Monday morning we kick off with a team stand up which is a good chance to catch up with everyone after the weekend to find out Alex has run a casual 100km and also to check in with everyone on their work stack for the week. The rest of the morning I tend to spend catching up on Slack messages, monitoring trends in risk metrics for our top merchants, having a 1-2-1 with my manager and planning ahead for the week.
The joy, I find, of working in a start-up like Hokodo is that you get the chance to work on such a diverse range of projects with teams across the business and with external stakeholders also. Each week is a mix between our BAU work, project work and then some reactive work if there’s a negative trend in one of our risk metrics, for example. Our team’s bread and butter is to monitor a suite of key performance metrics across our portfolio of merchants and make recommendations to optimise the commercial-risk trade-offs of our various partnerships. In short, we help them grow sustainably! On top of this, as we grow as a business, we are never short of a project to improve our risk strategy or the way we measure risk.
"The joy, I find, of working in a start-up like Hokodo is that you get the chance to work on such a diverse range of projects with teams across the business and with external stakeholders also."
All of this means each day is quite different. I love the slightly chaotic energy of working on a pricing strategy to support the sales team; switching to producing slides on credit data insights for one of our merchants; then catching up with Conor, our Fraud Analyst, who has the patience of a saint when I ask the same question for a third time; and, finally, trying to write this blog post!
Lunch time starts off with a light debate over where to go and then inevitably ending up at the food market where the debate will turn to which falafel place is best. It’s a ritual at this stage for whoever is in the office and then it’s back to eat with everyone. Something quite unique about Hokodo is how non-hierarchical it is, both in work terms and socialising. We regularly have lunch alongside Richard, the CEO, people on the Sales team, the Operations teams etc., which is great for building strong working relationships and also just for enjoying coming to work!
What’s great about working at Hokodo is that you can get involved in any project you are interested in. It’s never ‘not my job’. If you can help out and add value you’re encouraged to do so. Some of the projects I’ve recently worked on have included debt facility reporting with the finance team; delivering a set of credit limit pilots for one of our top merchants with the product and customer success teams; and working on a business case for an external data provider. The variety of the work and the people I get to work beside give me energy each week!
Want to join Niamh in Hokodo's Data Science and Fraud department? Check out our current roles today.