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 joined first as an intern in APAC broker-dealer operations. One project was SQL indexing across a large set of records and tables. The point was plain: make error resolution and daily reporting faster. I also worked on process automation and trained colleagues in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Manila on the tools we used.
Full time, I worked on testing and onboarding a transaction processor for ANZ superannuation. I was one person in a chain that included operations, technology, controls, and the client. My part included testing, tracking work, automating repeated steps, and helping the team use the new process. I did not manage a fund or make investment decisions.
That distinction matters to me now. A fund is not only a strategy and a return. It also has custody records, accounting movements, reconciliations, controls, and people who have to resolve a break. The work can look small from the outside because each person owns one part. The whole thing works only when those parts agree.
Crypto often starts from the other end. The asset moves first, and the operating process is built around it later. My bank work started with the process. Neither approach removes the basic questions: who records the movement, who checks it, and what happens when two systems disagree.
I did not learn those questions from a fund manager’s seat. I learned them from operations. That is the narrower claim, and the true one.