Wondered what our data scientists work on? Find out from iwocan Neil Leiser

So tell us about you: what's your role and what does it involve?

I am a Data Scientist in an analytics team called the “League of Lending”. Our goal is to make the business as efficient as possible while keeping credit risk under control.

We are mostly responsible for building and maintaining credit risk algorithms. This means that we build models which help the business decide which customers we’ll accept for a loan, how much money we should lend, and what the losses could be in the future, if any.

But our role does not stop here. On top of building models, we’re also analysing data to drive decisions, building dashboards for data analysis, running A/B tests and writing production code.

What’s the most exciting thing about working as a Data Scientist at iwoca?

Impact and speed.

As a Data Scientist working in a credit risk team, your analysis can have a lot of impact on the business but also on customers. Because those analyses have such an impact, they’re also implemented and deployed very quickly into the system which I find very exciting. Within a couple of weeks, we can go from discussing an idea to actually implementing it and then deploying it in production.

What’s the culture like at iwoca?

iwoca’s culture is just amazing. What I like the most is the flexibility that we have. We don’t have to always be in the office and can also work remotely. Working hours are also quite flexible: you can decide to start late and finish later or start early and finish earlier as long as you attend meetings and deliver.

What I also like at iwoca is that the company really cares about its employees and lots of events are organised during the year like winter and summer parties, iwoca houses, cocktail parties in the office every month, and so much more.

Lastly, iwocans are very nice and are always available to help and answer questions.

What advice would you give someone considering a career in fintech?

Fintech is a sector which is moving and innovating quite quickly. Make sure you can adapt to new situations and don’t try to learn specific tools to solve a particular problem, always try to understand the big picture.

We’re all about small businesses - if you were to set up a small business, what would it be? And why?

I am a big fan of artificial intelligence and machine learning so it would probably be something related to that. Since the question asks for a small business, I would say an AI bar: a bar with a good wifi and quiet rooms where people can eat, drink and code. Why not have short machine learning competitions organised once a week so that people get to know each other and have fun.

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