Akanksha Rai

About Akanksha Rai

I have done masters in Business Analytics with a strong foundation in data strategy, consulting, and financial services. My career spans over five years in banking and forensic consulting, where I’ve worked closely with global clients on complex compliance, risk, and data transformation initiatives. At the University of San Diego, I deepened my expertise in data storytelling, ETL processes, and business intelligence. I also served as Marketing Director of the Business Analytics Association and supported employer engagement initiatives through my role with the Career Development Center experiences that sharpened my leadership, communication, and industry insight.I’m passionate about solving real business problems through analytics from streamlining operations to enhancing decision-making and creating social impact. I thrive in collaborative environments and am especially drawn to opportunities that combine strategy, data, and purpose.

Experience

1. Financial Analyst

   Occams Advisory

   Sep 2025 — Present · San Diego, CA, US

   Built an AI-powered CFO platform that ingests QuickBooks data and delivers automated financial dashboards and plain-English CFO reports for business owners — live product with paying customersDesigned and engineered the full LLM prompt system including reasoning frameworks, causal language rules, and output guardrails that transformed raw financial metrics into genuinely advisory, action-oriented insightsWorked inside an MCP server pipeline integrating Python-based financial calculations, forensic anomaly detection, and structured LLM context delivery — identified and resolved critical bugs in the metric pipeline that were generating false alerts across client reportsBuilt synthetic QuickBooks datasets to stress-test edge cases and validate the full prompt-to-report pipeline before real client data was processed — ensuring output accuracy and report reliability at launchTranslated complex accounting logic to the engineering team (margin formulas, liquidity ratios, DSO interpretation by industry), directly improving metric accuracy and preventing misleading outputs from reaching clientsDesigned the structured report output schema with embedded Chain-of-Thought triggers, tiered health indicators, and dollar-impact recommendations — defining exactly how the LLM reasons, writes, and prioritizes findings

Education

• University of San Diego - Knauss School of Business

  Master of Science - MS, Business Analytics | STEM

• Somerville House

  High School Diploma

• Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University

  Bachelor's degree, bcom(h)

  2014 — 2017

• IBS Hyderabad

  Master of Business Administration - MBA, Marketing Research

  2017 — 2019