Transcript

Anna Talerico (00:15)
Welcome back to another episode of Careers in Finance on FinPod. And I’m Anna Talerico, the CEO of CFI and totally thrilled to be here today with Scott Powell, co-founder of CFI, a very special guest on Careers in Finance. Welcome, Scott.

Scott (00:33)
I am delighted to be here and talking to you.

Anna Talerico (00:37)
Well, thank you for doing this. You are a colleague and most of my Careers in Finance interviews are with CFI members, community members, or finance professionals. And one of the things that I love about that podcast is that it shows the various paths that people can have in finance and in their professional development and also shows the paths that people come into their professional journey.

And I think there’s these moments for us, pivotal moments in our professional development where we might not know what’s next or we might just be on the journey and not sure where it’s taking us. And to interview so many finance professionals as they reflect back on their careers, I think, is just, you know, the audience really seems to be responding well to hearing these stories, and I find them so inspiring. So it struck me the other day that you have such a unique

path into your current role as a co-founder and chief content officer here at CFI, I thought we should definitely have you on the podcast as a guest. So thanks for joining me.

Scott (01:39)
I’m delighted.

Anna Talerico (01:41)
All right, so let’s get going. We’ll talk a lot about your current role and what you’re doing, and I have some questions for you there. But I want to, I always start this podcast with your origin story, how you got into finance and did you always know, you know, was it more of an accidental path and just sort of even what do you study? So, take us back to how you kind of came to be, you know, entering the field of finance, and did it relate to what you were studying at school?

Scott (02:10)
Yeah, great question. So one of the things I tell young people nowadays always is the power of a mentor. And that’s because I did not have one. And so I call my career an accidental career. And I finally found what my passion was by finding what I didn’t like doing. And…

that’s one reason I’ve mentored so many students over the years because I wanted to be that guide, that sounding board. Now, I did economics at university. I didn’t get excited about economics. I love the numbers. I love the number crunching. I love the regression analysis. But listen, I have a lot of gray hair. This is when computers, when I did regression analysis, you booked out a computer lab at the university with those big magnetic tapes that were…

and a gigantic computer and the regression analysis would take, you know, 12 hours. You’d come back 12 hours later. So…

I didn’t really want to go the economics route. So then the question is, what do I do? And really it was accounting and finance that really called to me. Also, I didn’t want a career in education. I had done a master’s degree, but I couldn’t really go into the work environment or I could continue to do a PhD. And that just wasn’t my passion, to do research,

to be in academia, it was really to be in the business world. So, one of the things though I look back on is that I had a hiccup. I really wanted to go into finance right away, but I did have my parents as mentors, but my parents weren’t able to go to university. And so when I told them, hey, I wanna do investment banking, they said, we would rather you do accounting. We think that’s better for you. So,

Anna Talerico (03:39)
Yeah.

Mm.

Scott (04:03)
so anyway, and I love my parents and so I took their advice and I started in accounting. I started in London, England with a firm called EY. Realized I hated accounting but persevered because I thought getting the designation was good. But then knew I wanted to go into finance. And I could tell you more there but so that was another accidental step. And I then when I was in finance, I’m going to tell you the next accidental step. I was sent to Hong Kong to teach

evaluation and accounting to new analysts, and I got to spend a year there, and suddenly, I found my passion. I thought I didn’t mind doing the finance. I love that more than accounting, but I love teaching finance and accounting. So I flew back to London. It was a year-long secondment, and I thought, how do I actually pivot my career?

Now that I’ve stumbled into, you know, started with accounting, started with economics, then went to accounting, then stumbled in finance and realized I wanted to teach finance. So sorry, that’s quite a long origin story.

Anna Talerico (05:04)
No, we’re gonna spend a lot of time on teaching, obviously, for sure, you know, your current role and just being even an entrepreneur, right? Your journey took you to entrepreneurship here at CFI. Just really quickly though, before I forget, economics, was that a choice to study because you cared about it and were interested in it or was it a choice because you said, well, that’s a solid thing to do?

Scott (05:29)
It was a solid thing to do. It was kind of like, so I was the first person in my family to ever go to university. My parents were amazing in terms of they just wanted, they wanted to see their kids do better and have more opportunities and possibilities. And so I felt I need a career that actually leads into business. So it was either business or economics. And I love the math around the economics.

Anna Talerico (05:34)
Amazing.

Scott (05:53)
And I thought, you know, there’s economists at all the investment banks. You don’t have to be an economist just at an academic institution. You can work for a central bank. You can work for the IMF. You can work for JP Morgan. So that was somewhat intentional.

Anna Talerico (06:08)
Okay, yeah. And so then your first role, I want to talk a little bit about that. EY, you were in London? Okay. So how long did you stay in that role? And give us a sense of like, what was that like day in the life? You know, what were you working on in that first role?

Scott (06:15)
Yeah, London, England, yeah.

Yeah, so basically I feel very privileged about the decade I grew up in because one of the things that’s really changed is when I got a job, I didn’t have to know anything. I was trained by my employer. And in fact, what was amazing about EY is I knew nothing about accounting, knew nothing about finance. And I was shocked that they basically paid me a salary, but six months of the year I was in a classroom training.

And that was a powerful message about investing in your people, right? And I was doing everything that you need to do to become an English chartered accountant. But listen, I started and realized I didn’t like it.

Anna Talerico (07:08)
I’m going to go to bed.

Scott (07:08)
But I was gonna persevere because I thought it’s gonna help me in finance because most of finance, you need to understand financial statements. And one of the things that I never look back on is that I was always better at financial statement analysis and just modeling and valuation than any of my peers because I’d started with accounting. But the thing that distresses me now is that now new analysts need to come already skilled, right?

Anna Talerico (07:27)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, it’s true. Yeah, yeah. And that’s, you know, it’s very true in finance, which is so interesting because as you experienced, there’s such a long rich tradition and history of training the new hires intensively and specifically, but even, you know, that’s shifting where people need to come already with the skills, even the new hires or the entry-level hires. But that’s not even unique to finance. We’re seeing that in so many industries. I mean, for on the other end of the spectrum, right? It used to be,

that a record label would sign an artist and they would develop the artist. And now they want the artist to have their audience already and already have created the albums. Same with authors, right? You get a book publishing deal after you’ve written the book and have built the audience. So I think that is just true too of like modern society and what employers are expecting for sure. So you did that role, you got some training, didn’t really love it. Was it an EY where then you were sent to do some training or when did that happen

when you were sent to Hong Kong?

Scott (08:37)
That was just my last six months with EY. Or last year with EY. I came back and thought I’m not staying with EY now that I know that I want to be on the finance side. So I started on the audit and tax side and I want to be more on the finance side. And then ended up getting asked to go to Hong Kong and that’s when I came back and resigned.

Anna Talerico (08:42)
Okay, yeah. Okay.

And so what did you do after that? So you did that. You had the year. It sounded like an amazing experience in Hong Kong. by the way, why do you think they selected you or asked you to go train? You had no experience training people.

Scott (09:05)
Yeah.

So I think, I mean, hindsight’s 20/20 Like you don’t realize your strengths when you’re in your 20s. And I realized, they clearly saw my strength was in service to others, I was super smart, knew what I was doing, but at the same time I was caring and, so I think they just saw that combination in me.

Anna Talerico (09:32)
Yeah, yeah. So you went, you did it, you loved it. You came back, you decided to resign. What was your next role after EY?

Scott (09:40)
Yeah, so what happened was I didn’t resign right away because I was rational. I needed money, a salary. But I was trying to, I was starting to then explore, should I go back into education? Like maybe be a high school teacher? Should I become a professor? But the…

Anna Talerico (09:45)
That’s it.

Scott (09:55)
But what I realized was my passion was really finance and banking. And I didn’t, I really wanted to teach adult learners. I didn’t want to be in a classroom per se at a school or a university because I then knew I could make a difference in people’s lives. So there was a firm I joined that had been set up, I think for five or six years before I joined them, a group of accountants and bankers who had started building a business focused on training new analysts who were joining banks and insurance,

companies and asset managers. And remember this was before the internet. So it was hard to find. And I remember finding a recruiter who then said, you should consider this firm. And if it wasn’t for that recruiter, I would not be where I am because there were very few firms that were doing this. And

Anna Talerico (10:45)
Yeah.

Scott (10:47)
I knew I was with the right family because everyone was a banker or an accountant or some finance and banking professional who had this passion for teaching, which is kind of unique, right? A lot of my colleagues were just passionate about investment banking or asset management. But to have that combination, I think is more rare than you realize.

Anna Talerico (11:08)
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, one thing that’s interesting too, is you think about, well, actually, let me ask you. You had worked a few years, couple of years, then leave to go do the teaching, found the right place to be able to do that. And your career, which then really that formed the bulk of your career, this is what you have done professionally, is teach aspiring and current finance and banking professionals.

Your career has spanned such a broad, well, a breadth of topics and sectors within finance. And I think that this is maybe we’ll peel back the curtain a little bit on teaching and how teaching is really about teaching yourself and how do you translate these concepts to others, right? Because you have taught, is there a subject in finance and banking that you haven’t taught? No. Yeah.

Scott (12:02)
No, no, other than like programming languages, some of the newer programming languages.

Anna Talerico (12:08)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So how did you go about that? You know, you get your first client that you’re working with that is in a maybe a field that you don’t have the depth of like, how do you prepare yourself to go in in those early days to train on these concepts? What did you do? Yeah.

Scott (12:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, so I’ll give you an example. I mean, I was teaching a lot of people in something called sales and trading or the capital markets. And that’s where we see the trading of asset classes like equities and fixed income, commodities, currencies. And I was training these people who are trading these asset classes. And I’m teaching them how to trade them. And the way it…

Anna Talerico (12:48)
I’m going to go.

Scott (12:53)
I think what also helped me was there’s two things I think one is I’m a perfectionist. Number two, I work hard. Maybe there’s a three or four things. Number three, what I would always do is I’d sit down on the desk with a few people who are doing the role and say hey, Can I just be a fly on the wall? I just want to see what’s the most important thing this new analyst needs to do and really absorb the job.

Then I would go back and create materials. My job was really to take complicated concepts and turn them into things that were easy to understand. And I’ll tell you why I did that, because I needed to do that. Because I was looking at something complicated and I needed to break it down for myself so that I could understand it. And when I could understand it, then I could teach it. And then I realized that was my true gift. The ability to, because I was doing it for myself, not for others, but the…

The trick of taking something complex, turning it into easy digestible chunks was my true gift. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 30 years.

Anna Talerico (13:58)
Yeah, yeah. And so lucky that you found that gift so early on in your career. So you have been teaching for how many years did you say?

Scott (14:12)
It has to be 30 because even when I was in Hong Kong, I think that was 93. And I wrote 2024.

Anna Talerico (14:15)
Amazing, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, you know, something about when I think about, you know, Scott Powell, 30 years ago, starting to go in to train on things that you didn’t yet have experience. And the Scott Powell today, who just the depth and breadth again of your experiences is remarkable. I mean, there’s just not a question that comes up every day that you don’t have experience in and, you know, lots of experience in, and you’re such an incredible leader for our

team that creates our curriculum and our training content. But you go back to those 30 years ago, I think there’s something really there that comes out in a lot of my interviews and careers in finance, which is that when I ask people, you know, what advice would you give to somebody that’s aspiring? A lot of the advice comes back to just do it, right? You don’t wait. You don’t wait till you’re ready.

You just, if you want to do something, you see a path for yourself. Like you just got jump in. You didn’t wait to say, I need more experience to do this. Or you knew that that’s what you wanted to do. And you jumped in and you know, you can pick up your head 30 years later. And it was just like this really rich, rewarding career that really probably just started from you deciding you were going to jump in and do it.

Scott (15:30)
Yeah, I think my big message, I was thinking on my life, what kept me going was I was clear about what I liked and disliked. And when I knew what I liked, I was not gonna wait, I’m moving on it. And I had confidence that I could do it. Which often people don’t have, but what I think everyone can have is hard work. Like what’s really seen me through is I’ve always worked hard.

And so I’m working hard to learn how to teach something. I worked hard at EY, I worked hard at university. And when I think about my career, having a bit of confidence, but working hard and moving and not waiting, have been the best things in my life.

Anna Talerico (15:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, which is great advice for anyone, right?

Scott (16:14)
Yeah, very much so.

Anna Talerico (16:16)
So tell me then about the transition from classroom trainer, live in-person trainer, which is how the training was done, to entrepreneur and co-founder of a company that does online training. Like did you ever, as you were going through the years in the classroom and doing live training, did you ever envision that you would be an entrepreneur or that there might be another chapter for you afterwards that would look different than classroom training?

Scott (16:44)
I sometimes call myself the failed entrepreneur who got lucky. And the reason I tell you that is I actually think I’m going to go back to that theme of hard work. So with that, with the firm I was with in London, England, I ended up moving to New York and opening an office for us and had to find clients. And you really end up being an entrepreneur because if you don’t, you think you get the clients or you fail.

Anna Talerico (16:51)
You

Scott (17:14)
And then I opened an office for us in Canada, the same thing. But the problem with classroom-based training was you’re selling time. And I think I’ve always been an entrepreneur. And I’ve always thought, how do I scale this business?

It’s too hard to scale. So that was always on my mind. But then what I was getting in the classroom was we were finding, I was finding that I was winning clients where I didn’t expect it. Yes, I won a big contract with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, but I was also being asked to come to business schools.

And the reason was, what we kind of talked about is business schools wanted their students to get the jobs on Wall Street. So they wanted them to be hyper-prepped. So they aced those interviews. And that part of the business was growing dramatically across North America. So myself or my team was going to business schools in the US and Canada, because they were all competing. And at the same time,

my colleague and I had led a project to create some e-learning for our Wall Street clients. And the business schools were dying to get access to it. And particularly individual students. And I would often give them just free access because I just wanted to give back. But it became clear to me that…

there was a retail play here because learners were having to educate themselves on their own and didn’t have access. And so that was the idea. And it worked.

Anna Talerico (18:54)
And I think it’s just a short eight years later, right? Millions of learners impacted hundreds of thousands of certification designation holders, tens of thousands of active CFI community members. It’s just really been, it’s an incredible what you’ve built and shows the popularity of what we do and how we do it. And also I think just the need for people to…

Scott (18:58)
Yeah.

Anna Talerico (19:22)
It’s oftentimes, you know, they want to have some hands-on skills as they’re just getting started, but oftentimes they’ve been in seat, you know, and just wanting to grow their skills, work more effectively or successfully or get into a new role. It’s remarkable to me. I’ve had recently two people on the podcast who are, were seasoned professionals when they decided to get their FMVA because there was a gap, you know, there are, there was a need in the business. You know, one was a CFO and there was a need in the business and he wanted to get

his modeling and valuation skills up. So it’s remarkable that something that really speaks to people at the beginning of their career, but is, you know, even very seasoned professionals as well. What an incredible testament to what you’ve built.

Scott (20:02)
Yeah.

No, but Anna, you’ve hit a key point. You have a thesis, but you have to also go where the market is. And I had the thesis, it was all people at the start of the career. What I didn’t realize is that so many people mid-career.

Anna Talerico (20:17)
Yeah. Yeah.

Scott (20:17)
We’re trying to upskill. And that was being, so that’s kind of just made, gave me a warm heart because I was making an impact on a much wider group of people than I originally expected. And so, and that’s been reflected in our courses. We’ve tried to create courses that are also more advanced, more sophisticated for maybe those people mid -career. We also have, you know, so we scale our courses. So are you new to the skill? Are you, are you trying to refresh the skill? Are you trying to go deep with a new skill? So that’s why we have all these different difficulty levels that we’ve incorporated

to meet all those different needs.

Anna Talerico (20:48)
Yeah, yeah. So two questions about careers and finance, and then I think we’re done for today. One is you have been a trainer in classroom, live, remote, virtual, recorded training, all the different types of training. And there is a whole group of future trainers coming up behind you, right? This need has not gone away.

If somebody wanted to be a successful trainer in finance and banking, what advice would you give them? What makes for, you know, a successful trainer? And yeah, tell me about your advice for them.

Scott (21:29)
Okay, the first thing is, and I’ve talked to some of my colleagues about this, there was a saying that if you can’t do the job you teach, and I realized it’s the exact opposite. You have to know the job better than the person doing the job because you have to then teach the person to do the job. And,

that’s why when people, I’ve met so many people in so many industries, people think I was on a trading floor. They think I worked for an asset manager. They said, what asset manager did you work for? Which, you know, what trading floor were you on? And it’s because to act, and I say, sorry, I haven’t been, but right, so the key thing is,

You need to have technical knowledge, but you also need a passion for teaching. And if that passion isn’t there, it shows up in the classroom. It shows up even in the design of e-learning. And you have to put the learner’s needs first and foremost. And so I always think about training, whether it’s online asynchronous or in the classroom, is the learner has to be your center point. Because if you’re doing everything for that learner,

you’re going to crack it. You’re going to do well. Because that’s all I did was always focus on the learner.

Anna Talerico (22:47)
Yeah, and I think you’ve embedded that into the culture at CFI, you know, where we’re always trying to think about what can help our learners drive successful outcomes. Like what are their goals and like how can, what services or content do we need to provide to help them reach those outcomes? So you’ve certainly infused that in the organization, I think. So keeping a learner at the heart of everything that they do would be one. So what about now on the other side of your career, you have

met and interacted with and trained so many aspiring professionals who’ve gone on to have their fulfilling careers? What do you think is, if you were to think about some of the people that you’ve come across in your career that really had successful paths that they were able to achieve professionally what they wanted to in their careers, like.

What would you say are some common characteristics where you say like these are characteristics you need to really succeed in your role if you’re going to be in finance and banking?

Scott (23:50)
Yeah, I was thinking about one learner I taught in the classroom probably 15 years ago. He just came to mind. And he was at a business school. And I was going around the room saying, what type of job do you want? And he said, I’ve wanted to be in investment banking since I was four years old. And I just went, no you haven’t. But in fact, he had. And

Anna Talerico (24:12)
(Laughs)

Hmm.

Scott (24:19)
everything he did was intentional. He was the hardest-working person I had ever met. I ended up mentoring him. And I met lots of people like this. They tend to be, they do a ton of research. They’re really clear on where they wanna go. They actually get the skills needed to get that job as quickly as possible. So they move fast, they work hard, and they go above and beyond.

And I’m sure that’s similar in other industries, but I know in finance and banking, that world moves very fast. And so you need to even move faster to differentiate yourself from everyone else.

Anna Talerico (24:59)
Yeah. Well, I think there’s this thread to this, you know, thinking about being intentional. When the Careers in Finance podcast, I interviewed people that had a really intentional path. They knew where exactly they wanted to go and they checked every box along the way and others that it was quite an accidental path and quite a winding journey. But regardless,

there’s a common theme that they talk about being successful as being intentional about goals when they set them. You know, I had Josh McLean on the other day. He’s a, a finance manager at Nike, FMV a holder, but also he has all three levels of a CFA and he got his FMV a, by the way, after his three levels of CFA, he did the three levels of CFA, like super quick. and I said, you know, like what, what were you doing and how did you do it? But he talked so much about being intentional.

You know, and I think that that is really a core theme I hear. And when I’m talking to people about their career journeys, whether your path was accidental or not, there’s something about your own professional development that you’re doing that you’re being intentional about, or, or trying to be disciplined and thoughtful about how you’re going to go about it.

Scott (26:10)
No, very much so. I love how you frame that. Loved how you framed it. Because one of the things that I’ve noticed is that whenever I’ve had a goal, maybe it was accidental, but as soon as I got clarity of goal, I was on a mission and I didn’t wait. And to this day, you know, there’s goals that, they’re smaller goals. There might be a goal around something we’re doing at CFI, but as soon as that goal is framed, I’m going.

Anna Talerico (26:24)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you in particular, what’s your Duolingo streak buddy?

Scott (26:36)
I think it’s over three years.

Anna Talerico (26:41)
Incredible. Love it. So this is a wild card. You did not know I was going to ask you this, but if you think about the next year or two, it’s CFI and the things that you’re excited about in terms of either something about skill development or learning or teaching or a ground curriculum, what are you most excited about as you think over the next couple of years?

Scott (26:43)
Yeah.

There’s a couple of things. One is that we are always pushing the envelope, trying new ways to make our learning more engaging because the world has become so distracting that to build skills in a world full of distractions is harder. And so one of the things we keep pushing into is we’re coming up with, I’m gonna say crazy wild ways that are still professional to really engage our learners.

And what I’m really excited about is our ability to get feedback from our learners has really been enhanced over this last two or three years. And that feedback loop is quite powerful. And so I would say I’m excited about some of the new stuff we’re doing because our learners are saying they want more. We have a huge library, but they want different ways of consuming that library. And so what I’m excited about is the ways that we’re going to provide access

to learning in different modalities. And I’m leaving it there because I don’t want to commit to anything as particular.

Anna Talerico (28:11)
But I think it’s you were thinking about how do people want to learn, how do people learn and serving in different ways, right? That everybody learns the same or wants to or has the same time constraints or time available. So yeah, I love that. Another wild card question for you. What’s your take on AI and its impact on finance professionals, which I know is a big broad question because there’s many different types of roles and some are going to be more impacted than other, but like just what’s your personal

Scott (28:20)
Yeah.

Anna Talerico (28:41)
thinking on AI right now?

Scott (28:44)
So anyone in a career in finance and banking, I say lean into it because it’s the biggest productivity enhancer that we’ve had for decades. And so I’m leaning, personally leaning into it. Secondly, it is going to impact the industry. I think it’s going to make people so hyperproductive. We may have less people in those roles, but there’s still going to be those roles. Exactly.

Anna Talerico (29:10)
And other roles, right? And knowing how to use the tools and the AI will become a new role. Yeah.

Scott (29:18)
Exactly. And I also think that you need a manager of the AI, which is this person who actually keeps the guardrails on, is guiding the AI. Because as much as we can say the world can be analyzed analytically, there’s so many qualitative elements

that also need to be considered when you’re thinking about finance and banking. And it’s that mix of both quantitative and qualitative and so many finance and banking roles that requires, I think, a hybrid of a hyperproductive, AI-enabled human being.

Anna Talerico (29:56)
Yeah, I love that. That’s a great way to say it. I love that. Yeah, I like one of our course authors, Glenn Hopper, you know, I love his analogy of thinking about it like you’ve got an intern and then you obviously would check your intern’s work. I think that’s what, but they’re doing work for you. I love that. I refer to that often, right? It’s just like that it’s enabling you to do more work more effectively, but you, there’s so much qualitative about it that you have to do yourself and should do.

Scott (30:23)
Yeah, and there’s a lot, if many people listening to this will know that when you’re an analyst in your first year, you do what people sometimes call grunt work. And the grunt work is really, you know, you need to, you know, you might be entering data.

And those type of grunt-worth tasks that no one liked doing, now we hand those over to AI and we get to focus on the more higher end parts of our job which require more thought, more analysis, rather than doing that grunt work. So I’m…

Yeah, I think we all need to lean into AI and be using it right now as much as we can because I’m concerned that some people in finance and banking are going to get left behind if they’re opting out.

Anna Talerico (31:13)
Yeah, I think you have to be curious, right? Like I think a lot of people, there are no experts, even self-proclaimed experts, they’ve just learned and taught themselves. And so I think we’re doing everything we can to bring relevant information to the learners. But I think learners and every, you know, professionals need to have an open mind and just be curious and learn, you know, how to leverage it in a way that works for them. Yeah. Well, Scott.

Scott (31:18)
Mm-hmm.

Anna Talerico (31:41)
What an incredible career that you have had. We’re so fortunate to have you at CFI. We’re fortunate that you founded CFI, co-founded CFI. We’ve impacted so many people and I was so happy to share your story today. So thank you for coming on the podcast.

Scott (31:59)
Thank you, Anna, it’s always a delight.