Scotiabank

Hello, My name is Alex Lai and I am a 4th year Computer Science student at the University of Guelph. During the winter 2019 semester I started my 4th Co-op term at Scotiabank working with the Digital Data and Analytics team. This page was created to give an overview of my experience.

Scotiabank is the 3rd largest bank in Canada as well as a multinational bank servicing people across the world. With 25 million customers, 88 thousand employees, and almost 100 billion in assets, Scotiabank is a massive company to say the least. I worked in a building called the Digital Factory located downtown Toronto which is where Scotiabank is building out many of their new digital platforms. Including their brand new released mobile banking app.

During this co-op term I will strive to learn how the Web Analytics team tracks, manages, and utilizes the data that is collected. I will achieve this goal by consistently asking questions about the process the team uses as well as analyzing both how and why the team does what they do. The level of success will be measured by my ability to apply the concepts I learned to future projects. Reflecting on this goal, I believe I am satisfied with what I learned working with the web analytics team and am confident in my ability to apply these new skills to future projects. I learned how to use analytics software and how the development process works within the team to deliver powerful stories to teams in the bank and the shareholders. In my role I will have a variety of teams to interact with since the data science teams manages data that can benefit many different aspects of the company. My goal is to develop strong oral communication skills to be able to communicate both technical and non technical information to the various teams so I can help the teams understand the data so they can utilise it to the best of their ability. My plan to achieve this goal is to learn from how my team interacts with the various other teams we provide data and services for. I will collect feedback as to how well I am delivering information in meetings or presentations. To measure the success of this goal I am going to reflect on the feedback as well as my ability to confidently deliver and explain information throughout the work term. Reflecting on this goal, I did improve on my oral communication skills in this role. I had weekly meetings where I would explain and discuss technical information to many teams who wanted to know how their products were performing. I would present them with my results and explain to them how it impacts them and what key points they should take away from the information. This constant exposure helped me with both my confidence and ability to deliver information in a meaningful way. Problem Solving is a skill that we work on continuously throughout life and is more challenging when learning new concepts since it is more difficult to utilise techniques in new areas. My goal is to develop strong problem solving skills related to data science. The plan I am going to use to achieve this goal is to learn about the techniques that my team uses in order to solve new problems as well as challenge myself in the problems that I face to uncover new strategies that will help me in my role. I will also reflect on recent projects and figure out what could have been done better in retrospect. The success of this role will be measured by my confidence level in tackling new problems and being able to deliver projects successfully that are completely new to me. I will also have an increase in efficiency when working on similar problems that I have had previous experience with. Reflecting on this goal, I am happy with how much I learned about how the process of web analytics works and this has increased my problem solving ability greatly. Exposure and practice are very important to learning how to problem solve in new areas. Once you learn how processes work, you can figure out where problems are occurring and solve problems quicker.

I worked with the Web Analytics team which is comprised of 3 people other than myself. The team's main clients are actually the other teams in the Digital Factory. Analytics data is collected on all of Scotiabanks internal and external products and teams utilize analytics captured to learn and improve on the products they build. The duties in my role included, tracking data on specific Scotiabank websites, debugging analytics errors, and creating dashboards and reports for other teams for specific products. I found that the most interesting aspect of my role was building dashboards with the analytics data captured. There are hundreds of millions of analytics events that occur every year within Scotiabank products but you need to categorize the data and present it in some way which is meaningful. Analytics is one of the banks most powerful tools but that requires a medium in which to present the information which allows you to gather insight into what the data represents. The skills that I needed for my job were understanding how analytics can be captured on websites, how to utilize software and JavaScript to capture analytics data, as well as the ability to communicate the data in the dashboards/reports to help the teams understand it.

Web Analytics was a new role for me and one of the most unique experiences I've had during a Co-op term. Going into this role I did not know the depth at which data is captured for analytics purposes. I learned that analytics can be captured in many different ways, using different technologies and processes to gain insight into how consumers interact with products. I was able to rely on my Computer Science debugging skills I have developed over the years as well as my ability to design and structure solutions to help me become successful in my role. I also learned how important it is to be able to tell a story with the data that you have. Without meaningful context and reason you cannot receive the full benefits of analytics data.

It's hard to believe how much information is captured from just the small team that is Web Analytics. I would like to acknowledge and thank Pejman Ramezanpour, Gurav Pratap, Winston Leung, and Nick Lee for providing me with a great experience and introduction into the world of Web Analytics and helping me with questions and direction along the way. They made my experience enjoyable and interesting throughout the term and I can't thank them enough for their support.