Juan Laverde Velasco |Senior Business Analyst, Macquarie Analytics

How long have you been at Macquarie?
12 years. My first role at Macquarie was in September 2002.

How do you get to campus?
Public transport. Since the station opened, by train.

What is your favourite thing about working at Macquarie?
Warm days at the start of Session 1 when the campus is full of students and the atmosphere is vibrant and lively.

Where is your favourite place to spend a spare five minutes at Macquarie?
Without a doubt, around the lake. The grounds of the Uni are really beautiful.

What was your earliest childhood career aspiration?
I have always had a passion for the ocean, so I wanted to be a marine biologist.

What are the biggest misconceptions about your profession?
Probably the biggest misconception about Business Intelligence (BI) is that all we do is produce reports or dashboards. BI is about providing tools and resources needed to get the right information at the right time.

In your job, what question are you most often asked?
Numbers, forecasts and scenarios.

If you weren’t a Senior Business Analyst, what would you do?
I’d be a scuba diving instructor.

What is your favourite film, book or TV show?
My favourite book is Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, closely followed by Aztec by Garry Jennings.

What is the one piece of technology you can’t live without?
Skype. I have family in the US, Mexico and Colombia and without it, I would miss them more than what I already do.

What would you want to learn if given the chance to learn it instantly?
Languages. All of them.

Something not many people know about me is…
Although I am Colombian, I do not care for football (soccer) at all. This makes me one of the very few Latin-Americans that do not consider soccer as their main religion.

If money were no object, what would you like to achieve?
Travel to every country and spend enough time to get a good taste of the culture in each one.

What were you doing before you started these questions?
I was taking brain tests for an upcoming planning session with our team.