Casper Hogenboom

Casper did a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering in Eindhoven and a master’s in Data Science for Decision-making in Maastricht. He also spent six months studying in Århus, Denmark. “Armed with the various projects I’d done, I went in search of a graduate internship in the private sector.”

Overwhelming

That resulted in him becoming an intern in the ING Wholesale Banking Advanced Analytics team. “It was quite overwhelming at first – so many people with so much expertise, so many different projects and the constant exchange of insights to keep the processes moving. But I very soon became just part of the team rather than feeling like ‘the intern’. And everyone was always happy to help me with any questions I had about my research.”

The KYC, Fraud & Cybersecurity team

“During my internship I decided to apply for the Analytics traineeship. I saw it as the perfect opportunity to further explore which direction I ultimately want to take. I started my first rotation in April 2021, in the KYC (Know Your Customer), Fraud & Cybersecurity team. It offered scope for the combination I was looking for: working in a squad and also doing my own project that I could complete within six months. It involved natural language processing (NLP, data science on text) and data visualisation.”

Supporting a better understanding

“The team monitors letters of credit in the global trade of products such as cotton, gas or steel. A letter of credit formalises the price agreement between an exporter and an importer and ING facilitates the transaction. My team built a model that analyses customers’ historical behaviour to detect whether a transaction falls outside of the normal, legitimate range. And I built a dashboard incorporating my NLP algorithm to help researchers gain a better understanding of the model’s findings.”

“During my second rotation – which I’m doing right now – I want to explore the data visualisation aspect in more depth. The analytics teams are doing some very sophisticated work, but there’s room for improvement in the transfer to stakeholders. Some parts of the information get lost, but that can be overcome by visualising it better in order to bridge the gap between the analytics team and the business.”

Pushing the boundaries

“One of the things I’m currently working on is redesigning the tables and graphs in ING’s annual report. We want to make them more intuitive and accessible. Rather than being a ‘pure’ data scientist, I’m now much more of an information designer and I’m able to push the boundaries a little. For example, I’m currently learning a new programming language that’s widely used in data visualisation: D3.js. I’m hugely interested in the combination of data and creation.”