I am Ammar. I currently work as the Financial Adviser’s Assistant at Permanent Wealth Partners. My main role is assisting all aspects of documentation for clients while training to be a financial adviser and attain all my qualifications.

I come from a small town called Shajapur in Central India. I was the district topper at A-levels and based on my academic performance I got an opportunity to study finance at Christ University Bangalore, one of the top universities in India.

During the final year of my graduation, I got an opportunity to intern with K-mint Wealth in Pune, India, where I was first introduced to the world of investments and financial planning. I spent the next six weeks learning different aspects of the business such as fund selection, risk mitigation, and the importance of building a long-term client relationship. It was here that I realised my passion for the subject and the industry and that I wanted to pursue a career in finance. After graduating from the university in 2019, I decided to move back home to help my family business and managed to successfully navigate the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, I decided to continue my journey to build a career in finance and moved to the UK to pursue a Master’s in Finance at the University of Edinburgh.

Having lived most of my life in rural India, I would not have believed anyone who told me I would be working in the second biggest financial market in the world in my early twenties. Pursuing an education in one of the most competitive and esteemed universities in the world was a dream come true.

However, adapting to a new lifestyle was certainly not easy. The first few months in the university were really challenging. Having to understand the financial concepts to a granular level and use statistical programming on financial data while maintaining a high quality on the essays was difficult, but made me value my time spent at the university even further.

Trying to make friends with people from different backgrounds who share no similarity to your upbringing is extremely difficult, especially when balancing demanding academics at the same time. The cold winter in Scotland didn’t help this either… the thought of leaving my relatively warm house and braving the cold was a challenge in itself! Overcoming these difficulties while dealing with countless culture shocks instilled a newfound confidence in me to take challenges head on.

My time at Edinburgh made me realise I was attracted towards the wealth management industry but at the same time wanted to help people with their finances on an individual level. Therefore, I leveraged my skills, knowledge, and internship experience to pursue a career in financial planning. Through my university, I came across a job opening at Permanent Wealth Partners. Having researched the company, its values resonated with my own and its approach closely aligned with what I believed to be an ideal financial service to a client. Over the next few months, I had several conversations with Adam and Adrian and visited them personally in London to find out more about the firm and its culture. Everything fell into place, and I became part of the PWP team in September 2022. Looking back, I count myself fortunate to have received an opportunity at Permanent Wealth Partners.

Moving to London was no smooth ride either. I was asked to vacate my apartment just three days after moving in and found myself out of a place to live in the first week of my new job. I was a stranger to the city and had no friends or family to rely upon.  It was certainly a struggle to find an apartment immediately in London; the anecdotes of temporarily staying in a hostel and all the incidents in between would make for a very long story (perhaps in another blog)! It would have been more difficult had Adam and Adrian not reached out to their contacts and given me advice on looking for properties and writing the perfect email to get a quick response from a potential landlord. The team at Permanent Wealth Partners further supported me by helping manage my workload around numerous house viewings. It was thanks to their efforts I was able to find a place within the first week of my search.

Over the last 9 months, I have learnt about financial planning in the UK and explored a wide range of investment products and strategies for clients, gradually building up my exposure to the tax rules surrounding pensions and other investments. One of the biggest positives of working at Permanent Wealth Partners for me was discovering a key skill I never knew I had. I came across the coding capabilities of the financial planning software we use at work and wanted to explore some of these features to investigate if we could adapt them into our business. Having had some experience of statistical programming back at the university of Edinburgh, I was confident that I would be able to pick up coding with Python steadily, but it meant that I would need to dedicate a significant amount of time to learn and implement the codes in various aspects of our client service.

I brought my ideas and a thorough plan to Adam and Adrian, and straight away they gave me full freedom and flexibility to manage my work and supported me to bring in innovation to our client services and improve our business processes. This level of support and trust is one reason I feel very fortunate to be working at PWP. Over the last few months, I have ventured into using Python to automate and improve our day-to-day processes. I discovered that coding came naturally to me, and I was able to understand and implement what we wanted to achieve much faster than my expectations. I used this new skill to reduce the time taken to complete recurring processes, completing the same amount of work in less time, which boosted the overall productivity of the firm extensively.

Using my newfound skills, I now focus on bringing innovation to financial processes at Permanent Wealth Partners while learning the ins and outs of financial planning on track to becoming a financial adviser myself.

Ammar Takhatwala