Cecilia Miao
Indulging all my fascinations
As a child, Cecilia had two dreams: to become an astronaut and to work in the financial sector. The latter came true, as she joined ING in the IT Class of 2019. She still has some way to go before realising her dream of going into space, although she is training to become a pilot.
Her degrees in Business Administration and Artificial Intelligence gave her the perfect grounding for her current position as a Machine Learning Engineer in Wholesale Banking Lending. Cecilia: “Here, I can indulge my fascinations for trend analysis, statistics, technical tools and the mechanisms of the financial market.”
Well-grounded choices
ING’s IT Class kickstarted Cecilia’s career. “I consciously chose to begin in a trainee position,” she says. “This gave me the chance to receive intensive coaching, to lay the foundations for a strong network and to make well-grounded choices for the future.”
Various challenging assignments
After two rotations in different departments (the first one dedicated to programming an accounting engine and the second to visualising a dashboard for price changes), Cecilia moved into her first permanament role in the Wholesale Banking Lending tribe. Once again, various assignments came her way. “I started with a project in which we used NLP technology to classify text paragraphs in legal documents, and I’m now involved in a project called Fair Value which entails building predictive models for loan and bond markets. Our clients are the Heads of Lending and Finance and their teams in Wholesale Banking. We’re working for Western and Eastern Europe, the US, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, among other regions.”
‘I like the complexity of our work and I especially love the pure modelling part’
“In my role, I touch on nearly every step of our modelling process. I get input from the quantitative and market analysts to incorporate into my model, I explore market data, develop software, test it and put it into production. Then I monitor the performance of the model and validate its output. I am both challenged and energised by the complexity of our work, the number of stakeholders we deal with and all their different requests and needs. But I especially love the pure modelling part, the chance to work with the most innovative technologies and the fact that I’m increasingly learning to comprehend how the financial market functions.”
Dreams
So what about her dream to become an astronaut? “I won’t achieve that, but I haven’t given up on my wish to take to the air. That’s why I’ve started training for my private pilot licence, which is absolutely fantastic!”
Cecilia:
- Has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
- Graduated in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam
- Joined ING in 2019
- Is busy studying for her Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) level 3
- Participates in the ‘succession pipeline’ management training programme for young professionals
- Likes swimming and kickboxing
- Has been a pianist since the age of six. Her favourite composers are Chopin and Debussy.