Banks discreetly seek personnel to mine alt data riches

Citi, Credit Suisse, HSBC and Morgan Stanley are hiring data scientists for a plethora of new initiatives

The world’s largest banks are hiring data scientists to harvest information that can be sold to clients, or used in improving their own operations.

A job post on Citi’s website seeks data scientists to join a newly minted consulting team that will work directly with clients on bespoke data requests. The projects will involve what the bank calls “non-markets” data – foot traffic, cellphone signals, satellite images, credit card and point-of-sale transactions data, geospatial datasets and