Just my personal opinion, feel free to disagree ;). There are few issues preventing finance being replaced by AI.
1. The large portion of finance is customization. AI works on the simple models, but it may struggle to perform adequately with complex, company-specific situations. Take pilot as example, it is an accounting and bookkeeping company with the combination of tech solution and human services. There is always human in the loop.
2. Finance deals with the numbers, the bar of accuracy is very high.
However, I believe AI can make learning finance much simpler, that is why I build this platform.
Yep, no stats or advanced math is needed. My primary focus is to cater to beginner and intermediate users.
For beginners, it is a good tool to understand the basic finance and accounting concepts. It is interactive, you can practice the formulas via quizzes, much more fun than reading a textbook. I suggest you try financial statement module.
For intermediate users, you can practice financial modeling by solving generic modeling problems (3-statements, DCF, LBO, M&A). It will help you build the muscle memory of using the functions/formulas.
For advanced users, I am planning to onboard more industry specific modeling content and practice cases.
Yea, I might do more in depth AI integration in the future. The hint function has been the most popular one in assassinating users learning how to solve the financial modeling problems. This platform is designed with the goal of assisting users in enhancing their practical skills in financial modeling.
Sure! While beginner content isn't unique, chatGPT can handle such questions effectively. Our main aim is to create a mind map that helps users understand concepts deeply and apply them to build various financial models.
Absolutely, the current platform is designed to help beginners and intermediate learners to hone their technical skills. I am considering expanding in areas such as allowing users to share their models and strategies. I understand it can be daunting for newcomers to an industry to figure out the best way to construct models. What are your thoughts on this?
In all seriousness, would this help me with something like CFA related certification? What other resources would you recommend to go along with Quantus?
The current stage of finance interview is a little bit like coding interview 20 years ago, pre-leetcode time, where you write sudo code on a paper to answer some coding challenges. The coding interview nowadays are quite advanced, I believe Leetcode plays huge role.
The best way of learning financial modeling is by doing it on the excel. Even though many finance technical interviews still focus on behavior type of questions, discussing your model-building approach and assumptions. By practising different scenarios on Excel, timeboxing it, it will help you refine your responses during the interview.
I give folks an excel test. It’s more of a very basic modeling test as I provide some data and tell them what I want from it and see how they get to the answer. They do it in our office on our PC and access to the internet for help.
I’ve been giving it to candidates for over 15 years now. And seen some awful stuff out of it. Some people just spend an hour building 14 different pivot tables and never write a formula. I think it’s very easy but only about 10% of people do well on it. It’s not meant to be tricky either, like one question is “write a SUMIFS on the data table to determine X, Y, Z” and you can tell most people fumble with giving the formula the correct parameters or in the right order. This is a major red flag for me as a Financial Analyst, even if they don’t use that formula often, should be able to understand the instructions Excel is giving you OR use a search engine to figure it out in just a couple minutes.
On the SUMIFS problem, we tell them exactly which formula to use because we noticed early on if we didn’t then people would just say they had no answer, or not sure how to approach the problem.
Worth noting, I only ever interview people with minimum 2 years actual work experience as a Financial Analyst (Also managers, directors, VPs. Everyone gets tested). Also, it’s become better over time. I think colleges are pushing excel literacy as part of the curriculum more than they used to.
