Index Analyst (Hybrid)

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets.

Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 600 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, India, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Finland and beyond. 

The Role

Fastmarkets Data team is a new and dynamic function supporting the business in developing and delivering our data strategy through data, insights, and business intelligence. Highly valued by the business, we are working hard to transform the data function and ways of working.

Reporting directly into the Advance Analytics Lead and Index Manager, we are looking for the right candidate to play a key role as part of our Insights and Analytics workstream. In your role, you will be responsible for maintaining and developing Fastmarkets index pricing data models, optimizing efficiency, and ensuring precision in normalizing a wide array of market data to a single reference price. You will also be crucial in creating and delivering valuable insights that improve decision-making and participating in an array of projects to refine and improve key performance indicators (KPIs) across the business, along with the support of the rest of the data team.

Principal Accountabilities

• Periodically update normalization models based on fresh data sets on tight schedules to maintain pricing precision.
• Optimize normalization models to increase model accuracy, identify patterns and variables that may be currently unaccounted for.
• Understand how the commodity markets and the pricing of those work from an economic and technical perspectives and to be able to explain these concepts internally and externally.
• Contribute to a design and implementation of data analytics processes and tools to improve on analytical output.
• Analyse various large and complex data sets to uncover hidden insights and provide recommendations to support business decisions and strategies.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify and prioritize business problems and develop data-driven solutions.
• Present/communicate data-driven actionable insights and recommendations to key stakeholders, including SLT.

KEY INTERFACES

• Head of Data
• Insights & Analytics Manager
• Advance Analytics Lead and Index Manager
• BI Manager
• Tech and Information Department
• Product Department
• Editorial Department

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully.

If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on...

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and have a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly.

• Expertise in using R, Python, SQL and Excel and work with large data sets.
• Familiarity with building data pipelines and combining data from multiple sources. Experience with PowerBI tool.
• Familiarity with applying regression analysis.
• Understanding of statistics, forecasting and research tools.
• Strong communication skills, including the demonstrated ability to find actionable items in data and to present complex data-driven insights to non-technical stakeholders.
• Independent curiosity and critical thinking; a history of taking initiative and questioning assumptions.
• Ability to listen and understand commercial needs to craft a shared vision for a solution.
• Experience working with CRM systems, such as Salesforce; marketing software, such as Marketo and/or event management software, such as Cvent are beneficial.
• Understanding of Economic principles and commodity markets.

If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or qualifications don't perfectly align, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values.

Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance
   
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done
   
• GROWTH MINDSET. This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency
   
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
   
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do
   
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you!

If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day.

It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.