A brief introduction:

Hello Everyone! My name is Ratanak Panha Duong.

I started off my career in the corporate finance division at the Cambodian office of an international Asian-Pacific life insurance company, Prudential Plc, working in corporate budgeting, capital management, financial analytics, and revenue forecasting. While working through the financial projections and analysis, I found myself performing a lot of data management, analysis and generating insights to present to management on our current standings and financial positions in our company. I began learning how to code and automate parts of my work relating to data and found I liked it a lot.

As I continued, I found out that we have a data science and analytics division in the company, and I figured I might be interested in that. I started networking with the team and then, without long consideration, I ended up moving to that division. After learning, growing, and acquiring industry knowledge and technical experiences in data science, I finally left Prudential Plc and joined another mega insurance company in the Asia-Pacific region, AIA Cambodia, as a lead digital transformation specialist and data scientist. Here, I lead the team to perform on grand scale projects related to financial analytics, data science, machine learning, operational digital transformation through cloud services and, of course, artificial intelligence. I found out as more and more financial services companies adopt technology, an increasing number of opportunities to collect and store data began to emerge. These experiences lead me to pursue the FDP Charter which hones my abilities to take full advantage of the new data available, especially in the financial services industry, while riding along this huge wave of digitalization.

Why did I take up the FDP challenge?

I pursued the FDP designation to accelerate my career in data science and corporate finance, by acquiring current market and conceptual knowledge in financial data science, getting worldwide exposure to various people of different experiences in related fields and industries and treating my intellectual hunger for applying data science and AI into the finance world.

What is great about FDP:

The FDP curriculum has helped me a lot with their available webinars, and up-to-date articles on the current practices in the financial services industry. As I learned throughout the FDP curriculum and materials, I found myself to be enthusiastically excited to see what’s out there in the world of finance and technology beyond my current experiences. Beyond sheer enthusiasm, I also have made plans for my education in corporate finance, investment management, data science and machine learning in regions away from my usual Asian-pacific region thanks to the help of the FDP.

The FDP designation has expanded my understanding of the overall financial services industry and how AI and machine learning play their parts in affecting those companies in that industry. I have already applied a few techniques that I learned throughout the FDP curriculum materials into my work, and I hope to use it even more as I progress further in my career. More importantly, the FDP designation has opened my eyes to see bigger challenges and opportunities from all other sub-fields that piqued my interest and excited me to pursue them later in my career if not as soon as I get the chance to do so.

I really enjoyed the webinars and industry newsletters provided by the FDP team. These materials added great value to my career such as bringing me bigger and wider exposures to the world of finance and technology especially in the western regions of the world. As far as belonging to a global community of financial data professionals, I found it to be very beneficial for me to learn from people with similar career interests, talking about their own professional and industry experience and, of course, sharing my own knowledge and experiences as well.

I am early in my career, so with these exposures and opportunities, I am able to accelerate my career and education at great speed and also understand more clearly what I want in the future for my career and how I want to make an impact in the world of finance and data throughout the globe.

My advice for aspiring industry professionals:

As an aspiring industry professional, I think you should be focusing more on how to maximize your opportunities to get exposure to a variety of different areas of professions, industries and, of course, knowledge base. From my experience, almost all major economies in the world are now beginning to digitalize and adopt technology to enhance their current practices and operational capabilities. Any organization or entity not doing so will find itself falling behind those that currently are doing so. As we move longer in time, more and more information and data will be stored digitally and shared throughout industries. A small piece of advice from me would be to be alert to this change and prepare yourself to embrace it as it will affect almost every industry there is.

About Ratanak Panha Duong

Ratanak Panha is the Lead Data Scientist and Digital Transformation Specialist at AIA Cambodia.