Chric Welch - My CV

Carruthers + Jackson - Senior Data Consultant

May 2023 to present

Welch Data Consulting - Data Consultant/Analyst/Scientist

March 2020 to May 2023

Building Something Myself

My preceding role came to an end just as Covid was kicking off so I decided to use my skills with data to help clients through consultancy.

It's a fantastic learning experience to manage projects, learn new skills on tight deadlines and take products from inception through to delivery.

You can find the company website here.

Data Leverage

Using data to solve more problems by adding value

Data Deployment

Through APIs, Mobile Apps, Web Apps and Desktop Apps.

Product Development

Applying product knowledge to applications.

ML, MLOps, ML Engineering

A big part of the work has involved building systems to bring ML projects into the real world.

Helping SMEs with their data

From my time working at Brismo I had often encountered the problem of small companies not having the bandwidth to get their data to the required destination in the right format. I decided to build a small consultancy around this idea.

Has it gone to plan? Yes and no. I've learned a lot about picking projects to work on, the time that you need to spend converting projects aggreements into work that can be billed for and how to overcome roadblocks in the path to getting to clean data.

Recent projects

Below is a list of some of the highlights from this role. I will outline the projects here but there is more detail of how I approached the projects in the skills page.

This was a 6 month project to help an ecommerce analytics company explore the quality of their scraped web data that drives their influential metrics.

I designed a prototype process to ingest and compare daily data against rolling averages and set acceptible boundaries for the quality of the data. These metrics could then be compared against a whole sales platform (Amazon for instance) for a specific retailer.

We worked together to understand the needs of the users, the sales platform maintainers and the data acquisition teams and employ a dashboard to demonstrate actionable insights to users.

I have developed several machine learning models for the same client that have been built around the property lending knowledge I gained at Brismo.

The mainstay of the models has been a metric that I designed to help differentiate loan applications based on key inputs. Implementing this metric has allowed for much easier classification of applications into types.

The models were initially deployed as APIs on a server hosted on a PaaS provider. This allowed for quick testing and rapid changes. We initially used the Azure suite of ML tools to train the models. We have not transitioned to an AWS offering and have re-tooled the models to be served through AWS lambda functions.

This is a project that I've been working on to take a product from idea stage through product launch.

Currently the product is in the minimum viable product stage and is being tested.

More information about the project can be found in the projects page.

This was a fun short project to collect data and create insights from proximity data. One of the issues about proximity data is that items can be close to each other but fall in different counties or be difficult to reach with existing transport links.

In this project I used uber's h3 to plot items across the UK and then used some bespoke algorithms to indicate the relative importance of the concentration of proximal features. I then plotted this using the mapbox tools.

Initially I used the Google reverse geocoding APIs to turn a location search into a lat/long value that could be plotted but then I transitioned this over to use the mapbox APIs to keep the solution code within one App.

Working for a small but influential investment company, I built a bespoke CRM tool that would allow them to capture information from recent meetings conducted. Their requirements meant that an off-the-shelf tool would take longer to implement and would be less efficient than one built specifically for their purposes.

Initially this was built in an excel document to work at the lowest common denominator. It allowed for communicating within their security requirements. I implemented communication with the database backend through VBA code.

This solution was good but the forms were not where they really needed to be, i.e. Outlook. I retooled the product to work as a VBA pluggin for outlook so that the forms were present in their email systems.

I progressed this product to be a fully fledged native desktop application by creating an ElectronJS application. While we didn't get the opportunity to role this out for the team, it was a fantastic opportunity to learn the power of Electron to build tools with a low footprint codebase.

Brismo - Head of Product

May 2017 to March 2020

Peer-to-Peer platform comparison

In the complex world of P2P finance, Brismo provided benchmarking metrics to help platform show performance and customers to find platforms they can trust.

This involved complex algorithms and data handling processes to take in loan book data and transactions data, transform them into a platform index and then load the insights into a Looker based dashboard.

The company was acquired by LoanClear at the start of the pandemic and the UK based team was no longer required.

Data Quality

Without ensuring high data quality, the index metric had now real value.

Client Onboarding

I played a big role in converting sales, building relationships with clients and mapping data for easier ingestion into the process.

Product Development

I developed some new products that helped explain the index values to new clients that improved sales conversion and also reduced onboarding time.

Product Ownership

Bridging gaps between clients, sales, analytics and dev teams to get the job done. Also, ensuring that the product was of high quality.

Transitioning from metals and mining

This was the first role I took after transitioning out of the world of metals and mining finance. It allowed me to round out my more transferable skills, in particular problem solving and excel.

While at Brismo I was able to hone my SQL and python skills. I am particularly proud of a reporting tool that I created that produced bespoke PDF reports using python libraries and SQL to pull data down from the database. This was designed to more specifically meet monthly reporting requirements and was well received by clients.

Pareto - Equities Analyst

December 2013 to May 2016

Equities Analyst - Metals and Mining

My role here was to produce regular reports on mining companies that were under my coverage. This included large multi-nationals such as Boliden and First Quantum as well as smaller firms such as NGEx.

This role required bridging the gap between experts on geology, metallurgy, finance and public relations to promote investment opportunities across the sector.

Our entire research desk was let go in 2016 owing to changes in the underlying metals market. I decided to leave the sector after this to focus on less cyclical industries.

You can find the company website here.

Financial Analysis

Building bottom-up and top-down models to take in market and scientific data and produce financial performance forecasts.

Research

Thorough analysis of technical reports on mining projects and industry reports to provide sector wide analytical reports.

Product Development

Working with the sales teams across the company to help import the impact of the research we produced. This included the development of daily and weekly newsletters.

Presenting Analysis

Presenting research results to sales teams, investors and conference audiences.

In this role I was able to use my commodities analysis experience and my geology background to add value to the research reports that I produced.