Financial services
Adam was brought into global hedge fund Point72 to build the industry’s preeminent data acquisition team. Both personally and through the team he assembled, Adam negotiated multi-year deals for a wide range of data types, from commercially available to alternative data to truly proprietary new sources. He served all sectors of the fundamental long/short business: consumer, tech, telecom, industrial, energy, health care, and financial services, as well as macro teams. He drove data strategy for the global firm, including expansion into Europe and Asia, collaborations with Point72 Ventures, and complex multi-team data source assessments.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with data on its 60 million customers sitting in business unit silos, JPMorgan Chase hired Adam to solve how to collect data from across all Chase consumer businesses to facilitate better marketing, risk, anti-fraud, customer experience, and operations decisions using big-data tools and approaches.
To run this program, the Customer Data Initiative, Adam inherited a team of six analysts, and ultimately grew it to 48 analysts, statisticians, project managers, and data architects while overseeing 50 IT support staff implementing company projects. This team created and implemented data sets driving impact of more than $150 million/year in recurring pre-tax income, as well as improved customer satisfaction, stronger compliance, better strategic decisions, and greater analytic efficiency:
- $80 million from credit risk actions, making better underwriting, line sizing, and collections decisions, such as through the use of new algorithms tied to Chase’s exclusive access to checking account data
- $40 million in improved marketing, targeting, and customization, such as through the creation of more accurate income and asset estimation models that enabled the efficient reallocation of bankers’ time
- $25 million in fraud-fighting initiatives, including the inaugural private-sector use of Palantir’s Gotham platform in combination with data sets curated and assembled by Adam’s team
- $15 million in operational cost reduction, including a database and algorithm to optimize predictions of which contact information to use when contacting customers for critical mortgage-related issues.
While at JPMorgan Chase, Adam served as a member of the company’s global Senior Leader Group; co-led the pilot of what ultimately became JPM Intelligent Solutions; and launched and ran the Consumer Analytics Leadership Council, convening ten executives in charge of all analytics teams across Chase consumer businesses, representing another 300+ analysts.
Other impact
- For a pioneering fintech company, Adam led a team that created the prototype database and algorithm to determine true customer lifetime value; used this platform to identify more than $40 million in run-rate profit opportunities across marketing, operations, product development, and risk management; and successfully transitioned the data models and algorithms to the client for implementation and scaling up
- For multiple players in financial services and telecom, Adam identified “breakpoints” for overinvestment in the customer service workforce, enabling savings of 3-5% of customer service costs with no adverse impact on customer satisfaction
- Adam led strategy work to assist a financial services player in developing innovative ways to leverage its industry-leading analytical capabilities and data for entry into adjacent fast-growing sectors, and then collaborated on the detailed design of the highest-potential products.