Tom Spencer, director of customer science, chief data office, Aviva

Describe your career to date 

After university, I was lucky enough to join a small (at the time) company called Dunnhumby which was doing exciting things with data, analytics and the fast pace of retail. It was a perfect match, and I was fortunate to be part of their explosive growth for the following 14 years.

My first role was as a customer data analyst (effectively what we’d now call a data scientist), where I cut my teeth on large retail datasets. In 2008, I relocated to Seoul to set-up Dunnhumby Korea as the analytics lead in a two-person team working shoulder-to-shoulder with Tesco. I spent the next nine years in Asia, two years based in China building and leading the region’s analytics teams, and then latterly as country head of the South Korea business.

When I returned to the UK, I joined Aviva to help step-change its customer analytics and data science capability. I lead a brilliant team of analysts, scientists, engineers, and product owners, using data to understand customers and help our business take better actions.

I feel so lucky to have a career in data, where I get to work with smart people and solve problems to make things better for customers. It’s highly rewarding.