Yasaman Hadjibashi

Yasaman (Yassi) Hadjibashi is a business, data and technology executive. She is currently the Chief Data Officer for Barclays Africa Group, leading the big data transformation across the African continent. She joined Barclays in 2010 and has worked in senior management positions in product innovation and execution across digital and mobile, as well as client/customer experience and design. She has been fundamental in establishing big data capabilities as a group-wide function across Barclays, whilst defining the bank’s next generation Data strategy and driving the execution of a number of key big data initiatives.

Early life and education

Born on September 16, 1982, in Tehran, Iran, Yasaman Hadjibashi is one of two siblings. She grew up in Iran, throughout the 8 year Iran-Iraq war, with her school being shut down in first grade after series of bomb explosions in Tehran, after which her family moved to Germany in 1990 for stability where she completed her secondary education.

She completed her Secondary education at The Helene-Lange-Gymnasium, a bilingual secondary school in Hamburg. She moved to Pleasant Hill California where she obtained a Bachelor of Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Whilst studying at University of California, Berkley, she worked at Wells Fargo sparking her interest in financial services. After graduating she worked for PwC Assurance and Business Advisory in San Francisco and then Deutsche Bank Global Markets in New York. She then went on to complete her MBA at Harvard Business School in 2010.

Career

Yasaman is the first Chief Data Officer at Barclays Africa. Her appointment came at the bank’s realization on the need to engage more meaningfully with its customers in real-time and create intelligent experiences for customers. Yassi specializes in incorporating big data into the bank's customer-centric approach through agile leadership.

Joining Barclays at London headquarters in 2010, Yasaman started in senior management positions in product innovation and execution, across digital and mobile, as well as client/customer experience and design. After working closely with world prominent technology leaders such as Dr. Shaygan Kheradpir and Dr. Usama Fayyad, in February 2015, she was appointed Chief Data Officer of Barclays Africa Group at the age of 32 making her one of the youngest female C-level leaders in a big legacy institution such as Barclays in the new field of Big data, Artificial Intelligence, and Product Innovation.

Since just over year in the newly created role as Group Chief Data Officer for Barclays Africa, and as the first female CDO in South Africa, and one of four in South Africa, and a handful across the African continent, she been leading the Africa Data Transformation with her global team, Data Products & Platforms, creating a new generation of award-winning consumer-centric data products and experiences leveraging latest in the field of open-source big data technologies, artificial intelligence, and deep learning with a strict focus on bringing back the lost intimacy with customers through personalized, intelligent engagement in financial services. She has led the team to win two Global Data Creativity Awards, at the international annual I-COM Summit this year. As well as this she has launched on one of the most exciting new efforts for ABSA launching the bank’s and Africa's first banking chatbot in FB messenger driven by artificial intelligence in June 2016.

As well as delivering on her strong innovation vision for Barclays Africa, Yassi has always had a keen macro-societal lens. Most recently she has launched Africa Success (http://www.africasuccess.org) an initiative which aims to engineer financial success in African youth in underpriviledged communities (https://vimeo.com/177539310). By combining big data and artificial intelligence, she aims to embed certain identified behaviours within youth, common to financially successful people whom they have surveyed