How Does A Business Analyst Differ From A Financial Analyst?
With regard to Analysts, organizations are divided into two broad categories, either they can be firms or companies, exclusively dealing with the financial markets or, companies that deal with other things such as retail, e-commerce, health and others. In organizations coming under the former category, the roles of both the business and financial analysts, are pretty much the same. While in the firms coming under the latter category, the functions of the two differ widely. Business Analysts are supposed to deal with optimization of the businesses, their requirements, analogies, process that help in building the company and so on. Whereas the financial analysts are supposed to work with balance sheets, management of assets, studying and analysing the capital markets, trends and forecasting the market and providing financial results using the same.
Business Analysts are professionals who generally work with statistical data and perform what is known as business analytics. Business analytics or more commonly known as data analytics is a process involving working with a lot of data. These professionals are supposed to work by gathering these huge amounts of data, either generated from the company, or by extracting it from the cloud, storing is, studying it and drawing out insights so as to perform evaluation exercises. Data Analytics has lately been the most sought after industry, when it comes to great career prospects. These data analytics professionals, fall under the category of business analysts and they are required to have specialization in one or more of the tools of data analytics , like SAS Programming, R Programming, Data Hadoop, Python and so on.
While Financial Analysts are supposed to analyse the financial structure of the various firms. In a way the roles of these professionals are pretty similar to that of the Bas but, they perform specific functions like the financial statement analysis, accounting analysis and so on. Their main focus lies on the analysis of finances, which basically refer to the viability, stability and the ability of a business to generate profits. They can also perform risk analysis, company valuations, capital budgeting and the likes. While Business Analysis has a broader scope, Financial Analysis is known to be a narrower, more specific segment of any business firm and includes on the financial part, unlike BA which includes both, the financial and the non-financial parts.
For any aspirant, strong data analytics skills are an absolute must. Whether a candidate aspires to get into business analysis or financial analysis, they should be extremely efficient when it comes to spotting trends, and anomalies and drawing insights from the most complex sets of data. While a financial analyst largely deals with investments, a business analyst deals with operations and management. Thus, it is necessary to possess great quantitative and mathematics skills for either of the jobs. Both the careers, need people with an education from a business background, in specific financial analysis requires individuals with a strong background in economics, finance and accounting. While business analysis, as a career requires individuals from the information technology background.
Imarticus Learning offers specialization courses in the field of finance and data analytics, which can give a candidate certain leverage over their competitors, when it comes to both the careers.
