How do you hire a data analyst in financial services?

In short

Hire a data analyst who can turn business, financial and market data into reports that executives act on, and who keeps the dashboards behind those reports correct. Business Intelligence Analysts, the closest O*NET occupation, puts generating standard or custom reports for executives and stakeholders first among its core tasks, followed by maintaining the tools, databases and dashboards that produce them.

Last updated

What does a data analyst do day to day in financial services?

A data analyst in financial services produces the reports and dashboards that business, finance and leadership teams read. O*NET has no data analyst occupation, so the closest O*NET occupation is Business Intelligence Analysts (O*NET 15-2051.01), and its core tasks include:

  • Generate standard or custom reports summarizing business, financial, or economic data for review by executives, managers, clients, and other stakeholders.
  • Maintain or update business intelligence tools, databases, dashboards, systems, or methods.
  • Manage timely flow of business intelligence information to users.
  • Identify and analyze industry or geographic trends with business strategy implications.
  • Document specifications for business intelligence or information technology reports, dashboards, or other outputs.
  • Conduct or coordinate tests to ensure that intelligence is consistent with defined needs.

Which skills should a data analyst job description ask for?

A data analyst job description in financial services should ask for reports that people relied on, not a list of tools. The core tasks put report building, dashboard upkeep and testing that the numbers meet the users' need ahead of any single product.

O*NET's technology list for Business Intelligence Analysts includes Alteryx software, Amazon Redshift, Apache Hadoop and Apache Hive. Name the warehouse and reporting tools your team runs, and test querying and data checking on the kind of data the analyst will see.

  • Built a recurring report that executives or managers used to decide something
  • Maintained a dashboard and traced a wrong number back to its source
  • Documented the specification for a report before building it
  • Checked that a report answered the question the user actually asked

Which titles do data analyst candidates use in financial services?

Data analyst candidates in financial services apply under several titles. The titles O*NET reports for Business Intelligence Analysts include:

  • Business Analyst
  • Business Intelligence Analyst (BI Analyst)
  • Business Intelligence Specialist (BI Specialist)
  • Market Intelligence Analyst
  • Competitive Intelligence Analyst
  • Intelligence Analyst

How much of a data analyst's work do people bring to AI tools?

0.52% of sampled Claude.ai conversations in May 2026 were about the tasks of Business Intelligence Analysts, the closest O*NET occupation, according to the Anthropic Economic Index. In those conversations, 66.14% asked Claude to complete the task directly (automation) and 33.86% worked with it iteratively (augmentation).

Business Intelligence Analysts is one of the occupations where automation outweighed augmentation in that sample. For hiring, ask the candidate how they check a query or a summary an assistant wrote before it reaches a report. The figures describe how people used Claude, not how many analyst jobs exist.

Common questions

Is a data analyst the same as a data scientist?
A data analyst mainly queries data and reports on patterns and trends, while a data scientist builds and validates predictive models. O*NET files the closest occupations separately, as Business Intelligence Analysts and Data Scientists.
Which job title should a financial services data analyst post use?
Use the title your candidates search for and name the work in the first line. Data analysts also apply as Business Analyst or Business Intelligence Analyst, both reported titles for the closest O*NET occupation.

Where this data comes from

  • O*NET 31.0 DatabaseThis page includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. EmployLabs has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.
  • Anthropic Economic Index, release_2026_06_26 (claude_ai, global, soc_occupation, May 2026)Anthropic Economic Index (Anthropic), data released under CC BY. Usage share is the share of sampled Claude.ai conversations classified to this occupation; the automation/augmentation split describes how those conversations used Claude. Neither measures the labour market.

Related