"Endless learning possibilities and amazing people” - meet Joonas

By Joonas Karaila (25)

I graduated recently with my master’s degree from Tampere University where I studied Industrial Engineering & Management and Applied Mathematics.

I’m one of the interns in the Future Finance Professionals (FFP) program 2022. I'm currently, working as Assistant Analyst in FX Data and Insights competence team in the Markets e-Trading organisation. I’m also part of Next Gen FX value stream, where we work in automating liquidity management and FX hedging for Nordea’s customers. Our main products are AutoFX Liquidity Management and AutoFX Hedging.

My responsibilities vary from smaller ad hoc tasks such as analysing what’s happened with a customer lately to larger projects such as creating a program for finding patterns from derivative contract time series data. There are a few larger projects with longer time horizons which I work on when I don’t have anything more urgent going on, or if a project has top priority. My work day can change quickly if something sudden happens, and for instance there’s an urgent need for an analysis.

Communication is key to success

My job requires great problem solving skills, since that’s what it’s all about, as well as doing different analyses for various stakeholders. The solutions should often be general enough so that the solution can be repeated elsewhere easily. At the same time, it is important to understand how much work should be put into the solution. 

I have noticed the benefit of this approach multiple times during the short time of two months I’ve worked at Nordea. Personally, I believe communication is the key to success in addition to understanding the business. Great problem solving skills are a must but understanding how the analyses and solutions are tied to business problems helps in solving the problems.

I got a chance to meet my team face to face on a trip to Copenhagen and it was wonderful to see how like-minded they were and how much they knew. I had great chats with different people at the trading floor there, and I got to learn a lot in only a few days. I had a great time speaking about different ideas. I believe there is no problem that could not be solved by combining the diverse skillsets of different professionals in the different teams.

Driven to succeed and very nice

Finally, I’d like to end the blog by mentioning the other interns in the Future Finance Professional program. They are all driven to succeed in their roles and they are all nice people. We have had few ‘after-works’, and other events where we have had time to speak and learn about each other. Everyone is a person I’d like to work with in the future.

Also, we’re all very different which is a good thing. There is a need for diverse group of people who complement each other in different ways and help each other succeed in the common goal. Some people like me are more technical, while others are more sales-minded for example.

It is not possible to flourish alone on the large projects, but by working together. By talking to other interns it is possible to hear what their jobs are like and hear about the problems they are working with. I believe sensing and having intellectual curiosity is important in the beginning of the career as there is so much that you don’t know that you don’t know about. The FFP program makes it possible to learn and do so much at the beginning of your career.

Stay tuned for more FFP blogs. Meanwhile, meet some of Joonas' FFP colleagues in this blog with Katriina, Miko and Aaro.