Amazon(PM) to Barclays(Jr. VP(Investment Banker)

Amit Singh

Tell us something about yourself

My name is Amit I have done my schooling from Kendriya Vidyalaya and did my Engineering from IIT Madras (14-18) Mba from IIM Ahmedabad(18-20).I started my career as Product Manager in Amazon worked there for 6 months than joined GS as an Analyst move to JP as associate and than Morgan Stanley now joining as Jr VP at Barclays Bank.

So why Investment Banking

I’m very interested in working on complex transactions and I think investment banking is the best environment for me to train that skill. . My favorite thing from this  is  about the nuanced nature of their deals and how they constantly have to manage multiple stakeholders.”

According to me Investment banking offers the opportunity to become an expert at building large, complex financial models at the earliest stage of your career.  While bankers aren’t necessarily great investors, they do spend a lot of time on valuation work, and this can be an excellent way to start your career.

Name an instance where you wanted something and went out of your comfort zone to achieve it OR Tell us the biggest risk you have taken so far in your life.

I, working as a associate for JP, and my client was the MD of a thermal power plant. We suggested an improvised bidding strategy for power exchange for the client. The client gave their go ahead for conducting a pilot and offered me that he is willing to absorb losses up to Rs 52 cr if our strategy turn a loss. During that meeting, only I was present from JP side and I accepted the challenge. By far, this was the biggest stake of money that someone has entrusted me with.I informed my Manager and Partner about it and they supported me on it. I devised the bid strategy and sent it to their bidding team. Their internal bid team were touching ~90% of the potential. Our strategy was to get it to ~95-98%.On first day, I could only get to ~80% of the potential. This came as a shock to me, as I had backtested my strategy and it worked well. I didn’t wanted to make the client underperform or worse lost the money. I looked at my strategy, I re-did all the data analysis, checked all the data sources, and I found that there was nothing more that I could have optimised. On day 2, I was able to achieve ~98% and for the next week I was able to achieve ~97% avg. Finally, my strategy paid off and the client adopted my strategy going forward.

Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?

My client was a thermal power plant and my project involved earning enhancement for the client. On this porject, I was working with various stakeholders from client’s side. As part of my team, we built a digital tool for the client to enhance earnings. However, due to a regulation change, version updates to our digital tool were expected by clients. We were thinking whether to fetch information related to a particular cut-off number before midnight everyday by ourselves or should we ask the client to input it before midnight everyday. This cut-off is published by Regional Load Dispatch Centres (RLDC) every evening for the next day.I believed the clients employees should be assigned the task of inputting this cut-off number as it would free us from any error that may creep in. It may also save us in case the servers of RLDCs goes down. However, my team and my manager believed we should build a tool which should automatically fetch this cut-off figure and update in the platform. Looking back, I believe that it was the better way to go and my suggestion was not customer centric.

If 10 Million Dollars (approximately INR 75 Crores) is given to you to use it any way you deem fit what would you do with this corpus? I would use this corpus to open a startup. I am working on a startup idea about a hyperlocal travel app which would improvise the local travel for any user. My startup idea crowdsourcing travel networks of unorganized sectors such as the e-rickshaws and Auto plying on local routes. I also intend to further improve upon the local travel on metro, buses using AR/VR technology and 3D mapping

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