Alison Choy

Category: Technology Professionals (IT Specialists, Developers, Engineers)

My career began with a PhD in cheminformatics, where I learnt programming by teaching myself how to code through watching YouTube videos. This led to me creating an application based on the scientific methodologies that I developed for my PhD.

Programming turned out to be what I enjoyed the most, and it was always clear to me that I wanted to pursue a career in software engineering. I worked as a software engineer for Alfa, a financial technology company operating in the asset finance market. I was instrumental in transforming Alfa's culture from that of a management consultancy to that of a tech company by organising their first two company hackathons. This set-in motion a chain of innovation projects that have been sustained even after I left the company.

I moved to Starling Bank in 2018, where I became responsible for gathering and fulfilling the organisation’s data requirements from compliance and regulatory reports to financial reconciliations and investor documents. Now as Starling’s head of machine learning, I am working to improve upon the organisation’s data foundation, to accelerate data driven decisions and work towards using AI to improve our customer’s experience and their financial lives.