PNC Bank Mission, Purpose & Impact

Our work has a real impact. Applications are used by our customers every day and it is a critical tool in their financial life. It’s much more than testing. It allows us to have design discussions, risk decisions, and our work is both challenging and rewarding.

What’s been exciting is often we work with these stakeholders that don’t have a data science group. They come to you and say, ‘Something is going on, and we want to improve our process.’ You do really get to play around and do exploratory data analysis. There’s a big discovery phase where you try out and decide upon models you want to build to answer those questions. I love the process of taking a business problem and distilling it into a deployed model or lessons learned from a study for our internal clients. Data science requires strong technology skills but also strong interpersonal communication skills, and PNC is a great place to hone both.

Fraud is so varied, and fraudsters are so creative, so you are always developing something new. It can be fun and exciting. And PNC enables you to work with big data tools, so there’s just a ton of creativity involved in the job.

This effort was all about collaborating — not just across the organization, but working with our telecommunications partners to help disrupt these criminal tactics. Now that we have created a model, our team is out in the industry, evangelizing the solution to other banks. The most important thing to us at PNC is making it safer for all to bank.