The Business Analyst at Finalyse is involved in the high level feasibility study of the project. He organizes workshops and interviews at the client premises to get a better understanding of the end-user requirements. He points out inconsistencies regarding the current development and makes suggestions for business process improvements. He identifies and suggests ways to address even better the business issues and risks. Shortly, he is responsible for defining the business requirements as mentioned by the end-users in the largest possible sense.
Further in the project life cycle, the business analyst performs a high level data analysis and validates the prototype design in the light of the business requirements. He (re)defines the scope of the project if necessary and he assists the project manager as business ambassador through all the stages of the project.

At Finalyse the business analyst can also take up two additional roles, namely as being a business expert or a (business) process analyst. The business expert is the person with in-depth knowledge of particular business items, business processes or specific software applications. The (business) process analyst his role is to analyse, map out and design business process. This includes researching and analyzing data in support of business functions and system requirements.

The business analyst is typically an economist, commercial engineer or equivalent through experience with in-depth business knowledge in one of our business area’s (financial markets, credit and operational risk, ALM, enterprise wide risk and performances).

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Working as a Functional Analyst at Finalyse means capturing, consolidating and communicating the information from the business analyst to the rest of the project team. The functional analyst is the facilitator in the project team and creates the link between the business analyst, providing the business requirements, and the rest of the team trying to construct the solution.

He transforms the input from the business analyst into functional specifications that the technical team can understand. He identifies, investigates and escalates conflicting requirements. Finally, he describes and analyses all the processes and data flows.

The functional analyst can be an economist, commercial engineer or civil engineer with an import combination of two skills: fair business knowledge to fully understand the business requirements and an IT knowledge to translate the business requirements for the technical team.

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The Quantitative Analyst at Finalyse develops mathematical methods applicable to problems in Finance. It is his role to identify the right model for a particular problem. Afterwards the QA should describe further in detail how the model should be calibrated and used (what sort of data it requires and how the outputs should be interpreted).

The QA must have well-developed communication skills in order to explain models to non-mathematicians and must, moreover, have a very good sense of the pragmatic since it is the practical application and not the theoretical beauty of the models that the client is interested in.

The QA is typically a mathematician, statistician, actuary, engineer or scientist by training with strong mathematical skills and a thorough knowledge in Finance in areas such as derivative pricing, risk analysis, and econometrics.

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The technical team at Finalyse consists out of a technical analyst and a developer. The Technical Analyst primarily covers the following responsibilities: the translation of functional specifications into technical specifications together with the writing of the use case specifications. In addition the technical analyst brings best practices to the project team regarding using new tools and applying the most appropriate architecture principles.

The Developer from his side participates in the design, creation, and testing of the software application components. He writes the software program code and develops the related unit tests to verify the quality and the performance of the code. He is an expert in the latest software development technologies.

In addition, the technical analyst and the developer both act as a tester on the project. The tester identifies the most appropriate implementation approach for a given test. He plans, designs, executes and evaluates the tests (from Unit Tests, System Tests, Users Acceptance Tests to Production Acceptance Tests).

The technical analyst and the developer have both an IT background. They should be innovative in order to find creative solutions for existing problems.

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Finally, we would like to elaborate further on the project manager role at Finalyse. The project manager's prime responsibility is to ensure that the project produces the required outputs respecting the required standards of quality and given the specified constraints of time and cost.

This includes a wide range of tasks such as: controlling the overall progress of the project, looking at the use of resources and initiating corrective action where necessary, directing and motivating the project team, liaising with programme/cluster management if the project is part of a programme/cluster. On top of this, the project manager ensures that key stakeholders are adequately involved in the project and he acts as the single point of contact for their project issues and problems.

Typically, the project manager was priory involved in different phases of the project life cycle. Given his seniority, he is able to manage the project based on his experience and business knowledge.

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