Senior Vice President, Head of Enterprise Data Science
When Chun Schiros moved to the U.S. from China after graduating from college, it was in hopes of becoming a facial-recognition engineer and working under the Tennessee professor who had written the textbook she'd studied in Beijing. But that professor had retired from teaching, so she instead headed to Alabama, where she completed master's and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering and statistics at Auburn University. Then she began work as a medical researcher, a career step that made sense for someone interested in how to use data in new ways.
"I'm continuously drawn to numbers, patterns, and the stories data can tell," she said.
The surprising part, to Schiros, was her move into banking. But working on a cardiology project helping to make treatment more personalized for heart patients opened her eyes to "how much data could be leveraged beyond medical research," she said.
In 2014, after six years at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, she joined the data science group at Regions Bank. (The $155 billion-asset bank is headquartered in Birmingham, but Schiros is based in Huntsville, where she lives with her husband, a fellow engineer she met in graduate school, their three school-aged children and a poodle named Charlie.)
Schiros' first role at the bank was in risk management, where she spent five years making sure the models the bank was using in units like credit and treasury were working properly. Then she moved over to be a data science manager for the corporate bank and wealth management arm.
One AI project she worked on, a "next best solution" engine, pulls together data from eight separate systems the bank uses to store customer-behavior data. The software allows bankers to see what the customer might want from a single viewpoint, she said.
During the pandemic, Schiros worked on a retention project to detect which business customers were likely to run out of money, allowing bankers to approach clients with targeted help before they ran into trouble. The software, which Regions programmers launched in four weeks, helped "bankers see where the liquidity constraint is for customers, so they can make calls far ahead of time," Sciros said.
A similar project for the wealth management arm alerted financial advisors when a client was about to abandon the bank. "Our financial advisors would love to have earlier insights and understanding if a customer is in the process of thinking about reducing services or engagement," Schiros said, allowing the advisor to call the client proactively.
"Her insights — in areas such as the ethical use of data, managing model drift, and the importance of employing open, transparent methodologies in using data — have shaped both the industry and the success of Regions," said Schiros' manager, Manav Misra, head of data and Analytics. "Chun Schiros is absolutely one of the best, most talented data science leaders in our industry, and Regions is fortunate to have her on our team."
