Pabak Indu, Author at Adamas University

FinTech is the future: Career opportunities for Computing in Finance Sector

Wondering about the title? Is it’s a new programming language? Is it new technology? According to a study, more than 50% of tech students are more interested in financial sector jobs than regular IT jobs. One of the key reasons is the requirement of less programming and more of a tech service knowledge. We often see many of our consanguine people are working for some bank or financial sectors and we intend to fascinate ourselves for those jobs. But we are confused as the current trend is leaning towards computer science, especially post COVID-19 world. So at ADAMAS UNIVERSITY, we merged them with your dream with the trend in our Bachelor of Computer Application Specialization in Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance domain. This is a unique course that feeds your tech-savvy part of the brain in-lining with your dream. With this course, you will be a strong challenger in the IT services market along with your specialty in FinTech.

Let’s see what FinTech has in arsenal for you:

Cybersecurity

The financial sector mostly operates on digital platforms and dome times cloud platforms. These financial applications grow on internal process and customer service, but as the day goes it also exposes many vulnerabilities and attracts many malicious cyber actors.

65 out of 100 cyberattacks target only financial sectors than any other institutes.

Cybercrime is always on the rise and finding new vulnerabilities as we speak. Cybersecurity institutes estimates that cybercrimes will increase 300% over coming five years only.

In this circumstances the demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals will always be touching the sky. The FinTech sector is in serious need of experts and specialists to develop security measures that prevent any malicious actions in consideration their business and client base.

Blockchain developer

Due to legalization of crypto currency and bitcoin in many parts of the world blockchain technology is growing with in the FinTech.

30% of FinTech companies expect to incorporate blockchain technologies into their strategy by 2020, according to PwC.

Although this distributed ledger technology was initially developed to account for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the FinTech sector has found other uses. For instance, one solution includes the elimination of business intermediaries to make transactions less costly, faster and more efficient. Some authorities also foresee its potential to provide more secure methods for records management.

As such, the demand for blockchain developers has grown rapidly.

The recent peak in cryptocurrency and blockchain interest continues to fuel job demand, as more companies require platforms and programs to improve efficiencies and speed-to-market.

Risk and compliance

FinTech emerged on the scene as an alternative hybrid solution to financial institutions. However, the lines have almost disappeared in recent years considering new developments.

There is a growing trend of FinTech businesses pursuing bank charters, and in turn, banks are nurturing relationships with FinTech companies to full fill consumer demand—a total transformation of both the FinTech and traditional financial services domain.

Both fields have been affected by new rules and regulations amid the evolution of technology. As a result, the risk of regulatory scrutiny and obligations have increased simultaneously, causing the need for compliance experts to rise.

In addition to compliance, risk control managers are also in demand. More financial companies need specialists to analyse, prevent and mitigate risks, including regulations, operations and crime.

Apps Developer

The FinTech apps market has seen spectacular growth over the last several years. Global app downloads and consumer spending have been hitting record levels, according to recent reports. The demand for mobile payment solutions and personal finance is only growing, as it is being driven by an appetite from younger generations of tech-savvy consumers.

Millennials also are more likely to use their increased ability to make payments securely on their phones.

Visa has reported more than 33% of users made a peer to peer digital payment over a mobile device, and 60% have sent money to family with a mobile device.

There will be a stronger need in future years for financial technology app developers to serve this booming market.

Financial Analyst

A financial analyst is responsible for managing budgets against incoming income forecasts. Depending upon the size of the firm, you could be an analyst for a single division or the entire company. Financial analysts assemble financial reports and do forecasts of incoming revenue, as well as run business studies. See full financial analyst salary outlook.

Financial analyst jobs in FinTech are in great demand as startups continue to grow.

These new financial services businesses need financial analysts with computer expertise to manage their revenue, but they also need tech-nerds to work with clients and develop tools to analyze the data.

Quantitative Analyst

‘Quants’ are the smart people who write the big, complex financial models. They are the ones behind the data-driving trading technology that large investment banks and hedge funds use to trade securities and analyse risk. As big data continues to rise, quants are becoming more important in FinTech to devise models that can sort through the massive amount of data and automate them so that trading can be a mostly automatic process.

Artificial intelligence

Digital transformation is a hot topic in the FinTech space, making technology adoption a top priority for organizations today.

The financial services industry flourishes on informed decision-making, from extending credit to consumers to evaluating risks.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have helped businesses make fast and critical decisions with data and insight. Across the industry, organizations have turned to these technologies to transform their business through AML pattern detection, chatbots, risk management, fraud prevention, network security and investment predictions.

Data Specialist

Deloitte recently highlighted the important strategic role of data in a report with the World Economic Forum about trends affecting the financial services industry. Innovation that emerges will allow financial companies to have access to new sets of data, including social data, and allow new ways to understand markets and customers.

As clients are more empowered by the Internet and digital technologies, clients are becoming more proactive and want new financial services companies to give them more individual services tailored to their needs. So, there will be a need for data scientists, chief data officers, financial data analysts and data analytics managers needed to sift through information that can provide more insights into their markets.

Adamas University is taking all possible steps to make you FinTech ready through its advanced curriculum and highly skilled faculties.

Play as Professional : An Insight to the career options for Gaming and Animation

Is police chasing you? Did you find who was the murderer? Can you escape from the room or build an empire or drive the fastest car or kill your enemies or get killed by them?

Well, I am not talking about a lawbreaker I am talking about a gamer.

While expressing yourself through our gaming console, if you

While spending time with your gaming console, if you ever hit by “how you could build a career in gaming”, then your Gray cells are working fine.

With more than 2.6 billion gamers worldwide, the gaming industry has come a long way in just 10 years and establishing itself as a prime evolving sector in the entertainment industry. According to Statista, the Indian gaming industry will grow up to 250.3 billion INR i.e. almost 25030 Crores INR by the end of 2024.

According to Industry association, NASSCOM estimates the Indian gaming sector to be worth more than INR 200 billion or 2000 crore.

With 1.33 billion people and more than two thirds of them under the age of 35 with almost every one of them holding a smartphones in their hand, as we speak, India is tranquil to be one of the world’s largest agora for gaming.

Relating to this rapid growth, there will be a high demand for professionals in this field of gamming, which focuses not just on playing games but creating them.

Game Animation, Game Art creation in 3D and 2D, Game Design, Game Testing, Game Programming, Project Management, Audio Engineers, along with general management positions to name a few job roles waiting for you.

Let’s have a look at some of the career opportunities in the gaming industry.

Game Designer

They are the visionaries of games entertain us. They work on design what they have conceived or from a pre-approved the idea, such as a game based on real life events, day to day activities, some adventures, some movies or any other inspiration.

They need to use their creativity to visualize games for a range of devices and platforms that engage and capture the fascination of the user. Observe and plan with every element detail of a new game including the rules, rough storyline, character interface, and modes of play.

By putting together a concept document and use this to convince the development team that the game is worth proceeding with detailed market research to understand what your target the audience wants and bringing a rough idea into a reality.

Narrative Designer

As per UBISOFT, the Narrative Designer crafts the story of a game, visualizing characters, defining the story behind locations or objects, designing the narrative of missions and clarifying the objective of the mission, building story arcs, contributing to building the player’s emotional journey.

To support the Game Design team in defining systems and structures to support the game experience throughout the entire game.

Their creativity is truly identified when they have to describe the circumstances through actions or expressions of the virtual characters more than what they speak. Their work brings actual life to design the gameplay by defining the “story experience”.

Game Animator

Game Animator is the craftsman of the virtual models from the character to the environment and props. They are the architect who designs breathing life into virtual characters. They provide details to the skin textures of each character, the watery gloss on the road when it rains, or define the shadows following the source of light. Defining how a character jumps, crouches, sits, stands, and moves are what a visual artist takes good care of.

There are various job roles within the art design department such as Concept Artists, 3D Modelers, 2D/Texture Artists, each with a different set of responsibilities and skills. With the help of Bachelor of computer application in gaming and animation at Adamas University gives you a chance to seek a career in this domain as well without perusing any separate training or degree.

Sound Engineer

Sound is one of the major senses through which user experiences and feel their environment. The job of the Sound Engineers are vital to create that aura where players will listen and feel and get into that situation of their virtual characters.

Every the game has its own storyline and genre, and audio engineers develop audio in harmony with it. They encapsulate the game’s essence in the audio they produce by blending dynamic sound effects with ambient sounds and background music to bring life to the game’s world.

Game Developer

Game developers are the creator of the building blocks for the entire gaming environment. They work on teams to plan, design, and produce video games for computers, mobile devices, or gaming consoles. Their work involves creating visual content for the game and writing code to implement all the game’s features and functionality. This career requires a background in coding and mathematics giving importance to the physics, chemistry and biological sciences and the ability to collaborate well with others to accomplish project goals. While many work full-time hours in-game studios or at software companies, opportunities exist for game developers who prefer to work remotely or to self-publish their games online as independent developers.

Game Tester

Do you get scolding for playing games all day from your parents? Now make it as your carrier and play in your career and become Game Tester. But Game Testers do not just sit with a cup of tea, relax and play through the game stages. They systematically play-test the game, analysing the game’s performance, identifying bugs, and suggesting changes to be made to the programmers to enhance the quality and playability of the game before it goes public.

Game Testing involves playing the same level over and over again until it is assured of the absence of any bugs or glitches. The work entails playing games for long hours and making sure the gaming experience of players does not spoil due to any flaws.

The international gaming industry is booming, and India is identified as the biggest market for the gaming industry. This will bring enough opportunities for game lovers. It is a relatively new industry but has grown drastically in the past two decades with the expansion of internet accessibility and the advancement of technology.

The future of the gaming industry in India is shining like Sirius in the blue sky thus it is the best time to build a career in this industry and Adamas University is ready with its Bachelor of computer application in gaming and animation to make you ready for your favourite job role.

Covid-19: A worldwide pandemic boosting the cyber security attacks

Introduction:

COVID-19 has a direct effect on human health. But how much passive effect it has over the entire world?

The effect of COVID-19 led the entire world in a state of lockdown. For the safety of the employees, all the sectors have moved to work from home facility. Even the sectors, where the facility of work from home may not have been considered from the past few decades, have now started implementing it as a necessity and leaning more towards the digital world. Every aspect of life has its pros and cons. Now the question is all about the future passive effect of COVID-19 in the digital world. The main motive behind this survey is about the industries adopting digital transformation as their Business Continuation Plan(BCP) or IT giants, pioneer in this digital era, both are facing a huge challenge concerning data security. The IT industries ensured adequate and updated digital security protocols in their infrastructure. But amid the ongoing nationwide lockdown, the organizations are engaging their associates in work from home facility, where associates are utilizing their personal infrastructure. Most of the time these facilities do not have adequate data security protocols and the organization is also not in a position to provide door to door support with an extensive data security infrastructure. This clears the way for malicious users to hack easily associates’ personal infrastructure and steal confidential data. In these circumstances, we shall conduct a survey and collect the stats, that our victory over COVID-19 is a real victory or pushing us into the next level of challenges for our future.

Some recorded Cyberattack(hacking) incidents using COVID-19 theme:

In a recent report by The Economic Times dated 27^th March 2020, the volume of cyberattacks has doubled in the past few days penetrating different corporate networks as suggested by PricewaterhouseCoopers’ cybersecurity team. India observed malware named AZORult, which was there for almost the last three years but recently it has been merged with files and apps belonging to the COVID-19 theme.

In a report by the India Today dated 24^th March 2020, the World Health Organization(WHO), frontline defense, for the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, has recently faced a cyberattack. A group of Elite hackers tried to break into the WHO’s internal email facility. But due to the active presence of the cybersecurity professionals in the organization, the attack has been nullified.

As claimed by WebARX, a web security company, over past few weeks, the attempts of website exploitations have increased in a considerable amount. The company has also claimed, in March 16^th , 2020 to April 08^th,2020 they got around 56 reports concerning cyberattacks.

Till March 30^th,2020, Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) division of FBI has encountered more than 1,200 complaints related to COVID-19 scams. In the past few weeks, hackers have engaged in phishing activities mimicking the actual websites used to raised funds for COVID-19 launched DDoS attacks against government agencies providing aid for COVID-19 deployed ransomware at medical facilities and created fake COVID-19 websites that silently download malware to victim devices.

As per the alert of CISA, USA, and NCSC, UK released on April 08^th, 2020, cybercriminal and advanced persistent threat (APT) groups are launching Phishing web applications, Malware distribution using the subject of coronavirus or COVID-19, Registration of new domain names containing wording related to coronavirus or COVID-19 for attracting and trapping a large number of internet users, and Attacks against newly deployed remote access and teleworking infrastructure.

As per the report of the Business Insider, India published on April 9^th, 2020, Microsoft has mapped cyberattacks such as phishing emails and found that 241 nations and territories have suffered at least one cybersecurity attack using the COVID-19 theme. Microsoft Threat Protection, the company’s suite of cybersecurity tools used to track and block threats also found roughly 60,000 mails with COVID-19 related malicious attachments or URLs are sent 2% of a day.

Figure 1: Describing Year wise cyberattack graph for January-March quarter

The Figure 1, portrays the cyberattack(hacker) trends for this year and past two years in the given duration of months.

Conclusion:

Many IT giants have released a virtual tracker as a part of their work from home facility to deal with these cyber-attacks(hackings) amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This will track the background network activities of their associates ensuring the protection of confidential organizational data from malicious users. They are even launching VPNs(Virtual Private Network), separating the associates with similar interests from the overall network traffic and restricting unauthorized access. These digital transformations happened very quickly without getting proper time for acclimatization. The non-IT firms are using many existing opensource software without knowing their security vulnerabilities. This software exposes the organizations to the malicious cyberattacks, during their confidential meeting or data sharing. We can draw a conclusion from the above study that, the whole world is not only fighting against the COVID-19 but also struggling with many passive problems influenced by this worldwide pandemic. These opportunist cyber criminals sneaking their way and achieving their goals by taking advantage of the COVID-19 outbreak, where people, Government and media are mainly focused for the health related issues. So, we need to be more conscious and alert while fighting with COVID-19 not only to defeat the disease but to protect ourselves from these passive threats into the digital world.

Co-Contributor: Ms. Sanjana Dutta, IT Analyst, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Kolkata, West Bengal, India.