Principal Business Analyst - AI & Innovation in London

About Schroders

We’re a global investment manager. We help institutions, intermediaries and individuals around the world invest money to meet their goals, fulfil their ambitions, and prepare for the future. We have around 5,000 people on six continents. And we’ve been around for over 200 years, but keep adapting as society and technology changes. What doesn’t change is our commitment to helping our clients, and society, prosper.

Technology at Schroders

There's a huge amount of change going on at Schroders. Technology is shaping our business more and more, so there are many opportunities waiting to be grabbed. And because we're a big financial player, we can put hefty backing behind good ideas. We're a serious business – we have enormous responsibilities to our clients and shareholders. But just because we're suited and booted, that doesn't make us stuffy; our tech teams are friendlier and more informal than you might expect.

The Team

The AI & Innovation team delivers central AI services and enables high impact use cases, making AI available across Schroders to deliver value to the company and our clients. Our flagship product, ‘Genie’, is a successful internal AI assistant used by over 3000 colleagues each week. Building on this success, we are now extending our central AI capabilities to accelerate AI adoption across the Schroders Group while ensuring consistency. We collaborate with a number of AI teams across the firm, to oversee and support AI use cases utilizing our technology products, while also ensuring robust Responsible AI governance and promoting education and adoption. This is a high priority, high visibility area using cutting edge technology and we are moving at pace while managing competing priorities. You'll work with a team of enthusiastic individuals who are passionate about software in a financial context and bringing AI services into Schroders. They're also keen on driving positive technology change at Schroders, ensuring that we always stay ahead of the curve.

What you’ll do

• In this role, you will be at the heart of defining and delivering technology solutions across the portfolio of the AI team.
• You will foster and facilitate team processes that keep the team focussed, well organised and motivated to continuously improve.
• In addition, you will apply critical thinking to the problems faced by the business and form the bridge between business stakeholders and our delivery team, translating business requirements into technical artifacts.

Key Responsibilities

• Keep the team focussed on the right priorities and ensure they are in a position to work efficiently in the face of uncertainty.
• Facilitate ceremonies and ensure the team are following Agile ways of working and best practice.
• Monitor the team against commitments and nurture a continuous improvement mindset.
• Ensure the technology team’s backlog is well maintained, appropriately detailed and clearly articulates business value.
• Assist in tracking and reporting the progress of the team’s delivery.
• Advance the use of metrics and other objective measures across the team’s activities.
• Apply a wide variety of business analysis techniques to capture business needs, discover requirements and generate solutions.
• Own the discovery phase of new initiatives that crosscut the needs of multiple teams.
• Create alignment and ownership between multiple stakeholder groups.
• Ensure scope is well managed and considers value, feasibility, and implementation constraints.
• Demonstrate expertise in the latest advancements in Generative AI technologies and provide relevant insights or recommendations for their use in addressing business challenges.
• Solve problems by working independently and in a team environment.

What you’ll be like

• An excellent communicator and problem solver with an aptitude for critical thinking.
• A capable servant-leader, comfortable directing and supporting high performing technical teams.
• Solid understanding and practical experience with Agile principles and practices.
• Resourceful with a skill for removing impediments and navigating problems faced by the wider team.
• Proactive and dependency aware.
• Someone who acts to break down information and knowledge silos.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into understandable terms for non-technical stakeholders.
• Adaptable and flexible. You will consider the right tool for the situation at hand instead of relying on the same ‘go-to’ tools / approaches.
• Ability to swiftly acquire and assimilate new business domain expertise.
• Previous experience of specifying and successfully delivering AI and/or Data Science initiatives is highly desirable.
• Skilled in utilising data and evidence to create data insights dashboards with tools such as PowerBI.

We recognise potential, whoever you are. Our purpose is to provide excellent investment performance to clients through active management. Diversity of thought facilitated by an inclusive culture will allow us to make better decisions and better achieve our purpose. This is why inclusion and diversity are a strategic priority for us and why we are an equal opportunities employer: you are welcome here regardless of your age, disability, gender identity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, socio-economic background or any other protected characteristics.