Karolina Kierzkowski

Tell us about your educational and professional background and how you came to D&B?

I graduated from NJIT in Applied Statistics and worked in mathematical and data science roles at other major data companies before starting at D&B. I’ve been at D&B for 15 years, but there have been four major stages to my career here. In my initial role, I supported US businesses on the finance and risk side, then I moved into global marketing and risk. Next, I moved into the data science applications framework where under my guidance we developed a new platform within D&B that serves both internal and external clients — Analytics Studio. For the last four years I've been leading our international analytics team in finance and risk analytics as well as TPRC. I have ownership of over 30 markets and manage both local and global solutions for our clients.

You’ve been listed on several patent applications, including one covering the Viability Rating¹ product and another covering Global Business Ranking.² Tell us how you participated in developing those and what the experience was like pursuing these patents.

Absolutely. Viability Rating was the first one I worked on. It’s a new capability to determine the probability of a business going out of business. I was one of the data scientists developing that capability, exploring a lot of new data assets, and identifying signals that we could leverage to understand business activity. Our clients can leverage this score for expanded use cases beyond credit risk assessment.

In Global Business Ranking, I was the manager, and I lead my team of data scientists to develop this global capability. What we have been able to incorporate there is the strength of our global data to create a score that's consistent across the globe. And that's really a challenge for many clients to manage risk when they have portfolios allocated in multiple markets. So we looked at complex methodologies as well as the insights from the data we could leverage to capture these global business activities as well as use prior learnings across our standard scores and the depth of data we have across our markets.

Do you have any projects you're working on now that are particularly novel and unique?

We are adapting to GenAI, what it means for D&B, and how we can strengthen analytics with it. So my team is supporting five new capabilities — ideas that will provide us efficiencies, productivity, as well as new revenue opportunities for our standard scores. I'm hopeful that out of that we will strengthen the value of the analytics that we impart into our scores.