I am considering taking the CFA but I am not sure if it makes sense in my situation and therefore wanted some thoughts. I work for a MNC and planning to move into finance role. However I do not see any CFAs and was wondering if CFA only makes sense if you want to go into IB, Pvt. equity or maybe treasury. From a company perspective I guess CFA might not have much weight (except treasury or investor relations.). I may be completely wrong here and therefore would like to hear your thoughts.
The CFA is best for investment decision making roles, i.e. as a financial analyst or portfolio manager. It’s not really required to get into IB, private equity or treasury although it obviously has some relevance and use for these positions.
When you say “corporate finance”, are you talking about the people who do FP&A/Business Analysis, or the people that do corporate development/M&A, or something in a derivatives/risk department?
I work in FP&A now and nobody here has both the ambition and brains to complete the CFA program. Not sure what to make of that. Does that mean that the CFA is irrelevant? Maybe. At the very least, it would be relevant to mergers and if I ever moved to an industry that relied on commodities, maybe that would look good in the interview.
Agree with the above - in a more FP&A type role, it wont really make a difference. I work in that area and I would say I have only had a few people even really know what it is when I interviewed. Even that, in some cases it worked against me (if the role was a little more accounting type role, like Controller, they didnt think I would stay in such a position and largely because the guy appreciated the CFA).
Generally speaking in corp fin (for those types of roles) I get more value out of the CPA.
Although these days, it’s probably hard to find Treasurers who are not CFA’s…
It really depends on the company, it’s not really about the job title because the job titles nowadays are very misleading. you don’t really know what they actually do knowing their titles.
And if your company engages in hedging, M&A, fund raising (equity/ debt), and a lot of FX transactions, i would say these are more CFA (or finance degree in general) discipline than accounting?
thank you all. I think this is some food for thought. My company is not doing M&A but there is a lot of FX transactions, however I am not sure. Also if I look at the options I have, CFA seems to be the best considering I dont have the time for a full time Masters. I could go for an executive course but its really costly and again you still need to invest weekends, etc which is currently difficult due to my work profile. CFA is a tough option, no doubt ,but in the scheme of things I think its worth a try.
