Member Spotlight | Milerde Armando

Meeyeon (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of CFI Member Spotlight, the series where we shine our light on the unique career paths and lived experiences of our global learner community. I’m your host, Meeyeon and you have likely seen and heard me here many times before. And today I’m joined by Milerde a seasoned banking professional with over 15 years of experience all the way from frontline to investment banking roles. Milerde, I’m thrilled to have you here today. Thank you for joining us.

Milerde Armando (00:28)
Thank you, Meeyeon. It’s a pleasure from my side. Thank you.

Meeyeon (00:31)
Where are you joining us from?

Milerde Armando (00:34)
Actually, Maputo, Mozambique, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about it, but it’s in southern Africa.

Meeyeon (00:46)
So this is the first time I’m interviewing someone from Mozambique, so I’m super excited. There’s all of these kind of conversations I treat as the most accessible coffee chat. And if it weren’t for like all of the kind of like normalization of podcasts and this type of conversations, it would be incredibly difficult for me to speak with someone from Mozambique. So I’m so glad you’re here today. I’m gonna kick this off by asking the most broad question, which is…

Milerde Armando (00:51)
Okay, nice.

Thank you.

Meeyeon (01:15)
To get us started, take us back way to the beginning. How did you first get your interest in finance? Was it something that you studied early on or did you have someone that was an influence, maybe a family member or a mentor?

Milerde Armando (01:29)
Actually not me. I didn’t have someone who influenced me in the finance world and even my background is not in finance actually. And to give you a bit of context, I began my professional career in banking, specifically in retail and business banking, where I spent, let’s say a decade there

going through roles like client management, building skills in operations, relationship management, and being a branch manager throughout my career in retail and business banking. And it was, let’s say, the most part of my career was made there. At that time, I didn’t have this

patient, let’s say, for finance because it wasn’t like a thing. I obviously had to go through it, okay, because I had to do the credit books and I had to understand

at least the basics about finance to make sure I could be able to understand and make a good proposal, I would say. But then there was a point in time in my career where when I felt I needed a shift, okay, and I needed something more challenging for me, more technical, let’s say.

That’s when I got into finance because I started to look for things like investment banking corporate finance Things like that and I came across Some good stuff online and that’s when my love of finance started to take shape.

Meeyeon (03:26)
When you were back in your first kind, two or three roles in BC, so actually you spent your entire career with one company, right?

Milerde Armando (03:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. So far.

Meeyeon (03:41)
That is super rare. I find that of all of the conversations that I’ve had, there’s very, very few people that stay with one employer for more than like three to five years. And I think that’s a huge accomplishment, right? Like, whenever, for example, regardless of what company you’re at, if you can stay there for more than 10 years, I just feel like that speaks a huge deal about…

Milerde Armando (03:45)
You

Meeyeon (04:06)
the person, their personality, their ability to work with others, develop relationships, because otherwise, how would you stay there for 10 years, right? Like it is such a huge accomplishment on its own. When you were in your very first kind of two or three roles,

Milerde Armando (04:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true.

I will take that as a compliment. 

Yep.

Meeyeon (04:25)
When you were in your first kind of two or three roles, what do you, in the first, let’s say like, you four years, what do you think those early years taught you the most? Because the role that you’re in today is very different from the ones that where you started. And I’m really curious where you did like in the early chapter of your career, where you feel like you learned them, what you feel like you learned the most and what type of skills you developed there.

Milerde Armando (04:51)
Actually building the client relationship seems easy, but it isn’t. It takes a lot of resilience.

and to build trust with a customer is difficult. I think the first, let’s say, five years taught me that, how to deal with different types of persons, because when you are in the front line, you deal with diverse, let’s say, type of persons, personalities, and…

At some point it is difficult to understand and to deal with these different types of personalities. So I think the first five years taught me that, how to deal with different situations, different type of askings, because you do have customers that ask, let’s say, things in a manner that you eventually can understand

and others don’t, and you have to understand how to deal with this type of situation. So I think the first five years was tough because I was actually very, very young. And I had to build this kind of resilience and understand how to deal with the customers, basically.

Meeyeon (06:18)
Yeah, because I guess the way that I could kind of best describe it is when you’re dealing with the retail client or even like the corporate client, you just never know what you’re going to get. And so everyone is from such different backgrounds, such different personalities. And when you have to deal with a high volume of people, you see all sorts of wonderful and scary and frustrating stressful situations.

Milerde Armando (06:31)
Yeah, that’s it.

Yeah, yeah.

Meeyeon (06:46)
But it certainly builds your skill in how to deal with conflict, how to be able to communicate really clearly and how to manage a relationship even in its most kind of blurry situations.

Milerde Armando (06:52)
Yes.

Yes, and you made a very good point,

communication is the key. when you are not able to communicate in a manner that you both can understand, it is very difficult to build a relationship and to build trust with the customer. So make sure you make your communication very, very clear so that you can build this relationship.

Meeyeon (07:26)
And then after you got some years under your belt of practicing and building up those communication skills, you moved into a relationship management role, right? And then a branch leadership role. What was the biggest shift for you going from kind of like an individual contributor role to a people manager?

Milerde Armando (07:40)
Yes.

Yes, the first thing was, I would say, to manage people. was tough at the beginning because I actually was still young at the time.

And I had a big challenge because all of the people, yes, I think all of them were older than me. ⁓ And it was very difficult at first to build trust because they had to trust in the way I was trying to implement my management skills and to make sure they can understand what I really wanted from them because we

do have objectives and we have to do it. So I had to have a strategy to make sure they can follow the things that we had to do and they can follow my command, which is not an easy thing to do, principally when you are younger than them.

It is very very very difficult but I managed that and I started to build up my confidence and I think that what helped me to manage the team because I had the confidence that I could handle the situations and when you build trust with people I think they easily can follow your command and that was my strategy at

time was to build trust with them to make sure they can trust what I was saying, they can follow my steps and I think we did quite a very very very good job at the time.

Meeyeon (09:47)
So I think communication skills, relationship management, and being able to influence in an appropriate situation and in an effective way is such a huge part of having a successful career in finance. You’ve worked extensively with lot of small, medium enterprise customers. When we talk about, and you’ve already touched on this, talking about building trust. From your perspective,

What’s the key to building trust in those types of relationships with the small medium enterprise businesses?

Milerde Armando (10:22)
think to be clear enough with them and to be straightforward. I think when you deal with customers, make sure you are very straightforward when you are talking with them and when we dealing with any type of situation. Independent of the situation, it is a bad or good situation. Be straightforward, be clear enough. Don’t try to…

I would say buy time because I see sometimes people, they don’t have the courage to say no. I think no is a very difficult word to say sometimes. So people try to buy time just to avoid the situation to say no.

No is part of the process and you have to make sure you can say no and don’t make the customer waste time. So I think when you are straightforward, you can build this relationship and make sure it lasts long enough and make sure the customer can always count on you, okay, or rely on you. So I think being straightforward is one of the most important things when you’re dealing with with particularly SMEs.

Meeyeon (11:48)
Okay, so then at one point in your career, there’s a really big transition. And I think it was in about 2020, you had moved into investment banking, which is a big career shift. What inspired you to do that?

Milerde Armando (12:06)
As I said before, at the time I wanted something more challenging for my career because I felt that I needed some technical skills and I had to upskill it. And at that point I started to look for some online training, I would say, just to…

tried to build something into this new shift that I wanted for my career. That’s when I got across this investment banking thing.

and I started to read more about it and try to understand how the market in my country actually is doing regarding the investment banking thing. Is it something I am really into it or not? Is it worth going into it or not?

And then I started looking inside my company because I needed to challenge myself at the time. And at the same time, I came across two wonderful books from Professor Mihir Dissai. He’s from Harvard Business School. He’s a professor there. I don’t know if you heard about him. But he wrote two interesting books. One is The Wisdom of Finance, which he touched

based on the history of finance. Actually, he tried to explain how finance is related to every decision that we do make every day.

And which actually I do believe he’s right. And I do agree, although we may not be aware of that, but finance is basically related to every decision that we make. Risk management is also there. And there’s another book, which is How Finance Work, which is a wonderful book as well, which is tries to dismiss complex finance subjects like valuation, value creation

and he can leverage, he tried to simplify this type of thing. those who don’t have this kind of skill set in finance can understand this type of thing. So those two books also shaped my interest in finance because he explained it in such a way that you think, I mean, finance is simple. Like people in finance try to make scary out of it. Like finance is a big deal, it’s something very difficult.

Actually, it isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t. Nobody will convince me that finance is difficult; it isn’t. And Professor Mihidisay on those two books showed me that there’s a logic you can build behind finance. It’s all about logic, okay? Just think logically and then you can draw a story behind the numbers because it’s about storytelling. Finance is about storytelling in fact.

And that’s when I started to get impatient, or trying to, starting to love finance. Yeah, that’s it. I think that’s when the true love of finance started to get in shape.

Meeyeon (15:46)
And when you were looking for the role within the same company, did you have any mentors that helped like bridge any connections or was it more like, you became interested in something, there was an internal job posting and you just kind of followed your intuition and your passion.

Milerde Armando (16:04)
Actually, at the time, I just said to my management team that I wanted something new and had that kind of feeling that I had to go somewhere else to try to shape my career in a different way.

And I talk internally with some people, HR people, and they just said to me, I mean, there’s this and that opportunity, okay? Just tell me if you’re interested in it or not. And actually I was, so that’s when I said, okay, let me try it. Actually, I’ve been looking for this for quite some time now

and I think it will be a good fit for me and that’s when this thing started and at the time I spoke with the manager of the team, the investment banking team. I had an interview with him at the time and it was good. I mean, I did quite well so that’s when I joined the team at the time.

Meeyeon (17:30)
And with these types of investment banking roles, it’s obviously a very rigorous type of role, I think, regardless of where you are in the world. And it requires a lot of technical modeling skills from the Excel and general financial modeling side. There’s a lot of presentation skills, communication skills, which you’ve kind of built up along the way, which are perfect. But how did you go about ramping up to all of the technical skills that you needed to kind of perform on day one?

Was the company providing a training program, or was it mainly like your online education pursuits that helped you be most prepared for that investment banking role?

Milerde Armando (18:11)
Actually, it was my online education path that gave me this type of skills, I would say. And actually, the FMVA was the first one that gave me hands-on on this type of financial modeling thing, valuation thing. I think the FMVA gave me the proper toolkit to build the confidence behind 

the numbers behind the technical skill that I actually have today. mean, I have never…

been in a situation where I had to tackle a financial model and go through and through, go all the tabs, all the schedules. I didn’t know anything about that. And when I came across the FMVA, that’s when I first had the opportunity to understand, to know exactly what

those three statements, financial modeling was, how valuation is made, what is behind the valuation, leverage, all those.

stuff that FMVA actually gave me that first understanding of finance, I would say. And then the data visualization as well, which the FMVA also has helped me to go through and to understand how I can transform

FMI, which was an adequate certification that gave me a very good, I would say.

A very good toolkit as well for what I’m doing today in my role because that’s a broad range of community, a lot of people there who are in finance as well, who help each other with hints. So it’s a community that gives you a lot of confidence behind, I would say, technical skill

In finance, so it also helped me a lot to do better in my job, actually.

Meeyeon (21:36)
And in Mozambique, I’m not sure what the landscape is there for investment banking, but do you have a specialty? Like, do you cover a specific industry? And apart from that, do you have a favorite kind of transaction that you find to be the most engaging that you’ve worked?

Milerde Armando (21:58)
I mean, the market is very short. You don’t have a lot of deals here. I would say, you do have a specific portfolio in all the banks that have investment banking division. I think we are all I would say looking for the same clients I would say And you do have logistics oil and gas 

FEMG, A, I would say, lot of parts, energy, yeah, that’s other industries that are more sound here. And actually, a deal that had, I remember that had kind of impact on my career so far.

I think it was in oil and gas industry. It was a big deal with such an extensive model, like a structure, a very different structure. That’s what I love about investment banking. I think all deals have different structure. And the more you get

exposure to different deals the more you can learn and that’s what I love about investment banking okay you can learn a lot of things the more you get exposed to this type of deals so there was a deal in oil and gas

shaped my career in a way that I could understand and it took me days and days just to understand the model. So it was tough but it was rewarding.

Meeyeon (23:52)
And so now we’re going to switch gears a little bit and we’re going to get to know Milerde, the person instead of Milerde the professional, like we’re going to get to the personal side a little bit more just for fun. And I’m going to do a rapid fire question. So this is kind of like this or that, not a whole lot of thinking just for fun. Are you a morning person or a night person? Morning person, night owl.

Milerde Armando (24:11)
Okay.

Night owl, I’m a night person.

Meeyeon (24:17)
That usually works out for people in investment banking. And what is your favorite Excel shortcut that you can’t live without?

Milerde Armando (24:29)
Ctrl-R.

Meeyeon (24:32)
Mine has always been Alt-A-Q, which I don’t actually remember what it’s even called anymore, but I think it’s Advanced Filter. I used to work in debt capital markets, so filtering data was this huge thing. I use it over and over and over again. It’s still my favorite. If you weren’t working in finance, what do you think you’d be doing today?

Milerde Armando (24:41)
Okay.

Okay. Okay.

Wow, playing football.

Meeyeon (25:00)
nice. Wait, are we talking about football as in English football, the sport that you play predominantly with your foot, or like American football, soccer?

Milerde Armando (25:04)
Soccer.

Soccer. Let’s say soccer

Meeyeon (25:12)
And I know we’ve talked on your favorite books.

Milerde Armando (25:16)
Yes.

Meeyeon (25:17)
And we talked about books that were two favorites of yours that were related to finance, but unrelated to finance, do you have a book, a podcast or Netflix series or show that you’re enjoying lately?

Milerde Armando (25:33)
I do have a book which is just… blow my mind at the time that I read it. It was Factfulness from Hans Rosling, which is a book that basically… Yes, Factfulness is… That book just blew my mind, actually. Like, don’t believe in everything you see in the news. That book is crazy.

Meeyeon (25:51)
I have that book on my Audible list.

Milerde Armando (26:03)
That’s crazy. I really love that book. And I think I’ve read it two or three times.

Meeyeon (26:10)
Is that the one with the…

Is that the one where they talk about the difference between what we used to call like Third World countries versus what we do today and how, and that also uses examples like hockey players are all born. If you notice between like January to March, and how that is extremely strategic because most like there’s this one type of hockey league at a very young age, where, where you’re born kind of

Milerde Armando (26:26)
Yes. Yes.

Yes, it is.

Meeyeon (26:46)
influences when you can start in that league. That’s the book, right?

Milerde Armando (26:51)
Yeah, it is. is. Basically, said there’s an agenda and you have to be aware of the agenda that you see on the news because not everything you see on the news are in fact true.

The world is in a much better place than it was, let’s say, a few decades ago. And sometimes people don’t understand, actually, that that is true. And don’t sense, because what they always see in the news is like Iran attack Israel, there’s a bomb in this country. In Africa, there’s poverty,

type of things but the world is in a better place than that and the media just don’t show that and I actually think and he has data, he has data that shows that so I think that’s actually true.

Meeyeon (27:55)
Yeah, I remember reading this book. It was such a long time ago, but it’s…

Milerde Armando (28:00)
Yeah, it’s a very good book. So that book changed the way I see things today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It changed the way I see things today.

Meeyeon (28:05)
It was really good, I remember.

Nice.

Okay, so for everyone that didn’t catch that, that’s Factfulness. That’s a great book. And then I have two final questions for you. One is kind of work-related and very simple question. What is your favorite part of your current role?

Milerde Armando (28:29)
Excel. I love Excel. Crashing numbers in Excel is fun for me. So I like it.

Meeyeon (28:35)
Okay, nice, that works out because you’re probably doing a lot of it.

And what do you like to do outside of work to recharge, to re-energize? What’s your favorite hobby?

Milerde Armando (28:51)
Swimming. I do swimming and it relaxes me a lot. Now I’m not swimming because it’s cold here, it’s winter, when I think September when the summer comes I will go back to swim.

Meeyeon (29:07)
One last question. If your colleagues could use one word to describe you, what do you think it would be?

Milerde Armando (29:17)
Reliable.

Meeyeon (29:23)
Nice. That’s a good, that’s, yeah. That’s nice.

Milerde Armando (29:24)
Yeah, I think so.

Meeyeon (29:28)
And so that wraps up today’s episode of CFI Member Spotlight. Milerde, thank you so much for sharing your story with us from the front lines of banking to strategic investment analysis and from branch leadership to continued education. Your journey is a reminder to us that growth and finance is never a linear and it’s built through persistence, learning and lots of impact.

And to our listeners, if you’re a CFI member with a story to tell, I’d actually love to hear from you. So you could reach out to me on CFI community if you’d like. And until next time, thank you all for tuning in and thank you, Milerde, for joining us today.

Milerde Armando (30:05)
Thank you, Meeyeon, for having me. See you soon.