietary tools to improve and speed up the cleaning process.
My proudest achievement
Much of my work is project-based. Recently I spent a lot of time working with Switzerland’s leading payment app provider, which is one of our clients. The whole of NetGuardians collaborated on this project, so I was working with colleagues in user interface, our architects and our business analysts to make sure we met our client’s needs and the needs of the engineers who install our system. It was tough, but really interesting.
I am also very proud of being the project manager on a CHF1.5 million joint project, researching automated feedback loops in active algorithms with the local university HEIG-VD (Haute Ecole d'Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud). When the project was finished, we had achieved all our goals. And we got to incorporate what we had learned into our software.
My ultimate goal
I’d love to lead the team towards the creation of a federated learning approach for financial crime detection. This would be an AI model fed by many frauds from many banks from many different jurisdictions, from which we could measure performance. It would be a robust, centralized, real-time financial crime database and machine-learning model that would really help to stop the fraudsters.
The most surprising thing about NetGuardians
In this area, things change and evolve fast, and as a data scientist, I’m always surprised and pleased by the significant role my team plays in this evolution.
Attention job seekers!
NetGuardians is hiring talented individuals for open positions around the world. We currently have a variety of job openings, including roles in software development, data science, sales, marketing, and more. If you're interested in joining our team, we encourage you to visit our careers page to learn more about our open positions and apply today.
Let's fight against fraud & financial crime together!
