FINRA and Georgetown’s Data Analytics Programs Establishing an Experimental Mindset Within Securities Regulation The securities industry is fast-paced and highly complex, with hundreds of billions of market events occurring every day. The industry demands high levels of integrity, credibility, and professional expertise. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) knows this better than most and has partnered with Georgetown McDonough to create a dynamic duo of programs designed to empower its employees to leverage data in support of its critical mission.
About FINRA
“For the [2024] summer session, we had 182 applicants for 60 openings,” Ahrens said.
Working tirelessly since the 1930s as the first line of oversight for the brokerage industry, FINRA is the largest independent regulator for all securities firms doing business in the United States. FINRA’s mission? Protecting investors and safeguarding the integrity of our country’s vibrant capital markets to ensure that everyone can invest with confidence.
The success of the core program then paved the way for an additional offering: the Advanced Analytics for Executives Program—an intensive, three-day session designed to educate senior leaders on the importance of analytics fluency and how to better support managers and their respective teams.
An Overview of The FINRA Analytics Program Advanced analytics skills, like graph analytics and machine learning, were essentially foreign concepts to most FINRA staff members, and the programs were designed to address those needs. “Employees [didn’t] know how it could benefit them in their day-to-day decisionmaking. They wanted to bridge that gap,” Brad Ahrens, Senior Vice President of Advanced Analytics at FINRA, said. Efforts to increase the skill sets of their staff culminated in the creation of the FINRA Analytics Program at Georgetown—a 60seat, eight-week experience combining the educational prowess of Georgetown McDonough’s expert faculty and FINRA’s approach to corporate responsibility.
Program Impact The immediate results of these programs have been felt not only on the application side of the organization but also from an operations perspective. “People now see the art of the impossible,” Ahrens stated. This cultural shift affected everything at FINRA. The organization saw incremental wins from using more data in their work, including better data visualization and ingestion, and diversification in how people approach data problems. In addition to the more immediate results of the programs, FINRA experienced some long-term benefits as well, including an increase in departmental skill sets, enhancements to decision-making processes, and the creation of ongoing advanced analytics courses.
Each program culminates in a capstone project that challenges the cohort to use what they’ve learned to solve issues affecting critical business processes. “People have been able to take capstone projects and put [them] into production. That has been very beneficial,” Ahrens said. One such success story involved an analytics program graduate who led a series of highly collaborative learning sessions on the Python programming language. Ahrens added, “It’s a key part of the program. It gets people going.”
“
[There has been] a culture shift throughout the organization on use of data, sharing of data, and access to data. —Brad Ahrens, SVP of Advanced Analytics, FINRA
FINRA’s commitment to continuing industry education and advocacy, underlined by Georgetown McDonough’s tradition of academic excellence, is proof positive that the most effective solutions to the most challenging issues are best found together.
Let’s Start a Conversation Reach out to chat or set up a consultation.
Contact Us