Junior Professional Associate

Job Description

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? Working at the World Bank Group provides a unique opportunity for you to help our clients solve their greatest development challenges. The World Bank Group is one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries; a unique global partnership of five institutions dedicated to ending extreme poverty, increasing shared prosperity and promoting sustainable development. With 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide, we work with public and private sector partners, investing in groundbreaking projects and using data, research, and technology to develop solutions to the most urgent global challenges.

Junior Professional Associates – Program Description

The Junior Professionals Associate Program (JPA) offers an exceptional opportunity for recent graduates to embark on a professional journey, providing a three-year contract with valuable work experience within a diverse and dynamic environment and the potential of field work experience. The program is an excellent platform to sharpen your existing skills and to develop new ones, all while gaining a profound understanding of the challenges associated with reducing poverty and fostering shared prosperity on a livable planet.

The following are minimum requirements to be eligible for the JPA program:

Be 32 years of age or younger
Hold a bachelor’s degree
Be fluent in English

The JPA program at the World Bank is a highly competitive initiative. Candidates who are being actively considered for positions may be required to present academic transcripts and professional references. The World Bank’s Human Resources team and hiring team will reach out exclusively to individuals selected for assessment and interviews.

Positions may be in any of the World Bank’s offices worldwide.

Specific Unit Description – Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation – Financial Inclusion, Infrastructure and Access – PMI Payments Analyst

The development and implementation of inclusive, accessible, safe, and efficient financial systems is a crucial component of the World Bank Group’s work to reduce poverty and boost prosperity on a livable planet. The global community has also recognized financial inclusion as an enabler for seven of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Against this backdrop, the Financial Inclusion, Infrastructure and Access (EFNFI) group works to improve key enablers in financial systems – ranging from financial inclusion, payment systems (domestic and cross-border), credit infrastructure, to domestic insolvency and creditor/debtor frameworks – to enhance access to and usage of responsible and digital financial services for individuals, MSMEs, and other businesses. This includes prioritizing reaching underserved populations such as women and youth and supporting an inclusive financial system to enable climate adaption and resilience.
Within EFNFI, the Payments and Market Infrastructures (PMI) Team works on safe, reliable and efficient domestic and cross-border payment systems. The work of the PMI team helps expand financial inclusion, foster economic development, enable digital economy and support financial stability. The work of the World Bank on these topics span development of legal/regulatory framework, large value payment systems, securities settlement, foreign exchange settlement, retail payment systems, government payments, cross-border payments, oversight and cooperation, as well as the latest developments in fintech.

Duties and Responsibilities

The PMI team is looking for an analyst to support the team’s activities via data analysis. The core tasks include analysis of quantitative and qualitative data on payments, remittances and financial inclusion, visualization and presentation of the data. Examples of data sources the PSDG uses include (but not limited to) the Global Payment Systems Survey (GPSS), Remittance Prices Worldwide (RPW) database, Global Financial Inclusion and Consumer Protection (FICP) Survey, Global Findex, WDI, IMF Financial Access Survey (FAS), ID4D database and one-off micro-datasets (household level and/or firm level) on the use of retail payment instruments.

Specific tasks will involve:

Data preparation (understand data structure, convert data in different formats, clean the data, generate new variables, harmonize and merge datasets for cross-country analysis)
Programming of STATA do files in order to check the data quality of delivered data sets in the most efficient way;
Design analytical dashboards and reports on Tableau and/or Power BI;
Use of AI and ML for gathering publicly available data and analysis;
Assisting in analyzing the data descriptively and by means of more sophisticated statistical methods (e.g. factor analysis, cluster analysis, regression analysis);
Drafting narratives to document the analysis conducted;
Provide data-driven insights to enable decision-making;
Provide support in drafting technical notes, reports and updates based on the data analysis.

Selection Criteria

Minimum of bachelor’s degree with background in economics, statistics, econometrics, computer science, finance or business informatics;
High level of proficiency with programming in Stata, R or similar;

Strong analytical skills and c
with background in economics, statistics, econometrics, computer science, finance or business informatics;
High level of proficiency with programming in Stata, R or similar;
Strong analytical skills and comfortable working with large data sets
Experience in using and managing quantitative survey data;
Experience in survey data collection and cleaning;
Ability to transform data into actionable insights;
Deep experience with data visualizations and tools
Strong knowledge of best practices for dashboards and visualizations is required
Strong analytical and conceptual skills, ability to interpret and present statistical information;
Good understanding and familiarity with financial literacy and education, financial inclusion, access to finance, financial consumer protection and/or digital financial services;
Strong communication skills; ability to effectively communicate in English;
Demonstrated commitment to teamwork and working with multidisciplinary teams, but also ability to work independently.