Jinal Shah | CA | Bank of America | ISB Class of 2019 | Citibank

Jinal Shah | CA | Bank of America | ISB Class of 2019 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jinalshahabc/

After completing Chartered Accountancy in November 2007, Jinal joined the SKP Group and worked on advisory for clients’ corporate taxes. Subsequently she joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) in December 2010 with their Corporate Tax team. There she gain enriching cross-functional as well as cross-geographies experience having worked closely with all business units on tax implications of their operations. She has worked extensively on transfer pricing matters for the group companies and has gained global experience having worked out of their Hong Kong and London offices. In January 2017, Jinal joined the Banking Operations team of BAML with a view to gain an in-depth understanding on the corporate and commercial banking business and products. There, she worked on implementing the GST law on the business which impacted 2000+ clients, 11 internal departments and branch operations across 4 states. After ISB, she is now working as Commercial Banking Relationship Manager at Citibank.

Q1. Tell us more about yourself, your journey so far.

Ans: As you rightly said, I am a chartered accountant, I have qualified in November 2007. I started my career as an entrepreneur, I started my CA practice, I worked for 3 years as an entrepreneur. While I was working on my own, I came across this opportunity to work with Bank of America on a tax assignment and within a month or two I was made an offer by them and I ended up joining them as a full-time employee and that’s when my corporate life really began. So, 7.5 years with Bank of America has been what my career is in corporate world has taken. I started with Bank of America with corporate tax domain. I handled the group taxation in India for about 6 years. I had the opportunity to work out of our UK office which is our international headquarter on some pricing project and out of our Hong Kong office which is our regional head office again on some business sale project. After 6 years I actually moved into the wholesale banking operations team which is more like a banking operations team. The movers basically motivated because I wanted to explore a career not in the taxation field but in the field of business which is the selling banking products, commercial banking, corporate banking, and so on, and obviously being a CA with tax domain of 6–8 years behind me, it was not easy to make a shift into the banking world immediately so I decided to move into the operations team for a year and half and gain some knowledge on the products and then I joined ISB.

Q2. What was your trigger for the MBA decision?

Ans: It was a mix of multiple things- one is obviously the fact that I needed a richer role, so obviously being a CA you end up taking a career either a finance or taxation which is a default group to go and I did the same thing. I did my articleship in audit, I realised I do not like audit so I shifted to taxation. In my practice I did a little bit of tax and a lot of tax while I was with Bank of America. Over these 6 years what I realised was it does not suit very well with my personality because it was a very behind the desk job which is kind of glued to the tax book or your computer all the time. I like interacting with people, I like having these interpersonal relations and I was good at it is what I realised. Then I said that this is something that fits my personality so let me see if there is a role which fits that personality, which is when I decided that its maybe business side where I work better. I started exploring a career in these roles. While I was trying for it, of course, as I mentioned I did not have the product experience so that is something which I started getting my hands on by working at Bank of America, but still there was something which was holding me back, because of which I was not able to make that final move on that business side and I spoke to a lot of colleagues at Bank of America, and to a lot of people who were actually doing the roles I was trying for and that is when I realised doing an MBA would help me in multiple ways. One is of course that it would get me education in the right direction because CA has been a lot about tax and accounts. MBA on the other side has been about marketing, finance and other areas.

Q3. Did people tell you to get this MBA done and they will be happy to take you back?

Ans: Not really; I mean there was no guarantee that if I did an MBA I would get the job, but there was a general direction that its very difficult for a CA to get there but its much easier for an MBA to get there and MBA also gives you these options where you can apply directly through campus placements, so it was more of a risk that I had to take and I decided to take it because I wanted a job which would make me happy.

Q4. How did you go about preparing for your GMAT?

Ans: Again, for a CA to prepare for a GMAT is not an easy thing because after leaving the education field for almost 10 years, I had to get back to studying for GMAT, so it was not easy to begin with. I started reading from the official GMAT notes which was my go-to book, so I solved all the practice papers there. Thereafter I went and took an online test, the free ones whichever were available. Also, I was lucky to get a set of a lot of Manhattan exam papers and Princeton exam papers, so my GMAT preparation was entirely focused on solving as many papers as I could to see where I went wrong and obviously figuring out how to avoid that mistake from the next time. I didn’t study for too long. My studies were max about a month and a half to two months, but I used to stay back after my work, I used to spend an hour and a half in office to practice for my GMAT and on weekends obviously I spent around 6–10 hours depending on the type of the day. My GMAT final scores were 770.

Q5. With this kind of score, did you ever evaluate an MBA abroad from an INSEAD, IE Business School, Harvard?

Ans: There were multiple factors again which went into play for that decision, so one is as I told you, I wanted a client facing role, I did not want a behind the scene role and from my conversations with people I realised that it is very difficult to get those kind of roles outside India which is natural because I don’t have a cultural connect with an American since I am an Indian. If I get a sales job in the US, it is going to be very difficult for me to kind of develop a rapport with my potential client and that would be the case for other countries. People who had gone for MBA abroad, were getting good roles but no client interaction was in outside India. So, that was one reason I did not apply to these colleges. Second is, it was a time when UK was obviously going through breakset, Trump was talking a lot about cutting out visas, so it was no guarantee that after completing an MBA I would land a job over there. Third is, I definitely didn’t want to go for a 2-year MBA at this point in my career. 1-year MBA was all I was looking for which gave me a good mix of knowledge as well as placement opportunities. Again, the choice of schools which I would have were limited in that sense.

I went through the placements of IIMA and IIMB and one thing I noticed that both these schools have a very small batch size about 70–100 people. The kind of profile of the students were also very highly IT or software backed. Also the companies which were coming to hire were looking for more of PM roles or they were from the IT space. I would have been an outliner in the student community. Second is, because of the smaller batch size the type of companies which came, the variety was limited, as also it was highly dominated by the IT sector. ISB was something which had like 900 students so even the companies which came and the roles which were offered were like a buffet and I could really go to roles which I wanted.

Q6. How was the ISB interview experience centered around your work-ex? How important is the role of essays, SOPs? Do they also quiz you about the current affairs?

Ans: No sir, the thing about ISB is because they are coming over here with a lot of work experience, the focus on current affairs is very superficial like it may come up in a conversation and you may talk about it. They don’t quiz you on who is the Prime Minister of the country or what’s happening right now in ABC country. My personal experience was entirely revolved around my essays. So my essays spoke about my achievements at work, what I have done and what I wish to do. So my questions were diving deeper into my experience, the projects which I covered in my essay and them trying to understand how would ISB help me to achieve my goals and if I had the idea of how ISB would fit in my entire career plan. So it was a very simple interview, and it was more conversational.

There are some panels which grill you in the interviews and there are some panels which also make you solve cases during your interview and it was a mixed bag, the panel which I had they interviewed me on my essay.

Q7. Once you got the admit offer, did people at home question you about quitting your job and for 35 lacs of fees?

Ans: Honestly no, that was never a contentious issue at all. Yes the fees was high so it was a thing that I questioned myself about that do I really want to spend 35 lacs on an MBA and give up a sizeable amount of salary for an entire year, and then take the risk of joining somewhere at a salary which is lower than what I used to get. But I read the pros and cons and finally arrived at a decision that I am okay to take a pay card and okay to give up my salary for a year because I ultimately want to look at the next 30 years. At home, thankfully, there were no questions and no doubts.

Q8. How was the life like rebooting as a student?

Ans: That’s been interesting; I thought it would be difficult because I think I suffer from something called attention deficit so I cant really pay attention in class for beyond a few minutes but thankfully education has not been very tough. I have been performing decently well and yes the pressure of assignments was there because it’s a course crunched into a year or two year program crunched into one. There is a lot of pressure with constantly keeping up the end term assignments, mid terms plus activities going on at ISB so its been aggressive, tiring, exhausting all of that, but not bad; its been a good experience.

Q9. What are your top 3 take-aways from your campus life?

Ans: One of the biggest take-away from any MBA I would say is networking. It’s a very cliched answer but your peer group is your strength and I am talking as a CA you don’t have a peer group. Now here I know I have created such a nice peer group at least in my own batch. For example, the role which I am going to would need me to go and sell products to clients later on. This peer group which would ideally be my first port of call, like if I want to connect with someone with ABC company I know that someone from ISB has got a place over there. It’s the person I would reach out to help me connect with the CFO or CXO and I know that I will be able to achieve it because of the ISB value that people do help out other ISB people and second is the network which you have created, so peer group and networking honestly remains the number one take-away from an MBA course for me. Other than that, it has been a very refreshing change to come back to a campus life where you are not worried about your 9 to 5. Its been a very refreshing change to come back to campus. Professors in ISB, we have a lot of resident faculty and visiting faculty from all the top B-schools and they are very helpful, so today I know that it’s a rich treasure trove of knowledge that resides with them and tomorrow if I need some specific guidance, I can always reach out to my professors and I am likely to get responses even from the professors from Harvard or Stanford on any of the things I am stuck.

Q10. One thing I heard is that the professors who are in a visiting mode, they are operating out of the suitcase, so that emotional connect would be built with a professor on campus. Does that happen?

Ans: That happens obviously with the resident faculty and at ISB we do try to kind of invite some of the professors for parties which happens in the studios over here, so that way there is a little bit of the connect but as you rightly said that they are here for about a month and a half so there is not a very deep emotional connect which you get but that does not mean that you can’t reach out to them for help.

Q11. What has been your experience with regards to placement season?

Ans: Placement season has been a nervous thing for everyone on the campus and it becomes more so at ISB because the competition is very tough, so the bigger batch size brings in a lot of roles but it also brings in a lot more competition. There are some coveted roles and everyone is trying for them. We had a time when for 25 roles at McKinsey we had 500 people who had applied, so you can imagine the odds you are competing against for those roles, so yes, it’s a scary time of the year. For CAs however, there are good roles, obviously consulting remains an option for chartered accountants not with 10 years of work-ex but if you are coming with 3–4 years of work-ex, there is always a potential to get into roles in consulting. There are some decent finance roles, there are these treasury roles like Reliance, Bajaj, came with treasury roles here on campus. There are also some support or back office roles with some banks which came to hire and then there are some front office roles like the ones I landed up Citibank sales role, and there was HDFC wealth manager role, so there is a good option for CAs to pick from.

Q12. What will be your advice to future aspirants?

Ans: If you are planning to come to ISB, be very clear about the reason you are doing the MBA and how ISB will help you really get there, because you are investing 35 lacs and probably the fees are only going to go up from next year or so. So you are investing a lot of money, you are also spending a year of your time and giving up your existing salary so be very careful about the roles you are going to get once you clear out of ISB, does it meet your aspirations or no and if they do, once you are in ISB start preparing to get those roles.