Building Analytics Capabilities in Financial Services

Case Study

Mango was tasked with building unified analytics capabilities across the 2,500-strong financial crime unit of a multinational Financial Services Company in order to help the institution tackle fundamental challenges such as money laundering.


Financial crime is a fast-growing concern for major financial institutions. Aware of the growing importance of regulation in the finance sector, the company was eager to implement processes that could help it deal with regulation and reduce potential risks from crime, knowing it could help tackle some of these key concerns by ensuring it had a unified data skills capability around the globe to tackle these challenges.

The company needed to support the data analytics skills development of its fast-growing financial crime unit which had expanded to include individuals in various roles and departments around the world. These individuals held a range of capabilities, from the investigation and identification of potential crimes, through to high-level data science capabilities.

The financial services company wanted to create a framework to provide a common set of analytical skills for each job function in the financial crime unit. This framework would ensure consistency and standardisation across all levels of financial crime analysis around the globe and whilst providing support to individuals who were looking to develop their careers.


Mango had already worked with the client on an earlier worldwide project to help them boost its analytical capability. The success of this earlier project meant the client’s executive team knew it could trust Mango to develop a high-quality, bespoke training programme for its financial crime unit. They also knew that it was crucial to create a common language around analytics, to enable workers to communicate effectively and improve their capabilities.

A six-month project was established in an attempt to upskill the analytics talent by building analytics capabilities across the Financial Crime Unit unit. Mango started by building and delivering an “Art of the Possible” webinar to build awareness and enthusiasm around the benefits of data particularly in the area of Financial Crime. Mango also developed a “Common Lexicon” initiative. This project created common definitions for data terms such as “optimise” and “model”. It ensured technical and non-technical people could communicate, collaborate and make valuable contributions.

Mango then used its Data Science Radar to assess the capability of the workforce. This tool used an online questionnaire to analyse the analytical abilities of employees. Mango used this information to build a skills matrix, which measured and mapped out the analytical skills of the organisation from basic “level one” to advanced “level four”.

With a strong awareness of analytical capability within the Unit, it was then possible to start focusing on how individuals could improve their skills. Mango created learning pathways which explained the skills an employee would need to progress to the next level and then created a portfolio of training courses that were delivered as webinars.


Mango’s bespoke training programme boosted data analytics capability by firstly helping them to understand the benefits of improved analytical capability. It created a common language and standardised definitions of roles with the financial crime unit globally which meant that every person in the unit knew the skills they possessed and the capabilities they would need to hone in order to move up to the next level as part of a career development pathway.