Expertise: Financial and Management Reporting, Finance Data and Systems modernisation, General Insurance in the London Market, Data Strategy and Governance, Transformation.
Education: CIMA Qualified (2003)
Social media: LinkedIn

Olivia started her career as an Underwriting Assistant within a London Market Insurer after completing A- levels. Back in the mid 1990s technology and data were there but very immature, processes were manual and largely paper based, systems were black and green main frames and data was patchy and of poor quality if it was even captured at all. The industry was heavily male dominated, which Olivia did not realise at the time.

Fast forward a few years, companies and positions, Olivia completed the CIMA accounting professional qualification in 2003. She held several senior Finance roles and led and improved Finance teams based across various countries, often assuming the role of the bridge between IT and Finance to drive change through diversity of thought and different approach. On reflection, she believes this was likely because of being a female. Finance processes were always impacted by bad data; timeliness, availability, quality, and the need to consistently drive greater process efficiency which could only in part be enabled by improved technology.

In 2015, Olivia moved from wholesale into a data role. After the birth of her daughter, she led and transformed the global data function of a FTSE 250. Olivia eventually moved from Industry into Consulting where she was able to consolidate over two decades of Finance and Data experience.

Now a director, Olivia is passionate about supporting and nurturing female talent in data. as the Mum to a daughter who is fascinated by science, technology, and maths, she wants to ensure young women have access to the same career opportunities that men have traditionally had and strive for improved gender representation.

Expertise: Data Analytics
Education: University of Coimbra – Biological Sciences BSc (2010), Biochemistry MSc (2012), Kings College London – PhD, Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism (2021)
Social media: LinkedIn

Patrícia’s journey in data started in biomedical sciences. During her PhD, an exciting opportunity arose to do a deep dive into a big data set using R. This experience changed her perception of great data sets to obtain meaningful insights and prompted her to become increasingly curious about the unused data available around the globe.

After finishing her PhD, she started investing her time to learn data tools such as Tableau, and shortly after pursued a Nanodegree in Data provided by Code First Girls.

Now working at Slalom, she leverages the critical thinking and communication skills developed in academia to help clients unravel insights from their data, from gathering requirements from stakeholders to transposing these needs into informative dashboards.

As an early career data analyst that changed her STEM field later in life, she recognises the importance of giving women the tools to explore all careers available and support them in their growth

Expertise: Data Visualisation (Tableau), Stakeholder Engagement & Communication, Data Analysis
Education: BSC Level 4 Diploma in Data & Analytics (2020)
Social media: LinkedIn

Growing up, Lauren was very open to exploring different opportunities and avenues. She chose not to continue with higher education and always assumed with she would have a career involving her people skills. Never, did she imagine a career in data despite being exposed to the world of Data & Analytics from an early age. Her dad has always been her inspiration as an extremely skilled IT & Data Analytics contractor. When he sadly passed away, his legacy encouraged Lauren to apply for an apprenticeship in Data & Analytics.

Coming from a non-technical background into a male-dominated industry, Lauren wants everyone to know careers in data are possible. From data visualisation to data engineering, she is loving and learning every second. To any young woman considering a career, don’t be afraid to make the jump!

Expertise: Data Architect, Data Analytics, Data Engineering in AWS, Azure and snowflake
Education: Bachelor of Engineering, Master of Business Administration
Social media: LinkedIn

After graduating, Jeeva started working at Tata Consultancy Services in Chennai, India. Here, she was introduced to business intelligence, specifically working with data across various sectors including airlines and Insurance. By working on data migration projects and LIVE payroll systems, Jeeva realised the significance of the data.

Eventually, Jeeva moved to the UK and was introduced to Cloud Data governance and Data Architecture.  With new clients in financial services came additional responsibilities of delivering the project end-to-end: from the Business requirement discussion to the Production implementation on their data platform. Though it was challenging, Jeeva supported their data platform and data visualisation system which supported clients to take significant financial decisions.

Jeeva also started working with her US teammates on cloud migration projects. This introduced her to modern technologies including data lakes on the various cloud.  As an output, Jeeva went on to complete Snowflake snow pro certification, AWS cloud practitioner certification and AWS Solution Architect certification.

As of 2021, as a Senior Consultant at Slalom, Jeeva has worked with numerous sectors from Retail to Life Sciences. She is proud to participate in new initiatives at Slalom such as the D&A academy, and Girls in Data. Here, Jeeva strives to help, motivate and inspire some young minds in our data practice.

Expertise: Data Visualisation, Analytics, Engineering
Education: BSc Mathematics in Lancaster University (2015-2018)
Social media: LinkedIn 

Phrances is a technology enthusiast with over 3 years’ experiences in the industry. She loves working with all things data especially using new technologies and techniques in the engineering and analytics space. She loves helping customers translate their business needs into technical requirements, especially using data to drive decision making. Her main aspiration is to bring data to life through storytelling and help stakeholders understand the value of their data.

Phrances graduated with a Maths degree in 2018 and stumbled upon a career in data. Her career began as a data analyst where she helped commercial teams make data-driven decisions. She then continued her data journey as an analytics engineer, where she built data products that focused on customer needs. Realising that tech is not a common career path for young women due to its male-dominance reputation, Phrances aims to be a role model to encourage young women and young people in general into a career in tech and generate more awareness that a career in data and tech is very much a possibility. One of her proudest achievements is being part of a panel for the Women in Data Science Conference, talking about her journey so far. In doing so, she hopes that she can inspire young people into a career in tech.

Expertise: Data Visualisation & Data Science
Education: 2015 – 2018 Queen Mary, University of London, BSc (Hons) Mathematics with Finance & Accounting (1st Class Degree)
2019-2020 Queen Mary, University of London, MSc Data Analytics (Distinction)
Social media: LinkedIn

After graduating with degree in Mathematics, Klaudia started her first role in FinTech industry as Financial Crime investigator. She quickly identified ways in which investigations can be made more data-driven and how analytics can improve financial crime detection. She started connecting with product owners and data analysts to identify such opportunities while learning SQL, Looker, and Python in the meantime. Over time she started taking over more and more data analytics related tasks such as creating dashboards and performing analyses to find emerging crime patterns. Working alongside data scientists has really sparked her interested in that field of analytics and led her to apply for a masters to learn more. During that time, she learnt the key principles of business intelligence, data science (including machine learning) and the mathematics behind it. After completing her master’s degree, she landed a job at Slalom within the Business Intelligence & Analytics team.  

At Slalom, her role is to enable clients to see the art of the possible when it comes to deriving key insights from data visualisations in Power BI and advanced analyses with R and Python. With Slalom’s support she obtained two certifications to date: AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty and Microsoft Certified: Data Analyst Associate. In her first 12 months at Slalom, she won two company awards for her performance and aptitude for learning. She is passionate about machine learning and is one of AI for All champions within Slalom UK which core mission is to help organisations realise the value of AI through holistic approach focusing on strategy, technology, and transformation. 

She is especially passionate about ethical applications of AI and for this reason it is important to her to bring more diversity into the data and analytics sector. She believes representation is key in driving change and that more women should be encouraged to choose career in data and analytics.

Expertise: Data Engineering
Education: Master’s of Computer Application from National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India
Social media: LinkedIn

Once Jean graduated, she started working at Thorogood Associates in Bangalore and got introduced to Business intelligence. At the onset of her career itself she  was working to help businesses understand their data, enabling the data to tell the story. Jean loved learning how various sectors worked and the stories their data would tell. A couple of years of that then she relocated to London joining NYSE and enabling different datasets to tell different stories. Empowering teams to look at the same data with different lenses, the simple humble ‘set theory’ in a much larger, powerful, and impactful scale. This role and her following role at Close Brothers enabled Jean to contribute to the larger puzzle of compliance to FSCA. Knowing that her work is making a positive  impact to society at large is an amazing feeling.

Jean joined Slalom in 2019, moving from the industry back into Consulting with the desire to help ‘Building better tomorrows’ for clients, the world, and her daughter.

Expertise: Data Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Machine Learning
Education: Liverpool John Moores University – MSc International Business and Management (2019)
Social media: LinkedIn 

Yumeng is a data professional specialising in business development through modern data strategies. She is passionate about enabling business values with cutting-edge technologies. 

Yumeng’s career began in business and finance. This is where she began to witness the impacts of data in core business strategies and wanted to explore further. She started with Python and quickly discovered the beauty of programming and data manipulation. Joining a training program for data engineering, she successfully relaunched her career as a data professional. 

Looking back at her journey, Yumeng has had her doubts and fears about moving into a technical pathway. However, she felt motivated to challenge inequalities, especially the gender-gap within STEM field. A passion for data and the encouragement of kind people only pushed her career choice further.

Inspired by many other successful stories, Yumeng wants to share hers to encourage women to chase their dreams. Whether it’s learning a new language or starting a new career, if you take the action, it’s never impossible!