Essential Finance/banking knowledge a business analyst should possess for a BA job in finance domain,

A business analyst is involved in the preparation of the requirement documentation, analysis of the functional issues, supporting the project team throughout the project life cycle and successful delivery to the client. The basic skills which a business analyst aspiring for a BA job in the finance domain should have are:

a) Functional knowledge – the finance domain as such is huge and has immense potential for the right candidate to grow. There are several subsets of the finance industry wherein you can be in the banking industry, financial services or the finance or accounts department of a user company. Wherever be the financial job role be, the functional knowledge required is broadly the same. The requirements include the basic knowledge of financial accounting and management, understanding of the primary KPIs(Key Performance Indicators) if required, basic knowledge of the operations in the front and the back offices of the financial organization.

b) Management Skills – A prospective business analyst in the financial domain should have be proficient and experienced in people management, good communication and leadership skills, excellence in project and change management. As  a business analyst is a conduit between the users and the technical team, its vital that the BA has professional experience in handling such project teams and resources

c)Technical skills – Right from being brilliant in MS – Office tools such as Word, Excel, Access, Visio to being hands-on in the programming languages. A business analyst should be up to date in the latest technology trends and the software packages launched recently, so as to be capable of providing a viable and innovative solution.

d) Educational background – if the prospective business analyst candidate is from a management educational background or has had a finance related education.

In case of a financial industry like the banking domain, there are several types of banking   like retail, corporate, investment etc . The business processes of each of these industries are somewhat different and the business applications and other technology tools being used are also varied. We can discuss in the detail the knowhow required for the various categories here:

a) Retail Banking:basic know how required are the financial operations, payments and trade transactions, AML(Anti Money laundering), Fraud management

b) Investment Banking: functional experience in FX(Foreign Exchange) processes either Options or Cash, Front and back office operations, Hedge Funds and derivatives, Asset management, Risk management

c) Private Banking/Wealth Management : expertise in treasury or cash products, traded instruments, vendor management, regulatory requirements, related applications based on technologies or tools such as SWIFT, Basel II

So, in case financial organizations are interested in a business analyst to join their ranks, they will prefer that the business analyst will come to them with minimum of few years in a similar industry and preferably from a business analyst background. If so then, the business analyst can bring with him the perfect mix of technical know-how and domain knowledge specific to that industry.

Sample Resume for Financial and Banking Domain:

Name:

Address:

Phone:

Email:

X years of Business Analysis experience with in-depth knowledge of business processes in banking and finacial industries. A thorough understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) including but not limited to the various concepts such as Requirement Gathering, Experience in the development of Client-Server and Web-Based Applications. Possess a detailed-oriented nature with excellent communication, interpersonal, problem solving skills, and recognized for being a valued team player.

• Proficient in all phases of Requirement Management, including gathering, analyzing, detailing and tracking requirements.
• Experienced in documenting requirement using Unified Modeling Language (Use Case and Activity Diagrams) also building business Process Flow Charts using tools such as Visio and Rose.
• Skilled at reviewing test cases making sure they are in accordance with requirements, and assist the overall testing process by activities such as Change and Defect Management and conducting User Acceptance Testing.
• Strong understanding of various SDLC methodologies such as RUP, Waterfall and Agile with hands on experience in all of them.
• Excellent communication skills and adept at facilitating walkthrough and training sessions.

Technical Expertise:

Operating Systems

MS Windows, DOS, UNIX

RDBMS

MS Access, SQL, Oracle

SDLC Methodologies

Rational Unified Process, Waterfall Methodology, Agile

Tracking Management Tools

TestDirector, Rational ClearQuest, ReqPro

ERPs

SAP (BW)

Software Eng Tools

MS Office, MS Project, MS Visio, MS Dreamwaver.

Web Technologies

HTML, XML

Modeling Tools

Rational Rose, MS Visio

Professional Experience:

Banking (company name)                                                                           duration

Sr. Business/Systems Analyst

xx Bank and Mortgage Company offers a full-range of mortgage products including conventional loans/fixed or variable rate; a variety of financing programs you may not find elsewhere; jumbo loans/fixed and variable rate; and innovative down payment, qualifying, and payment options. The bank used a vendor provided LoanQuest Residential Lending System for their Loan Origination purposes. It was a client – server based application. I was part of the maintenance and enhancement team working on multiple projects simultaneously.

Responsibilities:

• Interfaced with stake holders and facilitated communication between client and the IT department.
• Involved in creating targeted questionnaires and interviews for SME’s, clients and business users to gather requirements.
• Involved in Feasibility and Risk Analysis to identify the business critical and high-risk areas of the application.
• Worked as a liaison between business users and developers to submit requirements and changes, clarify questions and issues.
• Extensively experienced for organizing and documenting requirements, preparing use cases, writing business documents and reports in Pre- Testing phase.
• Developed data flow diagrams, illustrating the flow of data from the Legacy systems into the Application database Tables, along with checkpoints for testing / verification.
• Prepared use case documents and utilized MS Visio to create UML diagrams including use case, activity and class diagrams to extract business process flows and workflows, thereby assisting development and quality assurance teams in understanding the requirements.
• Worked on a team environment to finalize use cases to develop functional and detail design specifications of the application.
• Participated in JAD sessions for requirement, feasibility and risk analysis with various stakeholders, including designers, developers, QA and management to identify critical and high risk areas of the application.
• Collaborated with the QA team in reviewing and validating test plans and test cases, ensuring that the final application catered to the user requirements.
• Developed a user acceptance test plan and test case scenarios to guide a select group of key end-users in testing the user interface and functionality of the application.
• Performed requirement walkthroughs with the Dev. and QA teams with the aim to develop testing strategies and test plans such that test cases reflect user needs.
• Worked extensively with MS office suite for preparing status reports.