Jaqui Tuthill

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I am working as a Business Process Specialist for CUNA Mutual Group, an insurance company based in Madison, WI. We provide insurance and other financial services for credit unions and their members. I work in the Finance department leading the Account Performance team. We aggregate the data for all product lines for each credit union. This allows the product teams and the sales team to consider the entire account rather than a siloed view, one product at a time. My primary responsibilities include verifying data accuracy and responding to data requests from the different product areas. I also started an R&D working group whose purpose is to find more uses for the data. A lot of time has been invested into compiling and verifying the data and it can be very powerful in driving business decisions so I assembled a group of analysts from across the company to see how their departments can utilize the data. So far the project is one month in and we are already seeing interesting projects and a high level of interaction from the participants.

My Saint Michael’s mathematics education helped prepare me for this position because at St. Mike’s I learned not to have tunnel vision when solving a problem. There are typically many ways to find the solution and being able to wrap your mind around many different starting points at once is important. When I’m working with the data there are many different starting points and I have to decide pretty quickly which point is actually the best place to start. Similarly, if there are problems with the accuracy of the data I have to quickly determine the best course of action to remedy the issue. I am also doing some statistical regression, potentially moving towards inference, and learning about that at SMC has been invaluable.