Robert Hankache

Senior Ai Scientist and Researcher @NatWest Group

City of London, GB

Working within the central “AI R&D” team to revolutionise the bank using ML and AI tools.Projects:* Custom Language Model Development – Developed BERT models trained and fine-tuned from scratch on proprietary bank data. Achieved a 1% accuracy improvement in fraud detection applications.* Generative AI exploration – Led early PoCs identifying applications and benefits of GenAI within the bank, including- Emissions Tool: Automated downloading of ESG data and extracting companies emissions for the climate team- Chat My Money: An agentic, interactive app to query transactions; integrated with SQL db, Python REPL, and RAG for textual and visual outputs- Knowledge assistants: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems for HR and financial regulations Q&A.* Human-Eval Web App – Built a web-app to streamline LLM output evaluation. Adopted by multiple projects to collect hundreds of feedbacks.* Customer Complaints Automation – Automated customer email generation from investigation notes, with rigorous evaluation and monitoring to ensure high-quality outputs with no hallucinations, enhancing quality (standardized, structured, and simplified language) and reducing resolution time and operational cost.* Fraud Triaging AI Agent (Ongoing) – Developing a customer-facing conversational AI agent to triage fraud cases. Includes robust guardrails to prevent jailbreaking, off-topic discussions, and any offensive or illegal output. Improves customer experience, triage accuracy, and reduced costs and response time.Research Papers* Evaluating Name-Based Nationality Bias in LLMs* Evaluating the Sensitivity of LLMs to Prior Context* A Brief Review of Quantum Machine Learning for Financial ServicesLeadership* People manager for a team of 3 junior data scientists.* Chief Editor of the internal Data Science newsletter.Tech stack across projects:Python, Pandas, PyTorch, HuggingFace, LangChain, Pydantic, OpenAI agents, AWS SageMaker/Bedrock, Streamlit, FastAPI.

Pierre and Marie Curie University

Master's degree, Elementary Particle Physics

Lebanese University - Faculty of Engineering 2 (ULFG2)

Engineer's degree, Mechanical Engineering

Lebanese University - Faculty of Sciences

Masters 1, Physics

Sorbonne Université

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Elementary Particle Physics

Lebanese University - Faculty of Sciences

Licentiate degree, Physics