Yesterday, I sat down for my first coffee chat of the year as a returning mentor for the New Asia College Mentorship Programme at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Entering my second year as a mentor, I was eager to meet my mentees, who are bright minds on the cusp of graduating in Financial Technology. Listening to their questions, I could feel the weight of the current graduate market. Shrinking headcounts, fierce competition from returning overseas graduates, and the omnipresent shadow of artificial intelligence have left many students wondering where they actually fit. Yet, as we unpacked their concerns one by one, it became clear that the best antidote to market anxiety is not chasing the latest technical buzzword, but stepping back and thinking from first principles.
Having completed banking internships, one of my mentees noticed that almost every conversation around artificial intelligence revolves around internal automation and cost-cutting, asking me if I agreed that the technology is simply a game of automation. I respectfully disagreed. When you are deep inside a bank's technology division, it is easy to get lost in the weeds of scripts, workflows, and headcount efficiency. If we strip away the noise and return to first principles, we have to ask why a company exists in the first place. A business exists to deliver a product or service that creates genuine value for an end customer. Regardless of your future title, and regardless of whether you use artificial intelligence or not, your primary objective is to serve the customer. Automation that saves internal hours means very little if the institution fails to solve customer problems, so you must never let the mechanics of a tool blind you to the ultimate purpose of the enterprise.
Another classic worry among Financial Technology undergraduates is feeling caught in the middle, fearing their curriculum is neither deeply technical enough to compete with pure computer science majors on engineering, nor commercially focused enough to outshine traditional finance graduates. To turn this perceived weakness into a strategic asset, you have to understand the true nature of financial technology from first principles. When I asked what separates a digital bank from a traditional incumbent bank, the instinctive answer was a smoother user experience, which is only partially correct. The real difference lies in the business model and cost structure. Incumbent banks carry massive structural overhead from handling physical cash, operating branch networks, and maintaining legacy mainframes. Because of this heavy cost base, they struggle to meet evolving customer needs and end up losing market share in profitable lending businesses. Understanding how technology reshapes unit economics is the real essence of the discipline.
When deciding where to apply, many graduates cast a wide net across traditional banks, technology challengers, and consulting firms without matching their strengths to the employer's actual demand. While landing an offer always involves an element of luck and timing, you must align your long-term career goals with what the company actually lacks. If you apply to traditional banks, remember that they do not lack technical specialists or business analysts; they struggle to change with agility because existing staff are entrenched in legacy ways of working. Your real competitive advantage there is your fresh mindset as new blood. Conversely, if you apply to a financial technology firm, they are often packed with deeply technical engineers who lack domain experience in banking. In that environment, your financial domain knowledge becomes your greatest differentiator.
We also discussed whether the Big Four consulting firms remain a good career option, which requires understanding the fundamental nature of their business. Consultancies are in the business of selling people and project delivery. They first secure a client with a strict delivery timeline, and then hire or staff individuals to fill those roles. A precise skillset match is often less relevant to them than your sheer ability to deliver on schedule. Understanding this model takes the sting out of rejection: if you do not get the role, it is often not about your capability, but simply that the firm lost the client pitch. By the same token, even if you have the right skills and land the job, a dry project pipeline means you will end up sitting on the bench and eventually face layoffs.
Still, the overarching anxiety about artificial intelligence replacing junior roles altogether lingers for many graduates who struggle to see where their careers fit in an automated world. Looking back at the finance industry over the last decade, there has been a continuous trend of outsourcing information technology to lower-cost centers in mainland China or India. Today's shift toward artificial intelligence is fundamentally just another form of outsourcing, moving routine work from low-cost labor to machine automation. The real question you should ask yourself is why some companies choose to outsource while others fiercely build in-house. Institutions like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs build their own systems because they treat technology as a core differentiator to compete in the market, rather than a pure cost center. They operate as technology companies first, with finance as their product. You want to join organizations that view technology as an investment, whereas companies that treat it purely as a cost will cling to legacy stacks and spend only when forced—much like how some consumers upgrade to the latest iPhone every year while others refuse to spend until their old phone completely breaks down.
For those who still feel unsure about what path to take, or worry about making early career mistakes, my advice is to look across a longer horizon of three to five years. When you are graduating, it is easy to feel boxed in by immediate constraints like your degree major, job descriptions demanding prior experience, and recruiters expecting you to know everything on day one. Do not let those temporary friction points limit your imagination. Over a three-to-five-year window, your career can pivot into completely different roles or industries, provided you take the time to figure out what you actually want and what you enjoy doing. Only work that you genuinely enjoy is sustainable over the long run.
When my mentee admitted they did not know their real strengths or interests—Modestly noting they just seemed to do okay and get lucky with top grades in exams—I pointed out that our education system is largely at fault. School trains us to obsess over fixing our weaknesses rather than identifying and compounding our strengths. Taking assessments like CliftonStrengths can help uncover what you are naturally wired to do well. In the age of artificial intelligence, this self-awareness is critical because the technology acts as an amplifier of your natural strengths, not a replacement. If you enjoy client-facing work, artificial intelligence will help you draft faster and operate more efficiently, saving you time so you can spend even more of your day in front of clients. Ultimately, take a step back and reflect on your life purpose and your childhood dreams; they often hold the clearest clues to what you truly want, giving you the foundation to build a fulfilling career.
