Payment Expert’s ID Check: Payments Professionals offers insight from industry leaders and experts on how they got their start in the financial industry, from their early years in education, to how they have been able to climb the corporate ladder.
This week, Lucy Griffin, Director of Analytics at anti-fraud platform Featurespace, reveals how her time rowing at Cambridge built a relentless foundation for resilience, her first foray into the world of payments and why it is vital to understand there are no good solutions to the problems you don’t yet fully understand.

Where did you go to university and what did you study? How did this lead you to a career at Featurespace?
I was fortunate to go to the University of Cambridge, where I studied an undergraduate degree in Natural Science specialising in Chemistry, followed by a PhD at the Department of Chemistry.
During my PhD, I realised that I enjoyed developing models to fit data more than the pouring, mixing, and pipetting in a laboratory! Experimenting with code, models, and data seemed more rewarding and far less error prone than all the minutiae that go into getting excellent experimental results.
From there, a career in Data Science as part of the Featurespace team seemed the perfect move!
Were you part of any sports clubs or societies at university and has this influenced your educational and professional development?
A lot of rowing! I rowed in and captained my college’s first eight and then went on to row for the university, competing in the Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race twice.
Training for and competing in the Boat Race was one of the most gruelling and rewarding experiences that I’ve ever had. Rain or shine – but most often in howling winds – we trained on the Ouse in Ely before lectures and then again in the evening on rowing machines or in the weights gym. Relentlessly and single mindedly chasing a goal helped me to develop resilience that I’ve carried forward into my career.
Having the ability to keep grinding away at a long-lived project, knowing that the results do come, has helped me through many challenging experiences in my career.
What was the first job you had in the industry and what lessons have you taken from it?
Joining Featurespace as a Data Scientist marked both my first job in the industry and my first full-time job after leaving education. At the time, Featurespace was establishing itself as a vendor in the payments industry and there were plentiful opportunities to work very closely with customers to develop machine learning models which offered impactful change to their fraud prevention capabilities.
There is one lesson that I still carry with me today; in business, it is vital to deeply understand what success means to your customers, because there are no good solutions to the problems you don’t yet fully understand.
Who was your biggest role model outside of the payments industry who continues to inspire you in your current career?
Mark Cavendish is a role model and inspiration to me. Not for his long and successful career as a professional cyclist but for his attitude towards success, failure, and achievement.
In success, he is gracious to those who supported and helped him on his journey. In failure, has no harsh words for others, only a stronger desire to do better next time for himself.
I try to take that spirit with me through my career as a way of sharing a workplace, team, or simply common goal with those around me. That’s because the way milestones are achieved in my career is just as important to me as the milestones themselves.
Was there a moment you faced in the industry that really challenged you? How did you overcome this?
Adapting to the ever-changing demands of a scaling business has been the biggest challenge that I have faced in my career so far. What works well for a small, co-located team developing fraud prevention models for a small number of financial institutions must evolve as both those team members and financial institutions spread worldwide and grow in numbers.
It is an enduring challenge, rather than one which has been overcome, but I’ve learned two things along the way.
Firstly, embrace the need to change, not as a criticism of what has gone before, but as an opportunity to adapt for a brighter future. Secondly, be grateful for the challenge. The opportunity to be part of a fast-growing business shouldn’t be taken for granted!
Lastly, what is some advice you would give to an aspiring person looking to get a start in your respective industry?
My advice stands in both the payment industry and elsewhere but is still firmly the best advice that I can give for getting into the payments industry.
To progress quickly in your career, spend time thinking carefully about what unique excellence you can contribute to your customers or your employer. Then, work with relentless focus to execute on that excellence. It will be rewarded!