Mortgage clients of Truist (formerly SunTrust) can view their performance on a dashboard containing tables and charts. Mia Dantas, an alumna of Robinson’s M.S. in Data Science & Analytics program, is part of the team behind it. Dantas works as a vice president and mortgage analytics innovation lead at the bank, and currently is incorporating a predictive analytics component into its Tableau dashboard.
“If a business partner wants to change one of the parameters on the dashboard, it can automatically adjust,” Dantas said. “A data scientist won’t be needed to revamp the model.”
While still enrolled in the master’s program, Dantas secured a full-time position at SunTrust. It all started with a semester-long collaboration between the company and Dantas’ class. Dantas and her peers analyzed text data, specifically conversations with wholesale customers, to predict client attrition over six months’ time. SunTrust brought Dantas on as a data analytics intern the following summer, then elevated her to senior data scientist during her final semester in school. Since graduating in 2016, Dantas has been promoted an additional two times.
Dantas has accomplished a lot at Truist but cites a report to the Fed as her biggest achievement. As a main developer on the project, Dantas used SAS to query every single line of business data throughout the bank’s systems to make sure all loans and deposits were recorded.
“We successfully delivered the report to the Fed on the first day with no errors,” Dantas said.
Next on the horizon for Dantas: speech analytics. By examining the sentiment and tone in exchanges between Truist reps and clients, Dantas will measure customer satisfaction.
“We can share the same text mining algorithm across the bank,” Dantas said. “Coming from a computer science background, that’s very exciting for me. I love reusing things.”