A finance person who ended up living in the data

---

Timeline

How I Got Here

I didn’t plan any of this.

I finished a business degree in Granada in 2024 with no clear idea of what I wanted, and spent six months in the regional government processing grant applications. Slow in a way I haven’t experienced since. I took exactly one thing from it, but it was a good one: most of the pain inside an organisation is in how information moves, not in the decisions people make with it.

Then I got into PwC.

Since then I’ve spent a year and a half inside the financials of companies with revenues in the billions — energy and infrastructure, private and listed, fifteen-plus deals. The scale took some getting used to. A rounding error in those files is somebody’s annual budget.

What the job actually is

Someone wants to buy a company. Before they sign, they need to know whether the numbers are real.

That’s it. You get three years of financial history, usually as a pile of exports from systems that don’t talk to each other, and you rebuild it until you can say: this is what the business earns, this is what it owes, this is the number the price should sit on.

The number is the easy part.

Getting to a number you’d defend is the work.

Where I’m going

I recently took the CFA Level 1 exam. I’m waiting for the results. Not to go back to being a pure finance person, but so I don’t become someone who only knows tools.

The roles I want sit in the overlap: you have to know what a number means and how to build the thing that produces it.

Off the clock

I invest my own money, which has taught me more about my own psychology than about markets. I read too much about AI applied to finance. I ski when there’s snow on Sierra Nevada, 45 minutes up the road. And I take photographs — badly, but happily.

droldanalba@gmail.com — I read everything.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-roldan-alba