Junior Professional Associate

The development and implementation of inclusive, accessible, safe, and efficient financial systems is a crucial component of the World Bank Group’s work to reduce poverty and boost prosperity on a livable planet. The global community has also recognized financial inclusion as an enabler for seven of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Against this backdrop, the Financial Inclusion, Infrastructure and Access (EFNFI) group works to improve key enablers in financial systems – ranging from financial inclusion, payment systems (domestic and cross-border), credit infrastructure, to domestic insolvency and creditor/debtor frameworks – to enhance access to and usage of responsible and digital financial services for individuals, MSMEs, and other businesses. This includes prioritizing reaching underserved populations such as women and youth and supporting an inclusive financial system to enable climate adaption and resilience.

Within EFNFI, the Payments and Market Infrastructures (PMI) Team works on safe, reliable and efficient domestic and cross-border payment systems. The work of the PMI team helps expand financial inclusion, foster economic development, enable digital economy and support financial stability. The work of the World Bank on these topics span development of legal/regulatory framework, large value payment systems, securities settlement, foreign exchange settlement, retail payment systems, government payments, cross-border payments, oversight and cooperation, as well as the latest developments in fintech.

Duties and Responsibilities

The PMI team is looking for an analyst to support the team’s activities via data analysis. The core tasks include analysis of quantitative and qualitative data on payments, remittances and financial inclusion, visualization and presentation of the data. Examples of data sources the PSDG uses include (but not limited to) the Global Payment Systems Survey (GPSS), Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) database, Global Financial Inclusion and Consumer Protection (FICP) Survey, Global Findex, WDI, IMF Financial Access Survey (FAS), ID4D database and one-off micro-datasets (household level and/or firm level) on the use of retail payment instruments. 

Specific tasks will involve: 

• Data preparation (understand data structure, convert data in different formats, clean the data, generate new variables, harmonize and merge datasets for cross-country analysis)
• Programming of STATA do files in order to check the data quality of delivered data sets in the most efficient way;
• Design analytical dashboards and reports on Tableau and/or Power BI;
• Use of AI and ML for gathering publicly available data and analysis;
• Assisting in analyzing the data descriptively and by means of more sophisticated statistical methods (e.g. factor analysis, cluster analysis, regression analysis);
• Drafting narratives to document the analysis conducted;
• Provide data-driven insights to enable decision-making;
• Provide support in drafting technical notes, reports and updates based on the data analysis.

Selection Criteria:

• Minimum of bachelor’s degree with background in economics, statistics, econometrics, computer science, finance or business informatics;
• High level of proficiency with programming in Stata, R or similar;
• Strong analytical skills and comfortable working with large data sets
• Experience in using and managing quantitative survey data;
• Experience in survey data collection and cleaning;
• Ability to transform data into actionable insights;
• Deep experience with data visualizations and tools
• Strong knowledge of best practices for dashboards and visualizations is required
• Strong analytical and conceptual skills, ability to interpret and present statistical information;
• Good understanding and familiarity with financial literacy and education, financial inclusion, access to finance, financial consumer protection and/or digital financial services;
• Strong communication skills; ability to effectively communicate in English;
• Demonstrated commitment to teamwork and working with multidisciplinary teams, but also ability to work independently.

Source: https://worldbankgroup.csod.com/ats/careersite/JobDetails.aspx?id=28440&site=1