When you get a chance to sit for an interview with a FinTech company, remind yourself of the finance basics: time value of money, financial ratios, financial statements, terms from the stock market, etc. They will not throw very difficult questions at you, but make sure you can explain every skill and project mentioned in your profile. It is also important for you to spend some time on the company website so that you can answer questions like, ‘what attracted you to work at this firm or why do you want to join this company?’
Interview:
I got interviewed by the founding member of CredFIC and we had a discussion for around 30 minutes in which we talked about my previous work experience and some basic concepts from finance and data science. Then, in the end, he gave me a task to be completed in around 10-12 hours. I had to design a draft for creating a product that they are planning to launch in the market for loan lending firms, financial institutions, insurance companies, etc. I mailed them my analysis and we discussed it over a call on the next day after which they confirmed my candidature for the internship.
Internship Experience:
For the first few days, I was worried a bit because I never worked in a virtual setup before and I was thinking about how this experience is going to be? But the team at CredFIC made sure that we all interns get an amazing and flawless experience working on our projects. I had done a 34 months stint with Bank of America after my graduation where I worked with an equity derivatives market team and I had a good understanding of the finance sector which helped in this internship.
I was assigned a project that was based on the task given to me in the interview. I was supposed to create an end-to-end POC (Proof-of-concept) on a product that will analyze the bank account statement of a person without human intervention and give him/her a score indicating his/her financial prudence. There were two more interns from engineering colleges who worked with me on this project. I used to discuss the logic to be implemented for the product with my mentor and then divide the implementation part between us three. We used python programming language for development. There was a constant support and encouragement from my mentor and his expertise helped me a lot during this project.
We successfully completed the POC for the product in 7 weeks after which I worked on creating the business canvas and sales pitch for the product. In the end, I got the chance to do a final presentation with the whole senior team of CredFIC and they applauded and appreciated the work. They also promised to use this POC as a benchmark and launch the product in the market.
Key Learnings:
The whole experience of creating a product made me think in all the directions which will help me in my career. Creating the logic for a product, discussing it to in-depth details, modified it to its best possible form, explaining and dividing the tasks with others, and working on business canvas; every task that I performed in this 8-9 weeks stint gave me a very rich experience.