Dr Yudhvir Seetharam is currently employed as a Head of Analytics, Insights and Research at First National Bank (FNB) Business. His department oversees quantitative and qualitative analytics that spans across research (market analysis, industry analysis and company analysis), analytics and reporting for sales and marketing, acquisitions and collaborations, operations, fraud and transactional optimisation across South Africa. He lead a team of 14 analysts in meeting the demands of our various stakeholders, whilst ensuring that we effectively use "Big Data" in increasing the business unit's profitability. They have recently expanded our function to incorporate the “spectrum” of businesses by expanding into Public Sector Banking, Corporate & Investment Banking; and First National Bank (FNB) international subsidiaries. He has further developed and enhanced the career development stream for Data Scientists across First National Bank (FNB), creating promotion criteria and governance on candidates moving in/out of positions. As of 2021, Dr Seetharam has been appointed to develop Customer Experience metrics for the segment and broader bank, leveraging my background in behavioural finance.
Over a short career in both academia and business, Dr Seetharam has achieved milestones of being a senior leader in the First National Bank (FNB) Business segment, the preferred First National Bank (FNB) spokesperson on analytics; and having received accolades by the public-at-large (namely, the Mail & Guardian 2017 Top 200 Young South Africans list in the Business and Entrepreneurship category; the Top 100 (#59) Most Influential Young South Africans list; and a recipient of the Gauteng Premier’s Youth Service Excellence Award in Economic Development). He is also a part-time senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, lecturing topics in investments and financial risk management, conducting and publishing academic research in the field of behavioural finance in both local and international journals, and supervising postgraduate students (Honours, Masters and Doctoral candidates). He also participate in select incubator programmes for training future data scientists (whether via universities or private organisations).
Dr Seetharam's unique combination of academic and business acumen stand me in good stead to apply learnings that span across both fields to enhance the overall quality of my work. He hold director positions in four non-profit organisations (related to church governance and primary/high school governance) as well as a governor position of the South African Institute of Financial Markets.
