Report on the Experience of the Internship at a Financial Company

In the month September 2017 beginning the fifth day, I undertook an unpaid internship at a financial company. The weekly working days were Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The activities at the financial company involved managing total sales for advisors, organizing clients data and responding to the managers request for the clients data via the Salesforce.com.

I appreciate Mr. Jacob Makoyo, my immediate supervisor, and his support team for appropriate valuable training, hands-on experience, instructions and orientation of the institution on the day I reported for the internship.

The internship started with some assessments of spreadsheet skills using a task in Excel package. The assessment was positive. My fingerprints details were checked using the AXA Advisors code Before I could proceed with the internship, I had to fill statutory forms of secrecy and confidentiality of the companys and clients data.

I was then assigned an office desk with a desktop computer within the office block. I was given the companys systems credentials; the fob key, an email, the ID and password through which would be accessing the system with. To start managing the total sales for advisors, I began by using the supervisors access mode. Jacob guided me to get the advisors name for each policy member and clients information. This guidance would last for two weeks to generally and understand the working of axa.com and salesforce.com

The supervisor further trained me on how to use Salesforce to generate clients information and to give a specific advisor access to a specific number of clients to contact them. The practical training involved an assignment where I was given a task to select 30 clients specifically from NJ and give access to advisor called Lamar. I also exported the clients data from the system to Excel sheet and forwarded the details to the advisor through the email address. Though it was challenging task to start with, I eventually managed.

After the successful induction, I started working on the Excel sheets for all the advisors commission for August. I searched for the individual names of the clients, the advisors name, calculated their commission and deleted duplicated information in the system. When the details were audited by the supervisor, and any errors detected like missing names or cents not adding up on money ledgers, I was forced to redo the work by reviewing all numbers. Over time, I had to be very keen on numerical figures and names to avoid repeating the process at my own expense. In the beginning, I had teething challenges with the spelling of advisors names, the order of the first and last name of the advisors and I often got confused with clients who had more than one advisor. The challenge was whom to place as the advisor when the client had two advisors.

There were tasks that required me to create a new sheet for total leads and benefits for each advisor. After getting the 50 leading advisors, I computed the average benefits per lead. The further creating a PowerPoint presentation containing the top 10 advisors with their names and associated benefits. All the activities that required filtering of clients data required a generation of spreadsheet file and subsequent attachment to the relevant email address. For instance, there were 50 clients in the cities of Malvern, Villanova, Gulph Mills, Westchester, and Paoli. For this clients details, I gave access to the advisor, Mary Pinter, then combined all the clients contact information in Excel spreadsheet before sending them to the advisor through the email.

There are at times when the system did not provide some updated crucial details like in the case where I generated the top 100 clients for the Life Insurance policy then combined the information in an electronic spreadsheet. With the top 100 clients, and on crosschecking I find out that 35 of them had no connection with any advisor. This was a big concern considering the importance the 35 clients are valuable customers with an enormous amount of investments in the company. Through the alternative methods of crosschecking the hardcopy files, I found the details and updated the profile. I also eliminated all redundant information and combined the amounts of the same policy together

Data of the top 20 annual advisors for the 2015-2107 through the YTD and PCs were also required. For the three years, I generated a list of 60 advisors whom I further established the current leads by using the new salesforce.com tool to edit and search the number of the clients. An average PCs per lead for each advisor was also required, and I generated.

When an advisor leaves the company, the advisors clients are transferred to another. For instance, when advisor Luke Porter left the company, Jacob directed to redistribute the clients between Olivia and Owens equally.

When the new program AXA Aegis for designing policies, and calculating benefits were introduced, I was quick to learn it. I further designed a customer policy using the biodata, product type, extent of policy and insurance parameters like premiums and face amounts to automatically compute the arithmetic returns.

Training, learnings, and recommendations for improving the performance of the financial organization.September being the life insurance awareness month the deadliest and costliest terrorist attack of the 11th September 2001 on the World Trade Center, I had a great opportunity of attending training on life insurance policy. The training was very informative and thought-provoking. In remembrance of the victims who lost their lives in the disaster that neither the United States nor the insurance industry had never contemplated, the tragedy prompted the establishment of life insurance awareness month. The exposure at the training saw me genuinely realize and appreciate the value of life insurance to the family members. It protects the families from financial crippling in times of disasters and provide support anytime in due life and the events of death.

The training experience also provoked my ambitions to establish life insurance firm later in South Africa. Many families and parents in SA bestow life burden on their children. The majority are middle-class earners who solely depend on monthly salaries to make their ends meet. Therefore, running a life insurance firm is likely to succeed since it will be affordable and through awareness program, the parents and learners are likely to see sense in planning their life rather than leaving it in the mercy of children and well-wishers.

On the 18th day of September, I was privileged to attend another training about Retirement Plan Service facilitated by the companys leading financial consultants. The training was about how advisors should present themselves, how to utilize companys tools such as Judy Diamond Report to analyze annual review of the clients plan. The training was timely at the time the impending activities required understanding and utilization of analytical skills.

Undertaking internship was a great learning experience though challenges were inevitable. I am currently studying financial management course through which the experience at the bank is valuable.

Going forward, the financial institution needs to enhance quality service and integrate the financial systems to be to capture the clients details without errors. The current technology and systems at hand allow referential integrities of data and elimination of duplicated records. Instead of the employees spending valuable time on tasks that can be generated from a computer, the management can direct such energies in other production areas.