Retail credit data specialist at Absa Group Limited (Absa)

Job Summary

• To develop tactical strategy and delivery plans, formulate associated practice/s and to ensure operational implementation and adoption i.t.o. credit risk management methodology, practice, governance and delivery objectives.

Job Description

Role Description

• This role provides an exciting opportunity to add value in the Retail Credit journey towards digitization. This is a new strategic direction for Retail Credit requiring stronger technical and analytical skills to enhance our capabilities. The Data specialist serves as a development, support and analytical expert; primarily responsible for the design, development, automation, testing, support and administration of the Retail Credit Data Services. The role will also serve as an analytical expert within capabilities with the responsibility of credit bureau reporting, strategy simulation and ad hoc analytical support. The role requires technical experience with Hadoop, traditional ETL and databases, SAS, Cobrix, SQL as well as the business acumen to empower business partners in ad hoc data preparation for analysis and automated decision requirements.
• Reporting to the Head RBB Risk Capabilities & Enablement, take responsibility for assisting to develop and implement best practice data disciplines systems and processes to ensure that the strategic objectives and regulations of Credit Risk and RBB are executable and can be controlled and monitored. The role will ultimately include facilitating the creation of data capabilities in conjunction with the Big Data teams and IT partners to enable the implementation of the strategic systems roadmap for Retail Credit, and the management of all change requirements on the systems and processes managed by Retail Credit Change and Enablement.

Key Accountabilities
Overall (Medium Term):

• Help facilitate and build on the Strategic Architecture Conceptual data design to ensure all Credit Risk requirements are addressed
• Help define a strategic roadmap to move towards the strategic concept
• Work actively with the Credit Executive team, RDS, Data Engineering, Retail IT and Product tech teams to enable the strategic roadmap and ensure accurate, timeous and relevant data is available to add value to Bank and Customer
• Define the Credit Risk data requirements in conjunction with Project, IT and Business teams
• Ensure that all third party data processes and requirements are optimized:
  • Data supplied to third parties (SACRRA, Credit Bureau etc.)
  • Data received from third parties (Bureau for real time, batch, and ad hoc, etc.)
• Work with the product and product tech teams to ensure that bureau reporting is optimized, the correct controls are in place and process is managed efficiently
• Define and implement the strategic process for all regulatory reporting (ie, Bureau reporting)
• Primary responsibility for the compliance with all regulatory credit data reporting requirements
• Work actively with the Credit risk teams to facilitate the simulation and testing of strategy and systems changes, particularly (but not limited to) Credit decisioning i.e. Powercurve, Triad, DM
• Understand and simulate the strategies in the credit systems in SAS to replicate, monitor, test, identify and resolve issues.
• Identify and implement detective and reactive measures to increase the level of control in the credit systems
• Collaborate with credit risk teams as and when required to assist with pro-active strategy design and impact assessment

Candidate Description

• The incumbent will have the opportunity of working directly across the firm with developers, operational staff, credit risk analysts, data scientists, architects and business constituents to develop logical and physical datamart(s) for generic usage.
• Furthermore, the incumbent will have the opportunity to bridge the analytical gap between capabilities and credit risk / business by making use of analytical tools to inform and monitor strategies, identify and implement controls across the credit risk systems and ensure compliance with all regulatory credit requirements.
  • Engagement with data owners and system technology teams
  • Ability to design effective and efficient data models
  • Ability to work with multiple different sourcing interfaces (O/JDBC, API, File and etc)
  • Ability to critically evaluate problem statements and suggest best practice ingestion patterns
  • Ability to work in a matrix environment and be able to manage across functional lines in order to deliver
  • Provide consistent and clear communications for planning and estimates
  • Clearly articulate problems to backend engineering teams
  • Strong problem solving, data programming and automation skills
  • Background in information systems, computer science, engineering, physics, mathematics or equivalent
  • Strong analytical and SAS programming skills
  • Ability to understand bureau reporting requirements and automate the reporting thereof from the Hadoop platform
  • Bonus: Worked on Big Data platforms (Vanilla Hadoop, Cloudera or Hortonworks)

Skill Requirements:

• Strong SQL query experience
• Strong ETL tool experience
• Strong SAS experience
• Cobrix experience
• Practical and project experience with warehousing and warehouse or transaction system design
• Practical experience with creation of dimensional and transaction data models
• Practical and project experience in ETL products, such as SSIS, Informatica and etc. 
• Project experience in relational databases such as MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, MySQL and etc.
• Firm understanding of Apache Spark Architecture and YARN (Spark application build will not be required)
• Scripting experience on Linux OS and Windows OS
• Basic programmatic experience and terminology is required
• Cobrix experience

General/qualifications

• University Degree or higher certificate in computer science or information Technology or equivalent NQF level 5 qualification or higher
• Five years+ experience within a data warehouse/mart development environment
• Three years+ experience working with SAS

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Business, Commerce and Management Studies (Required)