Nadeem Ilyas - Finance
Job title: Financial Analyst
Degree & University: History, Oxford
Joined: September 2006
Transcript
What inspires you?
I’m drawing this because I find comedy inspirational. I think if everyone just adopted the same sort of attitudes, people doing comedy, in life generally people would get on so much better. I think people at Barclays are prepared to have a bit of a laugh. I know certainly the people I time with are game for a laugh. I love this Monty Python sketch – the Roman Centurions matching in on Bryan upset not that he’s not drawing on Pontius Pilate’s wall, but the fact that he’s got his Latin grammar wrong. I just think it’s a hilarious scene. This is my moment of inspiration.
What attracted you to Barclays?
When I decided that I definitely wanted to work in finance, after that it was a case of choosing which company. I applied to the accounting companies as well as Barclays and I was fortunate enough to get offers from everyone so it was a case of which one do I actually choose.
The reason I chose Barclays is because I felt that I could do everything I could do at the accounting company, plus a whole lot more at Barclays, so I’ve still got the opportunity to do my ACA qualification, but as well as that I’m also working in industry rather than for the professional firms.
So it means that you’re more involved with what is going on, and you know with so much going on in banking at the moment, it means you get a better perspective from being inside the company. I just think that it’s a good sector to work in, and a year into the programme, I’m very happy I chose Barclays.
Why did you choose to join Finance?
I’ve worked in both Finance and Sales before, so I’ve had experience in both those sectors, and for me I think that Finance is where my skills are best suited. It involves a lot of logical thinking, a lot of persistence, a lot of being thorough, with different information that you’re expected to analyse. For me I find that an interesting academic challenge as well as a work challenge.
What does your current role involve?
One of the things I like about working in Finance is that I’m involved in so many things. The particular team I work in is called the Exco reporting team. Now Exco, in sort of Barclays slang, is the Executive Committee which is sort of the five head honchos of Barclays.
Each month we report to them on how the entire group has performed in the previous month and that involves analysis of all the financials we have and because they are making decisions based on the information we are providing them it has to be analysed in so many different ways. So that is the primary responsibility of the team that I work for, and for me that can involve all sorts of things, in particular, it’s analysis, financial information, trying to predict future trends but also looking for patterns, looking for areas the business has been doing well in, and also areas that we could improve on.
That’s the primary task that I’ve been doing over the past year, but as well as that I’ve been involved in so many things, whether that’s working on our annual reports, doing verification, just doing bits for other teams that are involved in Barclays finance as well.
What do you enjoy the most about your job?
I think it’s the actual work itself, in the sense that, as I said earlier, it’s very analytical. It’s the sort of tasks, the sort of job that you don’t have to rush into, you're not always pressured by deadlines, although they do exist. It means that you can actually think about what you're doing, you can try to determine the best possible method of doing something rather than just try and do something as quickly as possible.
As well as that, alongside my work I’m also doing my ACA qualification. That’s a lot of fun because it means you get a deeper understanding of what finance is all about, what accounting is all about and a lot of the things that you study you’re actually using on a day-to-day basis in your normal work as well.
I think it’s a combination of doing all those things but being involved in different teams and getting to work with different people - it all adds up to a, sort of, attractive role. Going in in the morning is not a case of doom and gloom but it’s actually something you can look forward to.
What qualities do you need to succeed in Finance?
I don’t think that there is any particular quality that you need, I think it certainly helps if you are ambitious and motivated. I think it also helps if you’re, quite a logical person but I think anyone can succeed both in Barclays and in Finance,
I don’t think you need to be a particular type of person. I know, for example, for myself and other people I work with and other people on the graduate programme, it’s quite a disparate group and I wouldn’t say there was one underlying trait that everyone had. I think that as long as you’re talented, you’re prepared to work hard and you are motivated, then you can succeed.
Have you been involved in any inspirational moments?
One of those moments, as it were, was to do with an area of my work which is probably the worst bit that I do. Every quarter we produce a report called Multicolumn which goes to the Executive Committee.
It’s a huge document which is just literally full of numbers, just page after page of numbers and unfortunately part of my role was to make sure that all of those numbers were correct, which literally was calculator, pen, checking every single calculation to make sure it’s done properly.
And I just remember wanting to find a better way to do it and so literally I just got out my Excel spreadsheets and it took me a while, it probably took me a day fiddling about with it, but I managed to work out a formula for transferring the information automatically so all those manual calculations that I had been spending hours and days doing I no longer had to do.
It was one of those things that I just had to put in the numbers once and it would all do it for me. For me it was more of a case of a really frustrated moment. But I suppose doing something different, it became something that helped me and it’s now helping other people. It’s now become one of those tools that everyone wishes they’d heard of before they were doing the calculations.
Why join Finance?
I don’t think Finance really needs much selling, finance is the language of business. It’s a respected career, it’s a career that’s been around for ages, its also one of those careers where you’ve got full employment in the sense that every big company is looking to hire finance people.
You know if you’ve got those skills, those tools, if you’ve got the training and the qualifications, it’s an interesting area to work in, it’s a lot of fun, and also it means you get a really good idea of what’s going on in the world.
