11 de December de 2019
Saving and investment alternatives and innovative products in financial markets were among the winners at the Merca2 Awards for Financial Excellence at EAE’s Joaquín Costa Campus.
The Merca2 Group, in collaboration with EAE Business School Madrid, has held the ceremony of the Awards for Excellence in Financial Markets. These awards are given in recognition of organizations and professionals that have demonstrated the required merits and made an outstanding achievement by being innovative, disruptive and committed to Industry 4.0.
The institutional welcome to the event was given by Raúl Bravo, the Director of the Madrid Campus of EAE, “an international business school that has been training executives since 1958, the graduates of which are professionals working in leading companies all over the world”. This was followed by a presentation by Alejandro Suárez, the CEO of Merca2, one of the leading economic media outlets, with over 50 professionals, 7 million monthly readers more than 800 million news articles read, which “has proven that you can do things differently to succeed”, emphasized Alejandro.
Sofía Ruiz, the Director of the Economics, Accounting and Finance Department at EAE Business School, presented the EAE Award for Financial Business Excellence to the Corporate Finance area of Banco Santander. Irina Kuznetsova, the Director of Risk Forecasting at Banco Santander, collected the award. In Sofía’s opinion, taking part in the Merca2 Awards offers a different way of interacting with financial markets and its key players, managers and investors. “EAE Business School strive to offer training that combines theory (necessary in the world of finance) and practice, reinforced by close working relations with the real market”, explained the lecturer.
The Director of the Economics, Accounting and Finance Department at EAE said that she was proud to present this award to an institution such as Banco Santander, an institution that works very actively with the School’s Department of Economics, Accounting and Finance. The decision to present the award was based on the bank’s contribution to the Spanish and international financial sector; the quest for continuous and successful innovation and, obviously, the academic support that it gives the School.
Sofía Ruiz analysed trends in relation to digital innovation, which is opening a whole new world yet to be explored, “which is going to require a great emphasis on the ethical and socially responsible component in the operations that are conducted”, she explained, emphasizing the countless benefits that this brings about in terms of facilitating the access of investors and clients with great security and control, and access to a broader range of products and markets. “The development of the fintech world is going to enable us to modify the way institutions operate, generating stronger links between markets”, she concluded.
Awards for Excellence in Financial Markets 2019.
The winners of the first edition of the MERCA2 Awards were:
Irina Kuznetsova, Risk Forecasting Director at Banco Santander- EAE Award for Financial excellence:
What does it mean to you for an institution like Santander to win the EAE Award for Financial Excellence at the Merca2 Awards? It means the ratification of all the hard work and dedication of every person working in the group to ensure that all the shareholders and stakeholders are well taken care of, protected and satisfied. It also means consolidating the communication between Grupo Santander and EAE Business School, with a commitment to sharing knowledge, experiences and Human Resources. Vertical and horizontal networking is crucial for companies and institutions.
How does Santander operate to set and anticipate trends? At Santander, the capacity for prediction and anticipation is essential, especially in contexts characterized by high uncertainty, sudden changes in consumer habits, social tension and political and economic instability, environment sustainability and strong competition. Santander has the teams and departments equipped to analyse trends, examine scenarios and develop contingency plans to enable the group to react, fast, effectively and efficiently.
Working in the data analysis and stress test sector at Santander, what type of processes are undertaken in your department? We work with lots of different teams to ensure that our mathematical models are sufficiently robust and enable us to meet all the demands of the group, both in terms of business and complying with national and European legislative requirements. We analyse the impacts of new macroeconomic forecasts on the Group’s income statement, thereby enabling us to take pre-emptive measures to prevent potential negative impacts on the business, managing change and modifying the strategies of the Group’s business units if required.
To what extent are Big Data and Artificial Intelligence transforming the finance sector? Thanks to the digitization of many operational and customer service processes, it has been and continues to be possible to generate a huge amount of data, Big Data. Together with Machine Learning and Data Science, Big Data enables us, firstly, to profile customers more quickly and effectively, not only in descriptive but also behavioural terms, such as sentiment analysis, thereby improving segmentation strategies. Secondly, they give is a valuable tool for all decision-making processes.
Is there still a lot of progress to be made in this respect? From the customer’s perspective, the advantage of interacting with companies and institutions that use Big Data is the speed of the delivery of the services, better communication management and, most importantly, effective personalization. In other words, there is a significant enhancement of the customer experience. While, with Big Data, the future is now, in the case of AI, we are still in an embryonic phase. Predictive algorithms that self-learn based on Data Mining and Machine Learning are starting to be used on an increasing scale for historical data analysis, prediction, scenario analysis, customization and customer journey, decision-making and much more.
What level is Spain at compared to other countries? The challenge for Grupo Santander, like any other organization working with data, is ensuring that people’s privacy is respected, in the case of both employees and customers, ensuring an ethically sound use of data and compliance with the various legislation. As far as Spain is concerned, I don’t have any aggregate figures about its positioning in terms of Big Data and AI. One thing I can say though is that the competition between countries is becoming increasingly strong, and constant, large investment is required in such a strategic sector. Alongside the countries we are all familiar with (United States, Russia and Israel), new players are entering this sector, including India and Vietnam. Lagging behind could well mean being left out completely from and economic and social point of view.
What professional profiles are in the highest demand in the banking sector? What skills are required of these profiles? Irina Kuznetsova: As the banking sector is so large, there is a need for all kinds of profiles, from front office right through to corporate. More than a specific profile, I would like to underline the cross-profile competences that every professional ideally needs to have. I am referring to good analytical capacities, emotional intelligence, empathy, creativity, resilience, team management and time management. Modern jobs are no longer just a set of tasks and routines, but rather the management of unpredictable factors in highly undetermined contexts.