With the VivaTechnology trade show taking place this week in Paris, discover our Data & Tech professions. A parallel world where Python is spoken without whistling, where ‘lakes’ are made of data, and where ‘pipelines’ don't transport oil but streams of information. Here's a quick tutorial put together by our innovators and Data & Tech experts. The good news is that you don't need to have started coding at the age of 8 on Windows 2000 to understand everything.
Sales Engineer, the C-3PO of connectivity
Remember the droid from Star Wars who could communicate in millions of different ways? Sales Engineers are just like that: they translate complex user needs into developer language to help our customers integrate our connectivity solutions.
Hybrid experts with a mix of technical and commercial engineering skills, our Sales Engineers are ambassadors for our Plug & Play services, such as the automated digital assistant Alyx and our catalogue of APIs for our various activities (credit insurance, information services, debt collection and for our various audiences (customers, brokers, developers. They help our stakeholders easily integrate our commercial risk management expertise and services directly into their IT ecosystem. As soon as a customer wants to set up an automated data flow, a Coface Sales Engineer supports them from the formulation of the need to the technical implementation of the solution.
Today, CFOs and credit managers prioritise productivity, automation, operational risk reduction and solution ergonomics.
Benoît Henriet, Sales Engineer for Coface API solutions.
Data Manager, guardian of the Data galaxy
The new black gold of businesses, data is like a precious stone: before it can be used, it must be extracted, cleaned, structured and polished. This is one of the routines of our Data Managers, who work at the heart of Coface's reactor, with a direct impact on data production. The pipelines they build, such as Coface's Virtual Lake and Internal DataMarketplace, provide our business teams, IT teams, economists and even our customers and partners with clean, usable data sets.
Within the Data Office, they orchestrate the collection, analysis, governance, accessibility, storage and use of data from our various sources around the world.
Their ‘small’ daily victory? Delivering and enabling users to access the right data, in the right place, at any time and in complete autonomy.
‘It's like tidying your room: every toy has its place; everyone knows where to find it and nothing gets lost. If you lend a toy, you know who it belongs to and when it should be returned. Data governance is the same: organizing data so that everyone can find and use it securely.
Samia Boujatioui, Data Management Manager at Coface's Data Office.
Data Analyst, the data storyteller
The Data Analyst is a storyteller of numbers: when you see a boring Excel spreadsheet with 500 rows and 300 columns, they see a story (that makes sense) and business opportunities. They interpret what the data means and, above all, what can be done with it. They analyse it to identify trends (payment behaviour, credit history) or anomalies (weak signals of default risk) and generate insights. They are experts in Power BI and make sense of data by creating intelligent dashboards, visualisations and reports based on advanced analytics.
At Coface, data is not intangible assets stored in a cloud, it is the raw material of our risk management model, which is used in all our activities: credit insurance, information services and debt collection.
Nesrin Gonin, Director of Information Services for Western Europe and Africa.
Data&Tech ep3 - Nesrin Gonin
IT developer, the Gandalf of our era
Front-end, back-end, full-stack... Whatever their clan, developers write the code that brings Coface's apps, websites, software and other portals to life and keeps them running. These 21st-century Gandalfs speak a language that few understand (JavaScript, Angular or Python), but which everyone benefits from. Whether designing a decision-making tool, a new feature or a service platform, they work with the same winning trio: the UX/UI designer (for the interface and user experience), the Product Manager (to know what to build) and the Data Scientist (to integrate AI models). The goal is to deliver a value-added solution to our customers and offer an enriched and personalised user experience.
Our role is to simplify the use of our services for our customers and partners, and enable them to interact easily with Coface.
Emmanuel Delagneau, Development & Solutions Architecture Manager.
At Coface, we develop solutions for our direct users (customers and partners) as well as for other internal stakeholders in order to personalise and better adapt our services to their IT environment.
UX/UI Designer, the Steve Jobs of user experience
They are often mistaken for stylists, but digital design is not just about aesthetics. In the world of UX/UI design, we don't draw clothes, we make screens scroll with style. Disciples of Steve Jobs, UX/UI designers guide the design of a website, software or app to transform a digital maze into a walk in the park using user-centred design methods:
- UX (user experience): the journey, priority searches, accessibility
- UI (user interface): ergonomics, windows, buttons, links, and all other textual or graphical elements with which our user will interact.
Their role is to create interfaces that anticipate user needs while offering a personalised and distinctive experience. Every pixel has a purpose, every interaction must be intuitive, and every click must be obvious. To achieve this, they analyse how our users interact with our products or services, design prototypes to test concepts and constantly monitor new technological trends. Their main daily challenge? Convincing their fellow developers that a button that is 2 pixels bigger will revolutionise the user experience of the app.
Software Architect, the Grand Master of NextGen Tetris
Yes, they also use rules and draw plans. But software architects use them more like Christopher Nolan uses code. Like the director of Inception, they design complex, multi-level structures that fit together perfectly. For every piece of software developed by Coface, the architect builds the invisible but essential IT infrastructure: they connect databases, automate information flows, and ensure that everything arrives at its destination without bugs or bottlenecks. In short, they assemble the building blocks (software layers) like a Tetris NextGen pro!
Overall, it's about ensuring the security and scalability of our information system, software and data in line with our business and our customers' needs. For example, as an API architect, my role is to ensure that pieces of software can easily exchange data with each other through standardised gateways called APIs
Yvan Bissombolo, API architect in Coface's Business Technology department.
Business Analyst, the decoder
This is the person who transforms your ‘I'd like a simple module’ into 50 pages of functional and technical specifications. In short, the Business Analyst is the essential piece of the puzzle between the generic needs of our customers or business teams and the development of concrete technological solutions by our IT teams.
With the wisdom of Professor Xavier guiding his X-Men, the Business Analyst plays a key role in all our digital transformation projects: they guide developers, testers and IT project managers to evolve and simplify our products, operations and models by leveraging cutting-edge technologies.
Product Owner (PO), the conductor of the Tech symphony
Somewhere between a creative and a geek, the Product Owner is the conductor of a start-up version of a philharmonic orchestra. They lead the product team using an agile method (Scrum in particular) to improve and generate value for the product site they are responsible for. The PO does not necessarily code, but they understand everything. They juggle strategic vision and operational execution, and liaise between the tech teams (developers, designers, software architects), business experts (business analysts), sales teams (business development, marketing) and customers. With the aim of developing new features, they manage priorities and deadlines (‘urgent’, ‘very urgent’ or ‘extremely urgent’) to set the project roadmap, while simplifying processes in order to develop new features.
Cybersecurity engineer, the cyber ninja in the shadows
While everyone else is busy handling data flows, the cybersecurity engineer keeps an eye on things. In the dark alleys of the web, they track cyberattacks and hackers like Batman watches over Gotham. Always armed with a firewall or XDR (cyber defence mechanisms), they protect Coface's data, systems and reputation against cyber threats.
The daily life of a cybersecurity engineer is a bit like playing Assassin's Creed on repeat: an invisible cyber ninja defending Coface's digital assets. Every day, they face increasingly creative hackers who use AI to perfect their attacks. And in our ultra-connected era, where cyber risk is one of the most critical risks for businesses, cybersecurity experts must fight against an entire army of enemies and increasingly sophisticated threats.
The challenge is to detect real attacks among hundreds of alerts per day and millions of weak signals. Threats evolve very quickly, linked to new technologies. Just look at the scourge of ransomware. Many companies (even in the tech sector!) have been victims of cyberattacks. In addition to the financial damage, this often results in data theft or even the loss of technological solutions for companies.
Yoann Mourin, IT security engineer in the Business Technology department at Coface.
Machine Learning Engineer, the algorithm trainer
For him (and him alone, let's not get carried away), Black Mirror is far from being the future: at best, it's a reality TV show, or even a retro documentary at worst. Machine learning engineers train data scientist models (much like we used to train our Pokémon) to invent innovative practical tools or predictive solutions. His goal? To make AI smarter (and more autonomous!) than our Tamagotchis after 10 years of training and feeding it data.
Like Dr. Strange, he manipulates invisible dimensions (vectors, matrices, probabilities), invokes complex patterns and predicts the future with well-trained algorithms. In the credit insurance sector, he's the one who says: ‘According to my algorithm, this customer has an 87% chance of not paying within 90 days.’ And he's (almost) always right!
At Coface, Machine Learning engineers are involved in everything from setting up predictive scoring models to anticipate the risk of non-payment and default to integrating OCR (optical character recognition) technology to automate the analysis of the 70,000 collection files we manage each year.
Data scientist – The modern-day druid
Voted the sexiest job of the 21st century by the Harvard Business Review, the data scientist is halfway between Panoramix and Alan Turing. They read the future through lines of code, juggling advanced analytics, predictive scores and deep learning to transform raw materials (the famous Big Data) into cutting-edge technological solutions. Fully bilingual in Python or any other programming language, they analyse and interpret data by combining algorithms, statistics, modelling and machine learning.
At Coface, our Data Scientists use our enriched data to design predictive solutions to aid decision-making and personalise the customer experience based on changes in their behaviour and needs:
We don't innovate for the sake of innovation. We develop solutions tailored to our customers, making the most of our data. What's more, we have a very solid IT architecture that allows us to deploy solutions very quickly!
Martin Cepeda, Data Scientist & Machine Learning Engineer at Coface Data Lab.
How can you recognise a Data Scientist? By their ability to clearly explain why ‘correlation does not imply causation’ or to convince (for the 47th time) their colleague on the other floor that their predictive model is super-intelligent even if it can't guess the lottery results!
BONUS - Generative AI, the newcomer who is (really) too talkative
It's the new star of the business world, the newcomer who can do everything and has an answer for everything (sometimes even too much!): writing, coding, creating images... and so many other things that are part of our ‘simple’ everyday lives as humans. A brilliant, fast, super-powerful colleague, but one who needs to be prompted before being allowed to act independently. If only to avoid offering a poem in alexandrine verse to a customer waiting for a quote!
It sounds like fiction, but it could become your reality!
Check out our opportunities around the world and join our teams.
