Transforming a pension fund: A consultant's secondment experience

Przemek Lenkiewicz joined the Innovation Lab of PGGM pension fund as a data scientist, to participate in efforts to improve their operations with AI and cloud-based workflows.

Task

Pension funds, with their strong focus on financial management and compliance, have long relied on traditional workflows and manual operations. Themission of Innovation Lab is to infuse these processes with modern data science techniques and as a result to streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance decision-making.

Projects

Przemek joined the group of PGGM Innovation Lab, which deals with predictive analytics and process automatization. The first projects, in which he was involved, included predicting likelihood of relevant business events. Based on historical data, describing past occurrences of certain events, it is possible to predict how likely it is for these events to happen again. Such predictions require machine learning models, which are carefully created together with the owners of data and domainexperts. Validation needs to be performed, to make sure the predictions are trustworthy. In the end, the solution needs to be deployed in the cloud environment and automatically executed in the right period and deliver the result to the right users.

Another initiative was to automate and optimize the distribution of tasks in several PGGM teams. Instead of manual assignment of tasks to team members, smart optimization methods can be used to make sure each team member receives the right amount of work for a given period. Furthermore,it is possible to include additional conditions and checks, for example that necessary quotas of tasks and checks are maintained, which can be very hard to control manually.

Developing such tools require close collaboration with the end-users, good definition of the requirements and multiple iterations of testing and improvements. It is a challenging task, but with the potential to highly improve the efficiency of working processes within the organization.

The Team

The assignment of Przemek is full-time and requires focus and integration with the organization. The PGGM Innovation Lab team is a very dynamic group, with many interesting ideas, always open for collaborating on topics that can lead to improvement of efficiency and competitive value of PGGM. They welcome new colleagues and their ideas, offering a collaborative environment and great opportunities for impactful contributions.

Conclusion

This secondment highlighted the transformative power of data science and cloud technology in a pension fund setting. By working on optimized workflows, not only the operational efficiency can be improved, but also a step towards a more agile and forward-thinking organization is taken. As industries continue to embrace innovation, the role of data science consultants will be crucial in driving sustainable growth and success.

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