In May 2019, Cheryl Leong, Head of Fraud Analytics and Data Management at Moss & Associates, a mid-sized New York accounting firm, was tasked with fraud detection in annual reports. Besides helping clients present financial information to stakeholders, accounting firms had to ensure there were no misrepresentations. The incidence in companies reporting material falsehoods had risen in recent years and regulators were pushing accounting firms to detect those instances earlier. Companies had been using qualitative text to mislead stakeholders of their financial wellbeing. Leong was working on a data analytics platform that would replace the time consuming task of manually going over executive statements and management discussion & answers (MD&A) sections. Several text mining techniques were available within the system to break text down for classification. With the fraud detection tool ready for launch, she wondered whether she had adequately addressed the challenges of analysing text in annual reports. What steps should she programme the tool to take? How successful it would be?

It was April 2014, and Cadence Chong, a new analyst at YOB Bank Singapore's consumer banking department, is working on her first assignment. Chong has been hired to improve the bank's credit card business, as her manager believed that there was scope for the business to do better. A specific initiative that had been suggested was to enhance the bank's responsiveness to customer feedback on MyDiningDeals, a mobile application that offered special deals and promotions contingent upon customers using their YOB credit cards. Chong was tasked to apply analytical techniques to the user-generated data gathered by the application. She had to analyse the data in response to customer and internal feedback on the division's credit card offerings to investigate how the application could be made more user-friendly. Chong was eager to complete her task as she knew that her analyses and recommendations would help drive up profitability in the credit card division.