Financial Services and Insurance: Driving Tomorrow’s Data Science Trends

Last week Domino celebrated data science innovators driving breakthroughs in health and life sciences. This week we announce a new slate of innovators in the Financial Services and Insurance edition of the Data Science Innovator’s Playbook, available now as a free download. As before, each of its top data science innovation leaders in the financial services and insurance industries share insights on their work, careers, and the data science profession. The playbook includes seven profiles, the first being of Dr. Tiffany Perkins-Munn.

Meet Dr. Tiffany Perkins-Munn at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Tiffany Perkins-Munn, Ph.D. is Managing Director, Head of Marketing Data & Analytics at JPMorgan Chase & Co. She’s also an ANA Educational Foundation Board Member, one of CDO Magazine’s 2021 & 2022 Top 100 Global Data Power Women, and one of Data IQ 100’s 2022 Most Influential People in Data.

Dr. Perkins-Munn’s main job is developing financial models and applications that improve access and understanding of financial products and services. “Cost is rarely the key driver,” says Perkins-Munn. “It’s emotion that’s usually the most important factor in consumer choices.” She urges stakeholders to build emotion as a driver into ongoing research. “If I had been doing a longitudinal study on the impact of emotional decision-making today, I think it would be higher than ever before.”

Perkins-Munn urges early or mid-career data science professionals to relish the ability of data to reveal insights in virtually any industry. “Understanding data and data science is one of the few skills that’s extrapolatable and fungible. In many fields, it’s hard to make a change, but if you understand data, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in healthcare or financial services, the skills are the same, and they’re transferable and fungible.”

For Perkins-Munn, a key aspect of success is doing your best to help non-data scientists understand what the data means with storytelling. “Data scientists are notorious for not being able to digest what they’ve learned and put it into some small nuggets and stories that explain why their work is so impactful to their business and to other shareholders.” In essence: “You have to be able to tell stories about what you discover,” she says.

Full Roster of Innovative Data Science Leaders

Download our free eBook to read all the insights by Perkins-Munn and other innovators, advisors, and industry experts at the top of their game in data science within the financial services and insurance industries. All describe the tremendous growth of their data science departments in terms of team size and centrality in answering critical questions for their businesses. The full roster of profiled leaders includes:

1. Tiffany Perkins-Munn, Ph.D. – Managing Director, Head of Marketing Data & Analytics at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
2. Mohit Jain, Ph.D. – Director, Data Science/Machine Learning at BNY Mellon Wealth Management
3. Glenn Hofmann, Ph.D. – Chief Analytics Officer at New York Life
4. Anju Gupta, Ph.D. – Vice President, Data Science and Analytics at Northwestern Mutual
5. Meg Walters, Ph.D. – Senior Manager and Data Science Leader of Allstate’s Analytics Center of Excellence (CoE)
6. Vincent Walden, CPA, CFE – Certified Fraud Examiner of the Year in 2022, and CEO of Kona AI
7. Jeff Jonas – CEO, Founder and Chief Scientist at Senzing

The eBook also includes insights from two industry collaborators for this project. The first is NVIDIA’s Mark J. Bennett, Computer Scientist, Financial Engineer, Technical Manager, and Educator. Bennett provided us with insights from his extensive experience in cutting-edge technologies in finance, such as quantum computing. He’s joined by SCOR’s Antoine Ly, Chief Data Science Officer, and Kettle’s COO Nathaniel Manning, each of who provided their insights on innovation in the insurance industry.

Conclusion

We hope this introduction will encourage you to download the free eBook and feast on other insights shared by our featured industry experts. Comments by these innovation leaders can provide a spark to trigger new research or ideas to further your own career. The ideas can also help your organization’s team to scale data science with an MLOps platform and get your project over the finish line. We invite you to read the Financial Services and Insurance edition of the Data Science Innovator’s Playbook and learn how to accelerate the value of data science innovation.