The finance industry cares about how people and organisations manage their money, including how they get money, where they put it, and how they use it. It also looks at the risks involved in these activities and suggests ways to deal with them.
Finance is a field with a lot of interesting and well-paid jobs. The examples below are just a few.
More people work in commercial banking than in any other part of the financial services business. Banks give people the chance to meet a wide range of people and build a clientele. Most people who work in banking start as tellers and then move on to other services like leasing, credit card banking, trade credit, and international finance.
As the name suggests, a career in corporate finance means you will work for a company and your main job will be to find money for the company. This money will be used to grow the business, buy other companies, and secure the future of the company. In a business, you might start out as a financial officer.
As a financial planner, you may also work for a company, but you will mostly focus on just one part of money: planning for the future. You need to know a lot about investments, taxes, and estate planning. Or, you could be a consultant who helps people plan their finances, like figuring out how to save for retirement or pay for their kids' college.
With more than a trillion dollars in sales every year, the insurance industry looks like one of the best places to work in finance. In 2005, about 2.5 million people in the US worked in the insurance industry, which is mostly thought of as the business of managing risk and predicting problems. You could work in insurance as an underwriter, sales rep, customer service rep, asset manager, or actuary, among other jobs.
If you want to work in investment banking, you will have to worry about issuing and securing financial assets and helping investors buy, manage, or trade them. As a bonus, you can work at one of the top investment banks on Wall Street, such as Merrill Lynch, Salomon Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, or Goldman Sachs.
