Claudia Wu

With a background in computer science, statistics and data mining, Claudia's position as a senior portfolio analyst within the Retail Risk Management division of ANZ is a great fit.

"Our team manages ANZ's policies and strategies for retail and business banking. In a typical day, I look after an analytical 'data mart' and make sure the data that comes in is accurate for analytical purposes," says Claudia.

Claudia also builds models using historical data from the 'data warehouse' or the 'data mart' to work out what has happened before, and forecast what could happen in the future. She then uses the data to segment and predict customer behaviours, calculate ANZ's profit and loss, and overall, make sure the bank is lending responsibly.

"At ANZ I use the data mining skills I learnt at Waikato University every day. The first step is to understand the data and the data structure, to know what useful information I have and how to pull it from the database. I then manipulate the data to the shape I need and apply statistical methods and business knowledge to discover the information I want. From there I turn that information into knowledge, and use the knowledge to help make business decisions."

After graduating from Waikato, Claudia worked at Statistics New Zealand for two years, before moving into the banking industry.

"While at Statistics New Zealand, I worked on a lot of social surveys, including the Household Labour Force Survey, Household Income Survey, Disability Survey and more. Each of these surveys collected information from New Zealand households, and the information has been used to help the government to look into the policies that can improve New Zealanders' standard of living."

Claudia did her research before deciding on a degree. "I went online to Seek and found the number of jobs was increasing in the field of analysis, which requires people to know about databases, statistics and business knowledge. These job ads were often on the web longer than others and I realised there could be a shortage of people who can do both database programming and analysis."

With this in mind, Claudia structured her degree accordingly, deciding to major in computer science, but with supporting papers in data analytics and mathematics.

"Amazingly, I haven't found any method (during work or training) that I haven't heard of or studied before. I think the lecturers at Waikato did a fantastic job to choose the material and cover all the necessary topics. It just makes life so much easier at work!"

Claudia completed the majority of her high school studies in China, before moving to New Zealand and completing Year 13 at Avondale College in Auckland.