After a month
So it has been almost 1.5 months since I have started my internship in the beginning of June, and I have 2 weeks left. Since so many things have been happening, I would like to focus on small parts. I will begin with a little introduction.
What am I doing?
I work as an Investment Advisor intern for deVere USA in New York. deVere USA is a global financial consultancy group working to meet client’s financial needs. The office in NY focuses specifically on a financial product called QROPS (Qualified Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme), and basically what this scheme enables to do is un-freezing the pension fund in UK for British Expats currently living/working in the U.S. It will be too technical if I go on explaining this, so I will stop here. But what I am doing is helping my Senior Investment Advisor pitch this to potential clients. So my daily duties include crunching numbers into excel, modelling a scenario of how QROPS can benefit each client, and making a compelling PitchBook using these data. This is a brief summary of what I have been doing so far.
How is the Culture?
deVere USA has close to 60 offices around the world, and each office are comprised of 10~30 people. My office is not that big as well, with around 15 people + 7 interns including myself. Although this is a Wealth Management/Asset Management firm, the NY Office strongly focuses on QROPS and involves a lot of selling/marketing. This was something that was unexpected for me, as I expected more of an analytical job. But it does make sense for a Wealth Management firms to work hard on selling/marketing because without clients, we cannot generate any revenue or reputation whatsoever. Considering that the job includes a lot of client interaction on the phone, the culture is very free and open. Workers are walking around the office and making jokes of each other at times when they are off the phone. Some people may dislike this type of culture, but in a selling environment, I feel like the entertaining atmosphere is crucial as it keeps the workers more energetic and less tired.
So this was my first post, and this was a brief introduction of what I have been doing so far.