Acxiom is seeking a Data Scientist to help support reconciliation, settlement, and transaction analysis for a strategic client account across multiple products and vendor partners. This onsite role in Conway, AR blends advanced analytics, statistical techniques, and reporting to surface discrepancies, trace root causes, and identify practical process improvements that reduce operational risk and financial loss.
What you’ll do
- Analyze transaction, settlement, and reconciliation datasets to identify discrepancies, trends, anomalies, and operational risks.
- Partner with clients, vendors, and internal stakeholders to align on business objectives, operational challenges, and reporting needs.
- Conduct root cause analysis to determine drivers of financial discrepancies, processing issues, and settlement variances.
- Build and maintain dashboards, reports, scorecards, and visualizations to communicate financial and operational performance.
- Apply statistical analysis and data-driven methodologies to support operational decision-making.
- Evaluate transaction and settlement data to uncover process inefficiencies, risk indicators, and improvement opportunities.
- Investigate exception trends and recommend actions to reduce customer friction and financial loss.
- Support monthly, quarterly, and ad hoc business reviews through analytical reporting and insight generation.
- Translate complex findings into actionable recommendations for business and technical stakeholders.
- Prepare, cleanse, validate, and transform data from multiple internal and external sources.
- Use SQL and Excel to retrieve and analyze large datasets.
- Work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Accounting, and Operations to support issue resolution and process improvements.
- Lead discussions with vendor partners on reconciliation findings, settlement issues, enhancement opportunities, and corrective action plans.
- Present trends, financial impacts, and recommendations to clients, vendors, and leadership teams.
- Identify opportunities for automation of reconciliation, reporting, and research activities.
- Monitor key operational metrics and provide proactive recommendations based on observed trends.
- Identify potential fraud indicators, recurring exceptions, problematic transaction patterns, and emerging operational risks.
- Maintain documentation of analytical methodologies, findings, assumptions, and business recommendations.
- Produce monthly reconciliation summaries, variance reporting, operational scorecards, and executive-level insights.
- Support testing, implementation, and operational readiness activities for new products, vendor integrations, and system enhancements.
- Drive continuous improvement through analytics, automation, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies where appropriate.
What you bring
- Bachelor’s degree in Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Finance, Accounting, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent experience.
- Not eligible for any sort of sponsorship.
- Experience analyzing large transactional, financial, operational, or reconciliation datasets.
- Strong analytical, critical-thinking, and problem-solving skills.
- Experience applying statistical methods and data-driven analysis to business problems.
- Advanced Microsoft Excel skills, including PivotTables, XLOOKUP/VLOOKUP, formulas, and data analysis techniques.
- Strong SQL skills to retrieve, join, validate, and analyze data from multiple data sources.
- Experience developing dashboards, visualizations, and business intelligence reporting.
- Ability to identify trends, anomalies, patterns, and root causes within complex datasets.
- Experience preparing, cleansing, validating, and transforming data for analysis and reporting.
- Ability to leverage critical data-driven thinking and translate data into actionable insights and recommendations.
- Experience evaluating financial impacts, operational risks, and performance metrics.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills for presenting to business and technical audiences.
- Experience working directly with clients, vendors, and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Strong stakeholder management and relationship-building skills.
- Experience facilitating discussions, driving issue resolution, and influencing decisions across organizations.
- Root cause analysis and investigative research expertise.
- Knowledge of reconciliation, settlement operations, financial transactions, payments, or related business processes.
- Experience with process improvement, operational analytics, and performance measurement.
- Ability to balance analytical rigor with practical business needs and operational realities.
- Attention to detail and time management skills to deliver high-quality work across multiple priorities and deadlines.
- Experience documenting analytical findings, methodologies, processes, and business recommendations.
- Familiarity with Power BI, Tableau, Python, R, or similar analytical tools preferred.
- Interest in leveraging artificial intelligence and automation technologies to improve operational processes and decision-making.
Technologies
- SQL
- Excel (Microsoft Excel, PivotTables, XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP)
- Power BI
- Tableau
- Python
- R
Location: Conway, Arkansas (onsite)
Remote consideration: This position is not located in the listed states/regions (CO, CA, CT, MA, MD, NV, NJ, NYC, OH, RI, VIR), but applications for remote work may be considered. For information about this role under state or local equal pay or pay transparency laws, please contact compensation@acxiom.com.
California applicants: Please see the CCPA/CPRA Privacy Act notice here.
