Edward Jones, a Fortune 500 firm, provides financial services in the U.S. and through its affiliate in Canada. The firm’s nearly 19,000 financial advisors serve more than 8 million clients with a total of $1.7 trillion in client assets under care. Edward Jones’ purpose is to partner for positive impact to improve the lives of its clients and colleagues, and together, better our communities and society.

Through the dedication of the firm’s 50,000 associates and our branch presence in 68 percent of U.S. counties, the firm is committed to helping more people achieve financially what is most important to them.

The Data Analyst Lead is responsible for proactively identifying impactful opportunities where analytics can inform the business and provide actionable insights to support business decisions and long-term strategy development.

Essential Functions:

• Proactively identify opportunities with medium to broad impact where analytics can inform the business. Provide actionable insights to support business decisions and long-term strategy development, primarily by performing root cause, exploratory, sensitivity and scenario analysis, hypothesis testing, economic modeling, regression, and data visualization to identify patterns/trends/insights etc. on ambiguous business problems
• Consult with business owners to understand the business problem. Able to independently identify the appropriate analytic approach to solve the problem. Lead others through analytic approach and leverage systems thinking to connect work to other strategic initiatives.
• Merge, cleanse and transform complex data from multiple sources as needed for analysis. Develop advanced logic to structure datasets for analysis.
• Understand and apply intermediate to advanced statistical concepts.
• Apply critical thinking to pressure test and validate logic and outputs against known sources and understanding of business. Proactively identify data quality issues and collaborate with other subject matter experts to identify solutions.
• Lead team to generate and incorporate insights into a cohesive story that clearly addresses business questions and influences decision making. Effectively lead the creation and communication of tailored messages to influence senior leaders regarding analytic ideas, approach, key takeaways and actionable insights.
• Serve as a technical and functional data subject matter expert across a wide range of areas and have a solid knowledge on data relationship and flows including product, client, marketing, compliance, branch, etc. Lead collaboration with IDM for data improvements and proactively identify data enhancements in conjunction with division data stewards.
• Educate senior and executive leaders across the firm on analytical concepts and best practices.
• Consult on data and analytic requirements for database development and system changes.
• Actively participate in industry and trade data and analytic communities in order to bring fresh ideas to the organization

Business Expertise:

• Influences internal/ external business and/or regulatory issues that have an impact on the business

Leadership:

• Leads projects/programs with notable risk and complexity; develops the strategy for project/program execution; Serves as the thought leader, shaping the framework and/or methodology for a process
• Participate in and frequently lead cross functional teams responsible for implementing projects in support of divisional or firm-wide business objectives
• Demonstrates ability to provide strategic direction and technical leadership to align objectives to overall firm strategy
• Takes constructive action with little to no direction from others.
• Provides guidance to contract resources assisting with data analytics.
• Ability to prioritize and execute on multiple tasks/projects and adjust to changing priorities.
• Independently organize, plan & prioritize individual and team effort needed to ensure overall success of cross-functional projects
• Participate in and frequently lead cross-functional teams responsible for implementing projects in support of divisional or firm-wide business objectives.

Problem Solving:

• Solves unique problems with broad impact on the business; requires conceptual and innovative thinking to develop solutions
• Issues typically arise daily with varying degrees of complexity. The Lead Analyst must have ability to identify the question(s), what data is needed, and then analyze and interpret the results to recommend solutions to senior & executive Firm leaders for a broad spectrum of business improvement opportunities in a clear and concise manner. The Lead Analyst must have the ability to execute on projects of a moderate to high complexity which involve cross-functional teams, and therefore must be able to collaborate well with associates and leadership throughout the firm, including external vendors.
• The Lead Analyst should be able to lead teams thru identification of optimal solutions and strategy to execute on those solutions.

Impact:

• Impacts the achievement of customer, operational, project or service objectives; work is guided by functional policies; Mitigates high risk situations and ensures processes, products or services do not lead to risk to the firm
• The Analyst develops and performs high complexity analysis typically with high business impact.
• The Analyst works with leaders up to executive management, providing analytical guidance to directly influence strategic business decisions. While there are no direct supervisory responsibilities, mentoring and training other associates on the team as well as associates on project teams from other divisions is expected.
• This role requires the ability to influence team leaders, project leaders, and associates throughout the organization, so this position requires a deep understanding of how departments/divisions interact with one another and impact firm operations and initiatives.

Interpersonal Skills:

• Communicates complex ideas, anticipates potential objections, and persuades or influences others, often at senior/General Partner levels, to adopt a different point of view

Skills-Requirements

Experience Required:

• 7-10 years' experience in relevant field
• 7+ years
• Previous analytical related experience is preferred. Financial Services industry experience is a plus.

Education Required:

• Bachelor's Degree required with an emphasis in finance, business, economics, data science, math or analytics preferred. Relevant work experience will be considered.

Functional Knowledge:

• Regarded as the technical expert in their job discipline within the organization; Requires in-depth and/or breadth of expertise in own job discipline and broad knowledge of other job disciplines within the organization function Advanced experience interacting with various database and file storage systems (DB2, IDMS, Oracle, Hadoop, NoSQL)
• Advanced experience with data manipulation languages such as SQL, Impala, PL/SQL, Hive, Pig, XML required. Advanced knowledge of statistical concepts and analytic techniques, including descriptive statistics, forecasting, economic modeling, various regression techniques, matching learning techniques, exploratory analysis, and variance analysis required.
• Experience with statistical tools such as SAS, SPSS, R, or Python preferred.
• Experience using Microsoft Excel, including use of pivot tables, formulas, macros, vba, charts/graphs.
• Proficient with visualization tools such as Tableau, PowerBi, or MicroStrategy.
• Strong analytical, critical and systems thinking required.
• Ability to research industry best practices and apply to work. Actively identify need for, participate in, and/or take leadership role in communities of practice or user groups