Analytics Days at Wise
Sharmee Shah
“At Wise, we hosted our first ever Analytics Days! We’ve grown exponentially in numbers over the past 2 years and there are a lot of new faces and domains that not all of us are familiar with. Hence the creation of Analytics Days – a 2 day event where we foster relationship building, shed a light on all of the ground-breaking work done by our analysts across teams and celebrate our analysts and their efforts.
We had two days packed with creativity and numbers, with a kick-off from our Director of Analytics Mark Hunter and then dove straight into our annual Analytics Hackathon! Some of our most exciting topics this year included understanding the elasticity of price of transfers and a model to predict what specific variables in a customer’s first 30 days’ activity will lead them to inviting another person to use Wise.
After an exhilarating hackathon we delved into all the impact analysts created in the past quarter. Analysts from different teams across the world presented their projects and the impact they’ve had on our mission- money without borders. We learned about everything from analysing user behaviour using creative analytical methodologies to building FinCrime predictive models that keep the bad guys away. Read on to find out more about what our analysts felt and what they have to say about Analytics Days.”
Ken Low
“Analytics days is okay, better with Mocha (Bea’s pup) but I actually prefer oat flat white. The hackathon topic I picked is helpful to the Invest & Assets team as we will be able put all our heads together and close some analytical gaps, helping us create a better understanding of our customers and thus build a better product for them.”
Devin Bryant
“The Hackathon is really fun. Being from the satellite New York office there aren’t many opportunities to nerd out together. So coming together allows you to bounce off ideas with people who have diversity of thought and still rooted in analytics.”
Tara Patel
“Definitely a steep learning curve. I feel slightly out of my depth because everyone is specialised in the room but there’s a lot to learn, and there is a place for every skill set- I’ll be doing foundational analysis and making sure that the criteria is explicitly met.”
Cameron Fuge
“This is my happiest smile with you putting a camera in my face. I chose to optimise the analytics platform for the hackathon because there’s a lot of work there: we’re all consumers of it- it affects us all and hence I find it meaningful to fix/improve it. That’s Wise- see something you don’t like, find a way to make it better.”
Akshay Menon
“Its really cool that we get to work on problem spaces that we aren’t usually exposed to and with analysts outside of our teams. As we usually have one analyst per product team, the hackathon is a great way to build a sense of community amongst the function inside the company.”
Bea Gasper
“Its important to connect and re-connect with new domains, new people and old friends. The hackathon brings everyone together to forster better communication between us and this helps us work better across teams in the future.”
Jeremy Tan
“Analytics days was really a space where we could crystallise the great things different analyst teams are working on. It was amazing listening to the ideas and thoughts by our talented analysts. More importantly, there’s really no other time where all our analysts could come together and physically meet one another. Just having ideas bouncing off each other made the time spent together worth it.”
Ann Lakspere
“I loved Analytics Days and only while sitting there and listening to the presentations did I realise how much I have really missed without an event like this at Wise. Not only did it give me great insights into ongoing and recent analysis done across products, it gave us all a chance to get to know each other more and create a safe space to go out of our comfort zone (which a lot of us did). The sense of belonging and having a supportive community is crucial as in daily work we can often feel isolated and lonely. These past 2 days showed how incredible a community of analysts we have here in Wise: who are all curious to learn, solve a mystery and cheer each other on every step of the way. Thank you for this event and I cannot wait for the next one!”
Angela Huang
“Coming from a smaller office in a different timezone and having joined Wise during the pandemic, I found it invaluable meeting other analysts in person and putting names to faces. I learned so much listening to the team presentations and hearing from industry experts, and I was especially proud of my team’s presentations (and their karaoke skills…)”
Betty Dundics
“I really enjoyed analytics days; it was great to meet a lot of analysts for the first time in person – or at all if we’ve not chatted on slack before. Hackathons are always fun – although I wish we had more time to work on our topics – and I was very impressed with how much some teams got around to doing. I’m usually occupied with the world of Wise Platform so it was very insightful to hear what others are doing, both informally while just chatting and more formally during the presentations. Definitely have plans to catch up with some folks to see if Wise Platform can also recreate some of their analyses! The external speakers were also really cool and I had a lot of fun getting to know people better over drinks and being dazzled by their karaoke skills. Can’t wait for the next one!”
