I’m Phil Simpson, a history enthusiast with a keen interest in finance and the stories that can be told with it.
I have a Master’s Degree in Medieval History from King’s College London, and a Bachelor’s Degree in History from the University of Southampton.
Follow me on Twitter: @The_Money_Trail
My Academic Experience
Master’s Degree – Medieval History
I started my Master’s Degree in Medieval History in 2016 at King’s College London and I was immediately hooked. Previously, I had been relying on other academic translations of primary sources, but for the first time I was being trained to read them directly myself. Through a combination of studying Latin and palaeography (the study of writing) I got myself to the point where I could look at a manuscript and know within 50 years when and where it was written. It’s a skill that doesn’t translate particularly well to the professional world, but it’s one that I absolutely loved to study.
For my electives I studied numismatics (the study of money), the Byzantine Empire before the First Crusade, the feudal revolution in England, and finally my dissertation on changing recruitment strategies between the first and second crusades.
Bachelor’s Degree – History
When one thinks of the Crusades they imagine the pop cultural icons; the blood red crosses of the Templar Knights, religious pilgrims wandering the desert and the apparently sanctified violence of a series of military campaigns. I took an elective specifically on the primary sources from that period and was struck with the knowledge that the Northern Italian City States were building up trade networks and began a campaign of slowly building an economic empire that connected Western Europe and the Levant. This almost hidden secondary narrative of the crusades convinced me that there was influence behind the scenes in every decision made by the collective that forms any power structure. At the time, people thought along the lines of affiliation rather than citizenship to a nation, but they still had the same goals; to accumulate, grow, and expand to be better than what they were before.
The universality to the human experience drove me to study further into the development of what is commonly referred to as the medieval period into the early modern. I was fascinated by the story of how idealised versions of humanity in the form of chivalric knights embodying the spirit of King Arthur transitioned into the titans of capitalism that dominate the modern political landscape.
I took a number of electives during my Bachelor’s Degree, including the formation of the American Citizenship in the early days of the Republic, Economics and Experiments, social hierarchies in medieval England, and finally the Wars of the Roses. I elected to do my dissertation on the public perception of mass violence during the Wars of the Roses.
My Professional Experience
Data Manager
(February 2021 – Present)
Managing the bank’s Insurance and Wealth Metadata using the Collibra web tools in order to comply with and support the bank’s regulatory reporting and progress towards higher DCAM scores. I also develop and support data quality tools to inform business decisions based on the objective and subjective quality of their data.
Data Governance Analyst
(July 2018 – February 2021)
Kubrick Group – Data Governance Analyst (July 2018 to February 2021 )
- 4 months of internal training on Data Governance principles, technical skills including SQL, tableau, VBA, Collibra, and Python.
Placement at Lloyd’s Banking Group (November 2018 – February 2021)
- BCBS239 Regulatory Project (November 2018 – July 2020) – Tailored solutions to issues raised by the stakeholders in a managed release process and engaging with business stakeholders to establish requirements for logical Data Quality rules:
- Building physical rules from the logical rules in the Ataccama IDE
- Performing Quality assurance testing on those rules within a test environment
- Passing stakeholder data through the rules and pushing the results to a tableau dashboard
- Maintaining the current solution for continual BAU throughout the bank for other business areas to use
- Using VBA to automate certain tasks within the release process to reduce risk of human error and improve efficiency
- Data Discovery Project (July 2020 – Present) – Building automated tools for business users to apply to legacy Database Applications in order to identify potentially classified data stored within them and produce tailored dashboards for stakeholders
- Used my knowledge of GitHub and managed releases from the previous project to step into the role of Git and Testing Manager for the Project Team
- Built tools in VBA and Ataccama IDE for automating the classification and publishing of stakeholder data
- Built additional tools to have all of the legacy data automatically uploaded to Collibra
Executive Remuneration Research Analyst
(January 2018 – June 2018)
Research and analysis of Executive remuneration packages in order to produce client reports in a standardized industry format to meet client requirements.
Primarily focused on publicly listed companies in the European Union but have also diversified into other regions, including but not limited to: Hong Kong, the USA, the UK and Canada.
The Money Trail 