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Tag: banking careers

A Transition Guide from Financial Analyst to Finance Professional: Best Financial Analyst Courses in India!

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

For those who can’t get enough numbers and charting data points, being a financial analyst might be the perfect job for us. But what does it take to become one? Where do finance professionals work? What’s their salary? Read on to find out!

Who is a Financial Analyst?

A financial analyst is a professional who is responsible for providing clients with advice on how to invest their money. After a chartered financial analyst course or online finance courses, they help and advice their clients to make better financial decisions.

Financial analysts are also responsible for ensuring that all transactions go according to plan within companies and institutions.

The chartered financial analyst (CFA) is a respectable and sought-after credential in finance. The CFA program is a rigorous, three-year training curriculum designed to prepare students for careers as investment professionals. CFAs are investment professionals qualified to offer advanced guidance on financial matters.

The number of candidates registering for CFA in India has been rising by 30% YoY for seven years, and today India is the third-largest market for CFA after China and the US.

Roles of a Financial Analyst

  • Financial Analysts determine a company’s present value, future business abilities and come up with forecasts for a business and help make an informed decision.
  • Analysts create & maintain spreadsheets and dashboards to help with the analysis and insight process. This gives a clear interpretation of trends & data to create models to value potential investment opportunities.
  • In-house financial analysts work as a team with various project managers to discuss performance or ascertain underlying causes of specific variances of performance.

Why choose a Career in Finance?

While there exist many careers, the financial services sector continues to be a leader and offers ample opportunities for people of all levels of experience.

The rising net disposable income drives the demand for financial services across multiple income brackets in India, which is also expected to emerge as the fourth-largest private wealth market globally by 2028. Such developments ensure a promising growth trajectory and a boom for aspirers in the long term.

How to Start Building a Career as a Financial Analyst?

Step 1: Earn a Bachelor’s Degree: A bachelor’s degree is often the primary qualification for a career as a financial analyst. Standard courses in economics, statistics, and related fields are relevant, but a more targeted degree is ideal.

Step 2: Attain Licensing and Certifications: Certifications courses for financial analysts like CFA and CFP help beginners boost their career while eying better employment opportunities. Many professionals may choose to obtain licenses and designations later in their careers.

Step 3: Build Employment Experience: To be a professional financial analyst, getting relevant work experience as early as possible, and work way up in the financial industry.

Step 4: Earn a Master’s Degree in Financial Analytics or Accounting

While on-job experience matters, a master’s degree in financial analytics can help fortify a resume.

Choose Improvisation with Imarticus Learning!

Wise aspirants may choose to improve their knowledge to increase interest from potential employers by obtaining a master’s degree. Imarticus Learning offers trending finance courses and certification programs.

With each course designed by Industry experts, the objective is to prepare students for industry. The financial analyst course is practical, engaging, and interactive and helps enhance my skill-set in finance and accounts.

Imarticus Learning empowers students through Financial Analysis Prodegree (FAP), a financial analyst course tailored by experts to use proper data analytics applications efficiently. The financial analytics course syllabus includes theoretical and practical knowledge through workshops with industry experts, which provides an excellent opportunity to learn.

Contact now via the Live Chat Support system for a transformative career or seek virtual guidance and get more details!

Top Cities to Have a Career in Right Now

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

Top Cities to Have a Career in Right Now

The Parliament of India recently released its Union budget and with the same, there have been a lot of good indications, both for the economy as well as the banking sector. While the country seems to be steadily progressing towards economic growth, the popular vibe among the present generation is an absolute fascination of the west. This is one of the reasons why many professionals, in various industries like Finance, Medicine, Analytics or Engineering and the likes, look to get highly qualified, in order to settle in on the job that they love the work in. This has encouraged the popularity of professional training courses, which are way more industry relevant as compared to the academic courses.
While it is a general notion that is reiterated time and again that you must find a job which you absolutely love doing. This idea for a lot of people gets attached to the more tangible concept of place, as many of the professionals, look to get hired in various foreign countries, in order to get the right kind of job. This is probably why you would see a lot of career websites, promoting different foreign countries, as the best and happiest place to work in. But then again, there are a lot of cities within India as well, with a prominent newspaper ranking Jaipur as the happiest city to live in, there are quite a few others, including the golden quadrangle with their metropolitan areas.So if you are looking for a great city to work in, we have curated a list of some of the happiest cities you can work in. This list basically is based on numerous surveys conducted, highlighting aspects like the happiness factor, compensations, work environment, employee- manager relationships and so on.

1.Chandigarh
Many residents of Chandigarh have time and again agreed to the fact that this city, makes for a great place to live in and thus by extension to be employed in. The many reasons cited would be a sound financial status of the people there, as well as great infrastructural development throughout.

2.Lucknow
Lucknow has gone on to be the second city to make it into the happiest places to live in list. The people residing in this city highly cherish their needs and desires and consider the same, their source of happiness. With a perfect mixture of the multinational and domestic companies, it makes for a great place to be employed in.

3.Delhi
The capital of India, apart from being extremely advanced in terms of infrastructure, it also houses headquarters of a number of nationalized banks, corporate financial institutions, private and public firms, making it the go-to place for all those professionals looking to leverage their career prospects.

4.Mumbai
How could the economic capital of India, not be a part of this list at all? Apart from being the part of the state that pays the most tax, it also has a thriving financial sector full of top ranking investment banks as well as commercial banks, various companies, which is no wonder why people come here to work.
So now you know, all you have to do now is take your pick! Do you think your city deserves to be on this list? Tell us why!

Investment Banking- Understanding the Deal: The Pitch Process (II)

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

In our last post we looked at why companies use investment bankers to sell or buy assets. In this post we try and understand what happens once a company decides to use an Investment Banker. What happens next?
Well they first need to look for a banker. So let’s go back to our earlier example taking the government’s stake sale in its Stuuti companies. Before they decided to shortlist Citibank, ICICI and HDFC, they hold a beauty parade where every banker worth their salt ‘parades’ their wares and offerings during a ‘pitch.’
Quite often you’ll find Investment Banking analyst friends working late on Saturday evening. When you ask them why, it’s quite likely they’ll utter the dreaded words, ‘pitch document’. The Pitch Document is the bread of Investment Banking, it’s the pizza base of that great Margerita. Without a great pitch document, all you are left with are handful of deals you managed to wing through your bosses contacts and even then you’re going to have to pitch for the deal. So what is a pitch document? It is a meeting backed up by a document where a banker convinces you, the client, why they are the best team to sell your asset. How do they do it?
The easiest way to explain this is to liken it to selling a pencil. If I have to sell you a pencil, what would I say? I need to tell you why this pencil is better than all the other pencils out there. I also need to tell you why this pencil costs as much as it does. For that I need to know what goes inside the pencil, how much those cost etc. If I need to sell the pencil on your behalf because you are my ‘client’ I need to know everything YOU know about the pencil. The price I sell the pencil at is the ‘value’ of the pencil. I have to explain to you what that value is and how I arrived at that value. I need to convince you I know everything there is to know about pencils, pencil making, the pencil industry, competing pencils so I can sell this pencil better than anyone else out there. So a usual Pitch Document consists of five elements.
1. Establishing my credentials – how many pencils have I sold before and to whom. Whose pencils have I sold and my expertise in selling these pencils. Perhaps I have someone who used to work in pencil manufacturing, Steadler maybe or Apsara, and knows the nuances of pencil making, has the inside track if you will.
2. Company Overview– I tell you a little bit about your company to show you that I know about your pencils. It’s a little counterintuitive I know but it shows I’ve done my homework and know what makes your pencils tick. I might also use this opportunity to tell you any risks I foresee with selling this pencil. Perhaps the pencil has an eraser that’s of an older technology or uses too much wood etc
3. Industry Overview– Here I showcase how much I know about pencils in general, trends in pencil making, what drives pencils usage, opportunities and risks in pencils which will help me forecast the market for pencils and therefore my clients potential market which will flow down to profitability and cashflows
4. Valuation– Once I have cashflows and industry numbers I put together the pencil’s valuation using both cashflows (DCF) as well as the value multiples of other pencils (Comparable PE and EV/EBITDA, EV/Sales multiples )in the market along with the value of what other pencils have been sold at in the past (Transaction multiples)
5. Potential Buyers of your pencil. Using my considerable industry knowledge I tell you who would be most interested in buying your pencil.
All this and more is taught in our FMVC as well as our Diploma in Corporate Finance, both of which are Mumbai’s best courses in Financial Modeling and Corporate Finance and Investment Banking.

 

The Data Analytics Employment boom

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

They are not just for engineers and IT departments — analysts could come from just about anywhere
Big data has been constructively cast as “the new oil” and held up as the economic counterbalance to America’s sinking developed sector. As oil did at the beginning of the last century, big data is going to drive economies in the centuries ahead. But it may not do so in the way that many people think it will. This Oil is even more productive because it’s a never ending fuel to the new horizons of IT industry brimming across the globe.
“Advances in software, interface designs, and things like that will make it easier to analyze big data in the future,” says Dr. Betsy Page Sigman, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and an expert on technology and information systems. “So it won’t be as big of a technological hurdle. The more important thing for companies will be to have a lot of people that understand not just how to produce statistics and analytics, but understand how to make better decisions because they have this information.” Not just that, there is an emerging trend of data analytics positions in India, there is a boom in business analytics training across various cities likes Mumbai, Bangalore and various other metro cities as well.
Part of this shift will simply require the retooling of existing jobs, but there is also a new class of positions and skills emerging as well. Spohrer says, positions like “chief data officer” and other “data scientists, data researcher, data technology head” that will become more common within existing companies, both large and small. These jobs won’t necessarily be occupied by deep analytics-types, but by non-data professionals educated and experienced in their chosen industry while also skilled in the use of big data tools.
As with oil, companies know data is out there in large quantities and that it’s not enough to simply know where it is — it has to be extracted, refined, and delivered in a usable format to be valuable. And like the energy economy before it, the data economy needs dedicated people — 4.4 million of them by 2015 in the IT field alone, according to an oft-cited Gartner Research analysis.
But here the similarities end. The oil patch has never had much trouble finding and training enough roughnecks to get oil out of the ground, but training up skilled big data professionals is a different enterprise entirely. In the U.S. alone, a McKinsey & Company report projects a shortfall of between 140,000 and 190,000 “deep analytical” big data professionals by 2018 — that is, people with highly technical skills in machine learning, statistics, and/or computer science, the actual hands-on big data people that know how to crunch huge data sets into meaningful information.
Academically, big data is playing a role in decidedly non-data disciplines, like some portions of the social sciences and humanities, says Jim Spohrer, computer scientist and director of IBM’s Global University Relations Programs. It will increasingly become integral in medical research, various kinds of product development and modeling, and all types of research science. To remain competitive, companies will require professionals at all levels that fundamentally grasp big data concepts and know how to use them to their advantage. But what’s often overlooked in this dim projection of the big data labor market is that the impact of big data on employment goes far deeper than the deep analytics and IT fields. Companies need professionals at all levels that are not necessarily schooled in deep analytics but are nonetheless big data-savvy. These professionals don’t need degrees in computer science or statistics. It’s been a general trend in India otherwise to acquire technical degrees of BE, B. Tech before any further advancement in skill development in any fields, let alone data Analytics. But data analytics training now suffices for a good beginning in Data related domain. But even if it is packaged along with a good degree and any other tags it can add to additional amount in any given package. A VP at management consulting and technology advisory outfit Booz Allen Hamilton recently told Information Week that the company has had great success bringing physicists and music majors onto data science teams — creative thinkers who know less about computer science and more about how to look at big data problems in a different way. Though companies and economies will certainly need data scientists to manage their massive databases and information technology teams to support them, to a far greater degree they’ll need professionals knowledgeable and creative enough to leverage big data to the greatest possible advantage.
Any employment bump tied to the proliferation of big data analytics won’t be confined to IT departments or even to dedicated “data divisions” that emerge within companies. And it isn’t just big data specialists like data scientists and statisticians that stand to benefit from this boom. Big data opportunities are already being exploited in data-centered pursuits like risk management, marketing and research science, but the applications are virtually limitless. Existing companies will expand as they deploy more big data resources — both human and technological — to leverage big data to their advantage. But the space to watch isn’t necessarily existing companies reorganizing to embrace big data, but the emerging big data industry where deep analytical job growth is likely to make its biggest economic impacts. As with so many other specialized endeavors that fall outside the purview of core business — things like advertising and marketing, the latter of which is itself being completely transformed by big data analytics — many big data applications will be farmed out to outside contractors who specialize in big data analysis and problem solving, Sigman says. Scores of big data startups are already emerging (largely with the help of venture capital) to meet this demand, including MapR, ParStream, ScaleArc, and Cloudant. The ones who are able to best meet their customers’ data analytics needs are poised to become home to many of those many millions jobs big data will generate over the next few years.
Source- Fortune & Investopedia
Ananya Pandey – Senior Counselor, Imarticus Learning