I spent last week working with the Firm Analytics and Competitive Insights teams downstairs. Now I’ve moved up to the ninth floor, and this week will be spent with Mr. Rawlins and his team in Treasury.
Yesterday, a guy named Tyler emailed me access to all of their data that keeps track of their business done in Canadian Dollars (CAD). He asked me to make a spreadsheet that would sort all the data into the different of accounts that they’re held in. There are two different types of accounts–Timed Deposit and Repos, that are held in the Bank of Montreal and Royal Canada Bank. So it’s essentially tracking how much money each of those four accounts had in them, each day, for the last year and a half. So far, the spreadsheet has over 1600 rows of data.
When they assigned that to me, I informed them that I’d used Excel approximately four times ever, in my entire life, and I wasn’t sure they should be entrusting me with the organization of billions of dollars. They just kind of laughed at me and I had to figure it out. But most of it is copying and pasting, just a time-consuming task that no one had gotten around to yet.
Today, they showed me how they manage all the Canadian money in the twelve(ish) different accounts there. The woman who manages it, Susan, has to go into their online treasury portal and make sure that each account has enough money in it for all the estimated withdrawals of the day, so that they aren’t charged for overdraft.
Something that I’ve found really interesting is the relationship Edward Jones has with the banks. I thought of EDJ as the customer and the bank as the service provider–naturally making the bank do as much as they can to provide EDJ with the best service so that they don’t move to another one. But what seems to actually be the case is that everything EDJ does kind of annoys the banks, and they have to try really hard to be low-maintenance so that the bank doesn’t close the account.
For Wednesday and Friday. I’ll keep working on this spreadsheet and hang out in treasury, and sit in on a couple more meetings. On Thursday I’ll go to the North campus in Maryland Heights to shadow Steve Ford in sourcing. I’m not super sure what exactly that is, but I’m sure I’ll find out!
And one last thing–I see a lot of articles about how bachelor’s degrees are useless and the only reason to get one is because it’s a prerequisite for lots of jobs. But you definitely need one degree, and maybe two to be able to work here. Otherwise, I think it would be very hard to figure out what’s going on (at least that’s my experience so far). The rhetoric is extremely high-level, and there are lots of business and economic theories put into practice. You really do need to know about all of it and be fluent in the language.
(One last thing part 2: I haven’t been attaching pictures because I can’t take them of anything really, because it’s all very confidential financial information. I’ll try to take a picture of my lunch of something.)
I’ll do another post on Friday when I figure out what the Sourcing department does!
I think that the fact that you get to work with such large sums of money is simply astounding. I honestly believe that I would be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the operations that go on there.
I’m honestly overwhelmed by it too. Someone described $80 million to me as a “rounding error” yesterday.
So far, just a couple weeks in, I think you’re the second person to mention (one told me directly) how useful it would be to know Excel.
What sort of things does Edward Jones do that annoys the banks?
If they move their money around too much, convert Canadian dollars into USD more often than necessary, accidentally overdraw (usually due to a technology issue), etc. The banks charge them for every little thing, from calling customer support to adding users to the online portal.
Okay that makes sense. Thanks.