Naufal Avianda

To me, data has always been the gold of a company. Bring out the right numbers at the right moment, and you help a business make better decisions and give it real direction.

I was born and raised in Bandung, Indonesia, an only child of two working parents. At sixteen I moved to Jakarta on my own for a bridging programme in economics, bookkeeping and Australian business law. I had to pass it before I could study abroad. My mother had once won a scholarship to the UK but couldn't take it; she was pregnant with me at the time. Maybe that is why she always told me to go beyond my own bubble and comfort zone. She believed that is one of the best ways we grow as people. Leaving home early never scared me — I like to explore. So at eighteen I moved to Australia to study economics at Monash University: close enough to home, yet a completely different culture.

I was drawn to economics because you see it everywhere in real life: in prices, in choices, in the taxes everyone has to deal with. After graduating I went back to Indonesia to work out what I really wanted. I realised I wanted to pair that economic foundation with technology, so I came to Amsterdam for a master's in Business Information Systems. It gave me the best of both worlds: the economics I already knew, and the technical skills to put it to work.

Around that time I heard about the orientation-year visa, which let me look for a job in the Netherlands. My first role was as a service delivery manager, mostly an IT job. One of my tasks was to build a dashboard, and to build it well you have to understand the data underneath it. That is where everything clicked. I saw how the right data lets a company make sharper commercial decisions: which product to develop, which one to drop, where to steer the business next. That is exactly what I do at TaxSavers today: I bring out the right data so the team can make the best decisions. My focus is on building the pipelines and dashboards behind the scenes, keeping the data reliable, and making sure the right information reaches the right people at the right time.