Interview with Arthur Lima, Manager in the Transaction Services team at PwC, who completed SHP Financial Training’s Certified Business Valuation and Financial Modelling Course in 2019.
I work at PwC with M&A Advisory, mainly focused on due diligence for local and overseas investors (financial and corporate buyers), acting on buy and sell side transactions, and also assisting with completion accounts for closing procedures.
Since we work with diverse investors on different transactions in various sectors, I decided to take the course in order to have the knowledge to offer complete assistance to our clients during due diligence and M&A process, instead of just the traditional accounting work. By understanding every step of a transaction, theoretically and in practice, I’m able to assist our clients with any of their needs, from the traditional due diligence analysis (understand of recurring and operational EBITDA, normalized level of Working Capital and indebtedness level), to tailored analysis that fits the modelling and price mechanism of that transaction.
I heard about SHP from a friend that took the ACCA classes and said great things about them, mainly related to the quality of the course due to great teachers and small student numbers. I took a look at the school website and found the course. The content format, hours and material of course convinced me, so I decided to sign-up.
Besides preparing me to apply for positions in the M&A market, in both finance and corporates, the course helped me to provide a more robust experience and better quality, purpose-driven analysis for my clients.
In my opinion the course is 10 of 10 because it teaches you the theory, wrapping up all the knowledge that is needed to understand the basics. During the course you apply the theory in practice, and understand from scratch how to build a model and how adapt it, by business and industry.
The course is great, and is a starting point for those who want to learn from the scratch the topic, and also a springboard for those who already have some knowledge, but need to go deeper and learn in practice how things are done.
