Limali in Fintech-Land

Insights
3 min read
By Limali Fonseka

When I first joined WealthOS as a product owner, I had almost zero knowledge of wealth management or of financial matters. I wasn't even that interested in the idea of finance and hadn't learned much on the subjects. But when I joined WealthOS, the knowledge of the business we are in was crucial in order to understand our product and the direction we are heading.

So I had a few sessions with our CEO, Anton on what I can study and methods I can use to study these topics. He suggested some different ways to learn all this from an interesting point of view. Then I started learning on my own. If you want to understand what wealth management is then you have to learn what financial needs are and why people want to manage wealth in the first place.

When I started learning about financial products, personal finance, and securities, it hit me strongly that I didn’t know many of the words I was hearing. So I thought of creating a glossary with all these new words in order to keep everything I learn in one place and not miss out on anything I came across. As I was the first of the new hiring cycle, I’ve been told to document anything I learn in our knowledge hub. So this made my idea even easier and I had a whole confluence space to myself to document any learning materials in a way I saw as necessary. Of course, I got guidance and tasks and suggestions from all senior members but they gave me the freedom to arrange things on my own. Which was a very exciting turnout for me.

I can talk about four main things I learned about finance in these first few weeks. Personal finance, financial products, investing, and wealth managers. Some of these weren’t directly related to WealthOS business vision but as a product manager, background knowledge always comes in handy and not to mention my own financial benefit!

Personal finance is a good topic to research if you want to get rich smartly. 😉 So I read a lot on this, watched videos, and followed a course, and to my surprise, something I never thought would be interesting to me ended up becoming something I would watch and read in my leisure time. I learned about retirement planning, and the retirement methods we have here in Sri Lanka against what they have in foreign countries like the USA and UK. Sadly learning materials are not that common for what’s available in Sri Lanka. But as a CS graduate, I have some decent search skills. So I was able to put together some details and review them with our subject-matter-expert CEO. Of course, we had some really interesting conversations about some of these topics where I wasn’t clear. I’m not willing to go through every rabbit hole I see but some of these holes were interesting enough to expect a wonderland.

Resources I found helpful:

For me learning all about stocks and funds and indexes became fun as I did it on my own and had people clear any doubts. Of course,learning styles can be different for each one of us but at WealthOS they got my opinion on how I want to carry out my studies and helped me to initiate and continue it. So actually this is the reason that I didn’t stop from learning when I got clear on the basics and continued down more rabbit holes. I started reading personal finance books and watching movies. Check out ‘The Big Short’ guys, worth a try. So this is how I got all excited about these things even though it was necessary for my job. All of this was new to me but I ended up having a great time studying and hence loving my new job.🤩