Aalia Kara
Head: Advanced Analytics
- Barclays Africa Group Limited
Professional Information
Aalia
Kara
Head: Advanced Analytics
Barclays Africa Group Limited
Financial Services
Education, Honors & Awards
University of Johannesburg
Masters Degree in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Johannesburg (2014)
(2014)
Mathematical Statistics Award; Economically Modeling Award; Operational Research Award ; Bio Statistic Award; Portfolio Theory Award
Personal Information
Johannesberg
Member of the Golden Key; Volunteer Work: Children in Orphanage & Elderly
Music; Dancing
6-10 Years
Aalia Kara has been in her industry for about 10 years, living and working in South Africa. As Head of Advanced Analytics with Barclays Africa Group Limited, her role is to service retail banks and investment banking, and includes migration, corporate models, and relationship banking. Aalia works to identify big data platform, working with the entire Africa group, and doing business on an international level. Prior experience she has includes an early promotion during her graduate program, when she was poached by Investec to start their Quantitative Modeling Capability. Once the team was started up, she took on a role at HSBC, looking after Africa Strategy. She then headed up Advanced Analytics for Standard Bank South Africa, covering the Personal and Inclusive Markets portfolio. Standard Bank put me Aalia on a 2 year career fast track program based on top performance. Accenture poached her from Standard Bank as they were consulting on a project with her team. She had two promotions in one year at Accenture and was ranked 3rd globally for performance. Aalia was consulting to ABSA for Accenture and ABSA poached her as the youngest Vice President to start-up their centralized analytics capability covering Retail Banking, Business Banking, Corporate Banking, Investment Banking and Wealth, Investment Management and Insurance for ABSA and the rest of Barclays Africa. In 4 months, she had a full operating model and functional capability and had recruited and trained a team. Aalia does extensive amounts of public speaking mostly conferences, and partakes in university level lectures for young adults, teaching them algebra. At this stage in her career, Aalia is seeking to network with like like-minded professionals globally and share her experiences. Aalia credits her success to her passion for what she does and within the next 5 years, she aspires to seek a similar role, in technology, possibly web-based.
Reatil Banks; Corporate Banks; Investment Banking Innovation; Creativity; Mathematics Modeling; Certification SAS Base Programming