Superannuation
My first long job was at JPMorgan in Bengaluru, on ANZ fund services. Superannuation: other people’s retirement money, custody, settlements, the daily grind of making the books match.
I interned on broker-dealer work. A lot of it was SQL over tables nobody wanted to own. I indexed a pile of records so reconciliations ran faster. It was not glamorous. It was the first time I saw that a bank is a set of files that have to agree by a deadline, and that people get blamed when they do not.
Full time I sat closer to the funds. We onboarded tools, tested processors, chased exceptions. I helped get Australian super money onto systems that already existed, rather than inventing anything. I did not move that money on my own. I was one person on a chain of people who moved a client from one process to another.
What I remember is the tempo. Funds do not settle because you are excited. They settle on a calendar. NAV is late or it is not. A redemption has a notice period. Someone in operations has a queue. If you have only worked in crypto, this feels like a museum. If you have only worked in a bank, crypto feels like a casino with better graphic design.
I was good at the parts that looked like chores: automation, training people on a tool, writing down a process so the next person did not have to ask me. I was restless. DeFi summer in 2020 made the restlessness worse. I had been trading coins on the side since 2017 with no particular skill. The tech was more interesting than my P&L.
I do not miss the building. I miss knowing, at the end of a day, whether the file had landed. A lot of startup work has no such file. That is not freedom. It is a different kind of fog. I still use the bank habit: write the steps, name the owner, look at yesterday’s exceptions before inventing a new strategy.