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Abstract

This seminar will focus on the application of statistics in the customer finance industry. She will first cover the the general application areas, and the different focus of industry application vs. academic research. She will also discuss, in detail, a couple of use cases, particularly in the Fraud Risk and Marketing Analytic areas, using big data and machine learning.

About Dr. Zhang 

Dr. Ren Zhang is the Vice President of American Express in charge of Risk and Information Management for Enterprise Growth. Currently, Dr. Zhang is in charge of Fraud risk management for Serve and Bluebird at time of customer on-boarding and funds-out including merchant spending and ATM withdrawl. Her responsibilities also include Acquisition Analytics for Serve & Bluebird products, and marketing analytics for Fee-based service: joint venture with Inspirato, Loyalty Edge and Foreign Exchange Services.

Before the current role, Dr. Zhang worked in various departments within American Express. She started her career in AXP as a Manager in credit risk management for OPEN small business. Later, she worked in Loyalty Analytics, Customer Relationship Management Capabilities, Marketing Analytics and Fraud Risk Management.

Ren earned her Ph.D in Statistics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.