Febe Rahellea
DATA ANALYTICS FOR A FINANCIAL ANALYST
Before participating in ADSE 2017, Febe Rahellea was not familiar with data analytics at all. She was a student at Universitas Indonesia majoring in Accounting, with no background on data science and no prior experience in exploring data analytics software. But when Febe and her partner decided to join ADSE 2017 as Team Omotesando, she started to learn and understand about data science and data analytics software from her first encounter with SAP.
Since she studied Economics and Business, Febe wanted to choose a topic that she’s most familiar with. She mentioned that having initial understanding on the issue would help her team to explore further on a specific issue and create an interesting storyboard, instead of merely discussing a general and high-level problem. Therefore, she decided to choose Decent Work and Economic Growth (Goal 8) as the theme of her research and “Escalating Financial Inclusion Through Branchless Banking as a Solution to Poverty Eradication” for the title of her storyboard.
Her research findings discovered that financial inclusion in ASEAN countries is still low. People do not demand financial services, and there was an inadequate supply of financial infrastructure. With those reasons, she proposed the solution to increase financial services’ access by using branchless banking in order to eradicate poverty. With financial services being simplified and more inclusive, it would lead to better growth of financial infrastructure and reduce the poverty rate.
When asked to describe her experiences as ADSE 2017 Regional Finals Runner-up, Febe explained “It has been a great experience. The experience of joining ADSE would be a great competitive advantage for whatever you want to do next in life – getting a job or going back to school.” The statement was proven by her, as she now works as an associate in Impact Credit Solutions (ICS), an Alternative Lending Fund that invests in consumer and SME loans across Southeast Asia. As an associate, she works closely with data analytics to assess the investment feasibility of a company and to monitor portofolio’s performance by using different kinds of data from financials, credit history, to behavioral data.
Febe shared the part of data analytics that excites her the most, which is the guarantee of the legitimacy. “When you share your findings, you know that you’re working with a reliable source, not just because someone says so”. She definitely would recommend ADSE to anyone who’s interested in data science because it would teach participants to get familiar with data cleansing, processing, and visualization with very simple and easy-to-use software. Everyone should join this competition because it is helpful to leverage participants’ capability, improve analytical, critical and structural thinking skills and also broaden social networks.
For aspiring data scientists, she would advise learning from websites that provide free courses on data analytics. Starting analyzing data can be as simple as doing Excel calculation, so it’s already a good start if you know how to use Excel. You don’t need to have any specific skills to be a data analyst as long as you’re determined and committed to learn something new every day!