Trupti Berwal spent 15 years in fintech, including at the NYSE, and the job looks nothing like the movies. Communication beats credentials, and building something beats saying you love finance.
The global financial system is essentially a massive operating system, and someone has to make sure it doesn't crash. That's the plain-language version of what senior management consultant Trupti Berwal does every day. Working at First Derivatives after a stint at the New York Stock Exchange, she sits at the intersection of capital markets, regulation, and technology — not executing trades, but ensuring that every trade, across every time zone, gets booked accurately, reported reliably, and handled within the rules of whichever country's regulators are watching.
Most people outside finance have never heard that role described that way, because the industry's public image is almost entirely about traders. Trupti’s job is to be the person behind the scenes who makes sure the whole machine holds together when new regulations arrive or new products hit the market. For 15 years, that has meant translating between the people who build technology and the people who run businesses — a gap, she says, that never fully closes.
Trupti started in computer science, earned a master's in software engineering, and fully expected to write code for a living. She discovered quickly that what she actually loved was solving problems, and that writing code was only one way to do it.
"I realized that it's not just writing code that I want to do. I want to still solve the problems, but I would like to solve them in a way that helps everyone."
That realization pushed her toward what she calls a liaison role: someone who can sit in a room with engineers and explain the business reality, then walk across the hall and translate the technical constraints back to the business side. When a new SEC regulation arrived and her firm needed someone who understood both worlds well enough to define implementation requirements, she raised her hand — even though she had no prior expertise in regulation. She read, she asked questions, she picked it up. That project became the on-ramp to the work she does today.
The path wasn't planned. She kept an open mind, opportunities arrived, and she kept saying yes to things that were slightly outside her comfort zone. Nobody told her this route wouldn't work. The harder challenge was simply letting go of a familiar role to step into one where she'd be the least-informed person in the room.
Hiring conversations have shifted. Trupti entered the US job market at a time when interviewers wanted to confirm your existing knowledge: Do you know Java? Do you understand Basel 3? Expertise at a specific level, beginner through advanced, was the filter.
That filter has changed.
Employers now want fast learners who can pick up anything and run with it independently.
Technical knowledge, she points out, is teachable. She can sit with someone for a week and cover what they need to know. What she cannot teach, and cannot afford to spend time trying to fix, is the ability to communicate clearly, manage timelines, follow through, and negotiate with people who have competing priorities. Those are the things that determine whether a new hire needs constant supervision or can actually be trusted with a project.
"It's very easy to teach technology today. But after that, if the person doesn't know how to communicate, how to follow up, how to manage timelines, how to negotiate with other people, then that becomes difficult — because that I am not able to."
The practical upshot for anyone job-hunting right now: a demonstrated track record of learning something and building something counts for more than a polished answer to "why do you love finance?" If you can walk into an interview and say you spent the last six months tracking four stocks, built a small Python app to monitor relevant news, and here's what you observed — that's a portfolio. That's evidence of the mindset employers are actually screening for.
When Trupti arrived at the New York Stock Exchange, she was surrounded by veterans who spoke in a language she didn't recognize. Every institution develops its own lingo, and the NYSE's is particularly dense. Her first instinct was intimidation.
Looking back, she wishes someone had told her the fear was unnecessary. Being chosen for a role means someone already believed you could do it. The knowledge gap is real but temporary; the confidence to ask questions and show up as a learner is what actually matters.
You don't need to know everything. You're still new. All you need is the confidence to ask the right questions.
She now tells every junior person entering the industry exactly that: don't hide your inexperience. Ask thoughtful questions. Be visibly willing to learn. The people who struggle are the ones who pretend to know things they don't, because they stop asking and start falling behind.
The unglamorous part of seniority is responsibility that follows you home — or tries to. When you're the person ensuring that a regulatory deadline is met across multiple groups, a missed date doesn't just affect you. It cascades. Teams downstream get blocked. Relationships get strained. That weight is real, and Trupti is honest that it gets to her.
Her approach is deliberate. When pressure builds, she physically steps away from her desk, walks a block or two, and comes back. She takes vacations in smaller chunks rather than banking them all. She builds non-work moments into the week with her team, brief enough to not feel forced, long enough to break the tension. And when she's home, she leaves work at work.
The comparison she draws is to high school: in middle school, everything was loose. High school added real responsibility, real time management, real stakes. Work is just the adult version of that adjustment. The stress doesn't disappear — you build better tools for handling it.
The most common misconception about working in capital markets, Trupti says, is the one Hollywood keeps selling: that finance is either a casino where everyone gets rich, or a disaster movie where the whole system implodes. Neither version captures what most people in the industry actually do.
Banks manage retirement funds, savings accounts, and 401(k)s. There are controls, compliance layers, and regulations that govern every move. The people responsible for those systems take that responsibility seriously, because they're handling money that belongs to real people who are counting on it.
"It's not all glamorous or bad as it is portrayed outside. There are different fields. You can choose what you want."
Finance contains multitudes: trading, technology, law, compliance, operations, consulting. You don't have to want to be a trader to have a career in capital markets. You can specialize in the technology infrastructure, or become a lawyer who advises on regulatory questions, or do exactly what Trupti does — sit at the boundary between all of it and make sure the pieces fit together.
Trupti’s concrete advice for anyone aiming at fintech or capital markets:
Learn Python. Fintech runs on data analysis. You don't need to be an expert, and AI tools make the learning curve manageable — but you need working knowledge.
Track some stocks manually. Pick a handful, follow the news around them, watch how price responds to announcements. Build a basic mental model of how markets move before you try to talk about it in an interview.
Build something small. A budgeting app, a stock-monitoring script, anything that shows you applied knowledge, not just studied it.
Use AI as a research partner. The way Thripti uses AI to process 200-page regulatory documents in two days instead of two months is the same way a junior person can accelerate their own learning and produce sharper work.
The goal is to walk into an interview with evidence, not enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is common. Evidence is rare.
The finance industry's real complexity is that it holds up the global economy quietly, invisibly, every single day. Most of the people making that happen are not the ones you see in movies. They're the ones asking whether the process is documented, whether the regulation is implemented correctly, and whether the system will still be running tomorrow morning. That's where the work actually is.
