My Summer Internship at CDCA

This summer, I have been able to intern for a management consultancy, focused on delivering business transformation in the regulatory environment within financial services. I have had the brilliant opportunity to learn from highly established professionals in this space, and contribute towards the continued growth of the company. I have also been working with Louis, my fellow intern and dear friend. My thoughts below detail my first week here, and what I have learnt thus far!

My First Week at CDCA

My internship has so far been an interesting and rewarding opportunity. I have worked on a multitude of projects, including brand strategy, talent procurement, and social media management since joining early last week. I have also been able to work on research articles, releasing CDCA’s first opinion piece on the outlook for the growth of the UK consulting sector.

I am also keen to view our final thought piece on blockchain technology, in partnership with Verum Capital - a global leader in new technologies.

As a first-year Chemistry student at university, I am glad to work on projects that interest me and is not necessarily focused on the science background. Being interested in the financial services sector, the internship allows me to learn more about it and contribute towards many original pieces depicting various news events, and in particular financial regulation. I would say that my chemistry skills have been utilised, particularly in gathering the data that I used in my first article. It was very similar to the various laboratory sessions at Uni, where I was writing formal lab reports!

Being involved in many finance roles in societies at university, such as an equity research analyst, results in the Research Articles and opinion pieces being the most interesting things to work on. At uni, most of the research I do is based around the capital markets, involving the price action movements and studying the technical movement of equity stocks, which has come in handy when analysing Bloomberg data and company reports so far! At the moment, I am researching the impacts of robotics process automation on the financial services industry and to publish a white paper based around this. Interestingly enough, it seems automation is not back office’s worst enemy, as I previously thought, as most roles based there are instead to be reallocated and mundane tasks to be completed by RPA bots. It is a viewpoint I look forward to exploring in the next article.

Other responsibilities have been building the internal side of the company, including brand strategy, marketing, and business development. CDCA has a plan to grow into a much larger consultancy this year and to be involved in these discussions and contribute towards it is something which bears a huge amount of responsibility – one that I am most proud of. In addition to this, I have had input into the making of the company playbook and the focus of CDCA, and how we differentiate ourselves. I look forward to seeing some of our ideas and plans to be implemented shortly.

To conclude, this internship has allowed me to add great value to the growth of CDCA. The level of freedom and independent work has so far taught me the ability to have confidence and opinion in all the work that has been produced. In addition to this, working in a collaborative environment has allowed me to discuss and generate ideas that have helped us make a solid amount of progress in a relatively short time we have been working together.