Sahil Agrawal 

Working on vital topics for the bank, whether in Amsterdam or Sydney

The traineeship wasn’t actually Sahil’s first introduction to ING. Born and raised in India, he came to Amsterdam to do his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Econometrics and Data Science, during which he did an internship at Financial Markets within ING. “That’s when I heard about the IITP’s Analytics track, and I was immediately interested,” Sahil says.

A big plus

“The technical part of the track particularly appealed to me. I’m very interested in the use of innovative technologies for data science purposes. But I saw the people at the bank as another big plus. Thanks to my internship, I already knew that the culture suited me.”

Fully experience the whole process

His first rotation in Retail Banking enabled Sahil to fully experience one of ING’s core businesses. “I worked in a team responsible for the personalised recommendations in the ING app. I got the chance to see the end-to-end product, from data collection to machine learning modelling, developing the feature in the app and monitoring the performance – everything was done in the same team. And we worked for the Dutch, Belgian and Polish markets. That European scope made the assignment even more attractive.”

A hot topic

For his second assignment, Sahil aimed at the global fraud team so that he could further develop his engineering skills. “Fraud prevention is a vital topic because it really contributes to the bank’s – and thus the customers’ – safety. I’m working on code optimising and parallelizing hyper-parameter tuning methods, so that we gain insights into possible fraud faster and more efficiently. This is quite a challenge, because we have a tremendous number of transactions, of which only a small fraction is labelled fraud. Moreover, the models we’re working with are the most complex I’ve seen so far. But it’s a great opportunity to experience such a hot topic up close.”

An exciting task in an exciting location

Sahil considers that as just one of the advantages of being a trainee. Another is the chance to go abroad – in Sahil’s case to Sydney, Australia. “I’m excited about the location, of course, but even more so about the task I will be working on. My assignment will be about customer interaction again, just like in my first rotation, but now more from an engineering perspective. I’ve discovered that I really like the pure tech side of things, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring that more.”