Business Analyst (Hybrid)

Fastmarkets is an independent commodity pricing and information organisation with over 600 staff. We are fuelled by values that bring us all together and are united by a collective passion to make a difference. We are supported by a working model that is based on a hybrid approach that allows each of us to balance home and office working while encouraging effective collaboration and accountability.

Fastmarkets is the most trusted Price Reporting Agency (PRA) in the metals, mining, agriculture, forest products, and energy transition markets. Our price data, forecasts, and market analyses give our customers strategic advantage in complex, volatile, often opaque markets. Our events provide forums for market participants to come together, trade, and talk through the critical issues of our times.

We are making a difference. Fastmarkets works to create transparent commodity markets through our reliable and trusted price data and market intelligence. The markets we serve are central to how economies work and are essential for our lives. By doing this, Fastmarkets helps our customers build a more sustainable world. We are built on a 130-year foundation while bringing a digital platform to market, combining the currency of trust with the power of digital.

Most importantly, we are fuelled by our teams that, across the globe, make the amazing possible. With a deep sense of purpose and belonging, we are building an extraordinary future – together. If you would like to help build the future, we hope you will join us on our journey.

Fastmarkets is owned by global private equity firm Astorg, a specialist investor in healthcare, software, technology, business services and technology-based industrial companies.

Job Description

The Role

The Business Analyst will work closely with the product, business and technology teams to identify and resolve gaps in requirements to address business problems and customer needs. 

The ideal candidate will have experience working with complex and highly technical systems such as pricing and data systems. They should be as comfortable working with drawing process maps, writing user stories and acceptance criteria, all at the same time as maintaining good relationships with developers, testers, product owners and business stakeholders. 

Principal Accountabilities

• Write effective user stories, acceptance criteria and scenarios
• Clarify requirements with the Product Owner when necessary
• Liaise with the development team to understand technical constraints 
• Work closely with UX designers as appropriate to make sure that the user stories and the UX specs are consistent
• Follow up with other development teams to understand the status of dependencies 
• Understand priorities from the Product Owner and ensure that the backlog represents these priorities 
• Ensure that the backlog contains sufficient buffer in terms of stories which are ready to play 
• Drive the backlog grooming, take responsibility for preparing stories at a high degree of completeness 
• Actively participate in various Agile ceremonies such as sprint planning, retrospective and daily stand-ups

Perform user acceptance testing  

• Update the Product Owner and other stakeholders about the status of various items in the sprint, highlight risks as they become evident 
• Take full responsibility for UAT testing, highlight issues and follow up on their resolution 

Qualifications

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully.

If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on...

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We are looking for an individual who is highly motivated, driven, and have a passion to be part of a fast-paced, successful team. Being a strong team player is also important as well as someone who is happy to work flexibly.

• Excellent spoken and written English is required 
• Writing user stories, acceptance criteria, scenarios and documenting them in Jira, Confluence 
• Performing specific mid-level analysis tasks to support the development of requirements either as relates to feature or data set development 
• Working closely with Product owners and the Agile development team 
• Presenting stories to the development team in Backlog refinement sessions, having the ability to take on several rounds of feedback and iterate stories until they are 100% ready for sprint
• Participating in various Agile ceremonies such as sprint planning, retrospective and daily stand-ups when necessary. 
• Performing User Acceptance Testing

EXPERIENCE  

• 2+ years experience as a business analysis, junior product owner preferably in an information services business 
• Working with a complex and highly technical systems such as pricing and data systems 
• Nice to have: financial experience 

If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or

qualifications

Additional Information

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values.

Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance
  
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done
  
• GROWTH MINDSET . This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency
  
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
  
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do
  
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you!

If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day.

It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.