Brief Description of position:

The origin story

In 2005, our co-founders Rishi Khosla, and Joel Perlman, were looking for a working capital facility to support their growing business, Copal Partners, a financial research firm they’d founded three years previously.

They approached numerous high-street banks and kept getting variations of the same response – “the computer says ‘No’”. Despite being a profitable business with strong cash flow and retained clients, none of the commercial banks were willing to lend to them. It was too small a ticket to offset the costs the bank would incur in doing a fundamental assessment of their business and structuring a finance facility for their needs. A few months later through one of their institutional client’s special situations desks, they managed to secure 100x the amount of debt for a dividend recap. So, an institutional division of a bank was able to support them, but the commercial lending part of the bank was not.

This experience stuck with them.

After they’d scaled Copal Partners to a 3,000-employee business and sold it to Moody’s Corporation (NYSE: MCO) in 2014, they then set out to address the funding gap they had experienced first-hand and help growth businesses achieve their potential. They have given themselves 20 years to build the globally dominant player in the mid-market lending space, both through OakNorth’s balance sheet and OakNorth’s technology and process solution for third party banks.

About us

OakNorth India is a core contributor to our mission of changing SME lending globally for growth companies. The team, based out of our offices in Gurgaon and Bangalore, constitute some of the best credit analysts in India along with a team of engineers and data scientists who integrate into a global product team - all focused on developing the OakNorth Analytical Intelligence platform which is revolutionizing customized mid-market lending globally.

Today, the platform is being used by banks across Europe, North America, and Asia, who have combined balance sheets more than $800bn. In the UK, the platform has helped us build a profitable loan book of over $2.3bn with no defaults to date. In terms of the impact this has had on the economy, our loans have directly helped with the creation of 9,500 new homes and 11,000 new jobs in the UK, as well as adding several billion pounds to the economy.

We are the fastest company in European history to achieve unicorn status (from 0 to USD 1bn valuation in 30 months)

Our employees in India get to visit our London credit center as a part of an exchange program

Who will you work with?

You will be joining the Data Science Team with high-caliber data scientists and experts with deep organizational experience to solve cutting edge advance analytics problems and help create OakNorth’s Credit Intelligence solutions. These solutions transform commercial lending by helping banks build deeper relationships with their clients, open new, more profitable opportunities, whilst delivering credit decisions up to ten times faster than traditional models, with lower risk and greater efficiency.

Credit Intelligence is a data-driven advance analytics technology that gives lenders a forward-looking view of the borrower based on expansive and dynamic data sets and scenarios specific to that business, using automated, continuous analysis of multiple drivers across the business, its peer group, and the wider economy. This provides an independent, consistent, detailed framework offering deep contextual insight that enables rapid underwriting, immediate stress-testing, and more agile and targeted strategic lending.

What will you do?

• Develop statistical models to analyze large financial/market/high-frequency data sets and provide business forecasts and performance conclusions for companies across multiple sectors e.g., linking macroeconomic data with specific sector performance, linking cost with revenue performance
• Be a content leader for team of data scientists/economists who will work closely with credit, market research and technology teams to develop core IP for OakNorth Credit Intelligence Suite
• Engage OakNorth clients (corporate and commercial lenders) to walk them through our statistical approach of IP creation
• Extensively use statistical techniques including time series analysis, multivariate regression, test of significance etc. in building the models
• Demonstrate strong understanding of key dynamics that explain sector performance and ability to independently verify the model outcomes
• Keep abreast of latest developments across sectors including impact of regulatory changes, impact of technological changes, structural changes in demand / supply environment etc.
• Extract information from multiple sources with varied platform and structural complexity

Who you are?

• Graduate in Engineering/ Statistics / Economics / Business or equivalent with at least 10-12 years’ experience in the field of data science and statistical modeling. Master’s degree would be added advantage
• Adeptness at linking statistical outcomes with business problems / situations and not thinking in silos ofsubject matter
• Ability to think critically in understanding client problem and brainstorm solution with colleagues of varied background (credit, market research, and technology)
• Deep experience of using R or Python with focus on statistical packages and working with databases such as SQL
• Deep knowledge of data science techniques such as linear/non-linear regression, maximum likelihood estimation, time series estimation & forecasting, optimization, simulations (Monte Carlo), asset pricing, data mining, pattern recognition, dimension reduction (PCA), Nowcasting and MIDAS
• Experience in implementing Machine learning algorithms including classification and clustering methods such as logistic regression, decision trees, random Forest, and K-means clustering
• Establish as a data science expert by developing and growing knowledge in latest techniques and platform, attending conferences and knowledge events, and creating proprietary content
• Leadership abilities to guide and motivate a high performing team and establish a followership
• Strong communication skills to work in a dynamic team setup and able to accomplish client facing assignments
• A collaborative, high-performing individual contributor, with innovative mindsets, and can execute the assignments independently
• A value driven individual who adapt to the changes and accept diverse perspectives with curiosity and respect

Location

Bangalore,Gurgaon

Minimum Qualification:

Graduate