An update from Tom Spouse, CEO
Dear Friends, I can’t believe it is already November!
Firstly, let me start by wishing you all a fabulous Holiday season. After the past few years, I know many of you will be looking forward to celebrating this year’s Holiday season with family and friends with a relative degree of normality.
2022 felt like it flew by especially given the relentless travel that many of us fell back into. More importantly, I know for many of us, it was a welcome pleasure to actually meet people in person after having built so many relationships over video. For those I haven’t had a chance to see personally this year, I hope we soon get the opportunity! Perhaps, even at a Christmas party…
Throughout the industry, 2022 has seen a significant increase in the digital agenda, with most of our programs of work now relating to Digital Transformation rather than Regulatory. Our Digital Advisory Practice is now busy and Prospect 33 is proud to be supporting several significant tier-one banks in advising around strategic digital solutions across the operational landscape.
Global Data Lab (GDL) – Prospect 33’s Machine Learning Lab
The GDL has seen much of my effort this past year. If I’d realized quite how big an exercise it would turn out to be, I probably would have elected something simpler! Moving Prospect 33 away from our core services in Regulatory Change and into the new dawning age of AI, Machine Learning (ML) & Data proved a mighty project. There’s still much work to be done as this journey is just beginning for many of us, but I’m proud of our accomplishments to date.
Our Lab is now in full production, running projects and producing around 150 ML specialists per year. We’re monetizing the Lab by engaging customers with consulting services, project services and even offering some of our preferred clients the option of direct hiring our specialists.
If you have a PoC you’d like to discuss with us for next year, please let me know. The Lab runs six projects over the course of the year; each project is run in partnership with a bank and often also with a technology partner. We do not charge for the core team of the Lab, so this is generally a non-commercial project. Something you’ve got in your draw that you’d love to get funding on, but need to flesh out. We’ll bring a team of our seasoned data scientists in and spend 3 months building a tangible solution. It’s exciting for our teams and it’s exciting for our customers. Our typical team is around 10-12 people so we really see a significant outcome. For more about this, please go to our website.
If you are interested in engaging any of our Machine Learning specialists, please drop me a line directly at tom.spouse@prospect33.com
Enterprise Data
We’ve been working in the Enterprise Data space for five years now, and I’m extremely proud of the team who have won a number of significant projects in 2022. We anticipate this service growing with the increasing demands around quality of data as we move into an advanced analytics lead future. Data is as essential to our lives as water, and I’ve found this journey a fascinating process. We’ve combined three different groups, namely a pure CDO Data team, a Technology Data team and most importantly a Business Change team. We believe essential to delivering good data projects is being able to combine those three tangible solutions together, and we’re pretty good at it.
Strategic AI
Finally, and most importantly, we’ve developed reseller & strategic partnerships with several leading AI Technology firms. As this market matures, we have witnessed a growing number of excellent technology startups, many coming out of silicon valley, who have meaningful disruptive technologies that have the potential to be significant in improving operating efficiencies throughout the major processing areas of our business. Tackling complex functional areas such as KYC and post-trade in a new way, our view is that this technology has the potential to massively improve operational resiliency while providing transparency at scale to complex business processes that have long dogged our industry.
Employee Spotlight
Now for some news from the people in P33 who actually do the work. As you can imagine, the profile of our workforce has evolved significantly over the years. As I watch this new generation of data & Ai savvy kids start their careers with P33, I’m as excited as I’ve ever been about their future. For many of you reading this blog, who got their start in financial services through one of our programs, I’d ask you for your help and support in helping P33 grow across your organizations and thus give more of these amazing people a chance to excel.
Rhys Jervis
In Spring 2022, we kicked off Cohort 17 of the Global Data Lab. There were twelve data scientists engaged and several deserve special note. Each contributed an exceptional amount to the success of the project so choosing one to spotlight in this article was difficult.
Rhys Jervis was voted the MVP of the project by popular choice and has subsequently joined P33’s US Data Science team full-time. He’s currently working with one of our technology partners helping them build some exciting models.
Rhys is originally from Trinidad and Tobago, where he attended the University of the West Indies. He received both his Bachelors in Actuarial Science and his Masters in Statistics before relocating to New Jersey in 2019. In his free time, he enjoys baking and reading, and enjoying new experiences (mostly exploring new foods!). One goal he has is to plan and complete a cross-country road trip!
Global Data Lab – Project 18 – Employee Attrition & Capacity Planning
The P33 GDL kicked off the Q4’22 PoC last week. The project objective is to work with one of our technology partners to build a series of AI models to predict employee capacity and attrition. They will be using employee data to predict forward capacity and utilization. We aim to produce a predictive model capable of giving forward guidance on capacity/utilization over a 4-8 week period into the future. The attrition models will be capable of predicting future employee attrition risk. Naturally, we are extremely excited about this research and have great hopes for this within our client base.
It’s way too early to predict who our MVPs will be, but we want to share with you two of our early standouts from our new team of 21 data scientists split between North America (US/Canada), UK & Ireland and East Africa.
Wishing everybody a wonderful Holiday season ahead. Please drop me a line if you’d like to reconnect in 2023.
Best,
