Cátia Baptista is a Human Resources Business Partner at Feedzai, the first CMU Portugal start-up and the market leader in fighting financial crime with AI. The Portuguese tech company is coding the future of commerce with today’s most advanced risk management platform powered by big data and machine learning. Founded and developed by data scientists and aerospace engineers, Feedzai has one mission: to make banking and commerce safe. With more than 500 employees and 60% year-on-year growth, Feedzai is considered to be the best in class by Aite and one of the most successful AI companies by Forbes. The world’s largest banks, processors, and retailers use Feedzai’s fraud prevention and anti-money laundering products to safeguard trillions of dollars and manage risk, while improving customer experience.
Feedzai was founded in 2008 by Paulo Marques and Pedro Bizarro, two faculty members of the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC), and Nuno Sebastião, product manager at the European Space Agency (ESA). This innovative startup focused in processing large volumes of data with low-latency, producing actionable information in real-time.
In Portugal, there’s an estimated lack of 15K to 25K engineers and most ICT companies have a difficult time recruiting. As Feedzai Head of HR, what is your view on this situation?
As a global company we see this challenge not being exclusive to our country, rather a tendency of the industry itself. When we take a closer look to Portugal we can see the IT market started to grow fast in the past few years, with new start-ups emerging and other big corporations choosing to open their innovation centers here as part of their strategy, so the hiring demand of this type of talent got even higher which amplified the challenge. Despite of that, Portugal is still in a good place when it comes to the pool of talent it has, namely due to its great higher education system, including in the ICT area.
In your opinion what could be done to change this scenario?
Due to its complexity, you would need to approach the scenario from multiple perspectives, ensuring we have more talent prepared in the market with the right competencies for this area. For that to happen, companies and academia should work together and align current and future needs of the industry. While we don’t have enough engineers locally, having more programs/initiatives (like the “Tech Visa”, launched by IAPMEI) that can help streamline the process of hiring highly qualified talent from other countries, would be greatly appreciated.
Feedzai is, since 2018, a CMU Portugal Industry Affiliated partner. Do you consider that establishing partnerships with the academia is one possible way to achieve the change?
As mentioned before, academia and industry should definitely work hand in hand. At Feedzai we work to have different initiatives that can bridge both worlds and strengthen this relationship (and it could not be different when we have two of our co-founders as former University Professors). This relationship is even more important when Feedzai brings added value due to the fact that it is leading one of the most recent areas that emerged in Portugal in recent years: Data Science. A few examples are: having students doing internships with our teams (summer and curricular), having some of our engineers give technical workshops in different Universities, University partnerships that sometimes lead to have our engineers lecturing some of their classes. With this both sides can complement themselves based on their different needs – the industry contributing to promote the development of the competencies that they need; the academia with indicators of market trends and ideas of new potential domains to explore.
Can you share with us Feedzai’s recruitment strategy for ICT professionals?
As the company is experiencing an exponential growth, our strategy is making sure we can attract talent from different sources locally and abroad. Brand awareness is an essential part of the job and for that we have a schedule of the most important events and partnerships to do throughout the year. That includes: attending top University Job Fairs, attending and hosting Tech MeetUps, partner with top Universities and Institutions within our domain. During such events we don’t only look to talk about what we do, but also how we do it, meaning our culture and principles, as those take also an important role in our recruiting process as well – we want people that like what we do, but that are also aligned with how we do it – Grit, Raise the Bar, Ownership, Think Globally. Looking back, we know that this was one of the key elements that made Feedzai grow the way it has in the past years.
After hiring and since it is a really competitive sector, it’s crucial to keep employees. What is Feedzai strategy to make its employees feel “happy”?
One of the most important things on this matter is to make sure you hear the organization and know that you are tackling the right things in the right moment. That’s why we spend time in hearing what our people have to say about the things we excel as a team and others where improvement needs to happen. We do this through engagement surveys, local (office based) all hands meetings, HR open hours, ask me anything moments with our CEO. All these data points serve as a guideline to define our people’s strategy resting assured that it will have a positive impact in the company and in our people.
The CMU Portugal Program is planning to launch Executive programs in ICT-related areas. Do you think that this could be a way to train and also recruit more people into ICT job positions?
In a time where all the companies are becoming more “tech” (e.g., banks, retail), this is a great initiative to develop managers and above positions on how to lead, manage, support this new pool of talent. Programs like this can help grow and develop important skills and competencies that technical individual contributors are not exposed to on a daily basis due to the technical nature of their work and by doing so it will also have an important impact on their retention.