Women in Financial Services
Inspiring Women - Nidhi Nikum - Global moves bring a different perspective
Mark.Freed / 23 Jul 2018
Embracing new experiences, rolling up sleeves and getting stuck in!
Nidhi Nikum has enjoyed a varied career in IT with ANZ, travelling the world with her job. She has shared some of her experiences and, indeed, highlights with E2W.
I’ve been at ANZ for fourteen years and really, it’s been great: Bangalore, Melbourne and now London, three divisions and seven roles. I feel as though I share the same values as the bank and I’ve really appreciated their ethos of moving people around divisions and roles, allowing them to use their transferable skills in different areas. It’s certainly meant that my time here has been varied.
My career started at HCL Technologies where I was working on a reengineering project for financial services for a US client. I had an engineering degree and had been handpicked by HCL from university to work in the IT area of their Financial Services domain.
After two years there, I was ready to gain greater experience and knowledge of financial services and so my career at ANZ began, 2000 km away from home in Bangalore.
I started in technology which, over the years, has given me great exposure to the whole ANZ organisation. I’ve worked with such a variety of areas – markets and core banking systems, wealth products for HNWIs, risk model validation, project management portfolio and enterprise data analytics. In all of my roles, I’ve been dealing with data, a subject which is such big news these days. I really ‘get’ data, how ANZ can use it, how we can slice and dice it, how we can learn from it and how I can help application of data by examining it and creating change projects for the bank. This has given me an enormous insight into the business and really turned me into an expert.
I’m a big fan of self-development and I’d like to credit two professional courses that have helped me ‘remove the blinkers’: the scrum project methodology and, enterprise architecture. The former is all about moving quickly, releasing a product or fix in a lightweight process as a prototype & reacting to feedback; the latter is about bringing alignment between IT & business concerns, helping to break down mental barriers to change.
I now use my knowledge of IT and data in credit risk and institutional banking where I’m part of the senior management team.
Throughout my career, I’ve met some incredible people – managers, supporters, mentors and sponsors all of whom have helped me along the way. One person and the opportunity he gave me early on, stands out. He was a senior exec at ANZ who appreciated my enthusiasm and attention to detail. He tasked me with organising a company wide event – the ANZ family day, a day where 2,500 people gather together. I relished the opportunity, drawing on all my project management skills and using the budget available.
I used the budget efficiently (I actually came in under budget) and delivered a successful event. The exec was impressed at how I’d managed to do the work of three people, hadn’t let my day job suffer and he nominated me for an ANZ Shine award … which I won!
This wasn’t a technical project dealing with IT, or risk but it was important to the business and the employees. It put me in the limelight and opened many doors to me – subsequently, I was known throughout the business.
In Bangalore, the IT industry was quite young there when I started. We didn’t have traditions to follow, we could create our own way of doing things without any kind of bias. (That’s not to say that there weren’t some anomalies to this but I overcame them!) In Melbourne and London however, it felt very different: more traditional, more existing biases. It seems as though regardless of your level of competency, you need serious navigation skills when it comes to organisation politics. The biggest challenge was to manage a growth area with a large team of forty people with various skills and backgrounds, in an environment of constant push and pull from my seasoned peers.
I like to roll up my sleeves and get to work. I’m extremely technical, objective and I’m not afraid to express my views, however controversial they may be; I’m ambitious and I want to progress. Exhibiting these traits as a woman has made me stand out from the crowd and not always in a positive light.
I’m looking forward to attending more E2W events and meeting other women in the same industry. I want to hear your stories about navigating the career path with success and hopefully I can also impart some advice from my years in banking & technology services.
If you would like to share your career in financial services with E2W followers, or if you have made a contribution to a project or initiative within your organisation, please contact us.
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