A day in the life of the Deutsche Bank associate who reflects before work and dances after

Akhila Chaganti is an associate in the product management team in Deutsche Bank’s Securities Services business in Singapore. She graduated from the National University of Singapore with a major in Economics in 2020 and joined Deutsche Bank’s graduate program a few months later. This is what a typical day looks like for her.

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7am. I wake up early but not too early and try to reflect and do a bit of journaling before I get out of bed. I usually leave for the office around 8.45am, so the mornings aren’t too rushed.

9.15am. I arrive in the office and my working day begins. I’m a generalist in product management, and I help build new products and enhance existing products for our large securities services client base. My role spans everything from product governance (making sure we are aware of the risks and have controls applied to our products) to meeting with the data digital and data vendors we partner with. We’re usually working on a few new products and APIs simultaneously.

9.30. I have an adhoc or weekly catch-up with some of my team. I help look after product governance issues for Asia Pacific and the Middle East and we have something that needs immediate approval. We assemble an approval request, ensuring that it covers the scope of what we’re offering to clients and that it’s been approved by our regulatory team. For example, right now we’re working on a platform enhancement as part of the transformation that’s underway: Part of my role is all about ensuring that the changes are captured in an appropriate way and that governance procedures are applied.

10.30am. I also work on marketing communications for the team, so that our salespeople know how our products are evolving. I spend an hour working on a piece of communication about product updates with my colleagues in the regions – India, China and ASEAN for example.

11.30am. I’m onboarding a new vendor application and ensuring that all the legal agreements have been signed. For this, I need inputs from our legal team, technology team and our governance team. It can be quite time-consuming!

12.30. I usually take 45 minutes or so for lunch, although when there are team lunches we’ll take an hour plus. Sometimes I’ll bring food from home and I’ll eat in the pantry in the office. This is a really nice room with a kitchen and a seating area. Other times, we’ll go out. The office is well located for Lau Pa Sat, which is one of the oldest hawker centres and has some of the best food in Singapore.

1.15pm. I’m working on a presentation that I’m making to a client later in the day.

2pm. While my mornings are spent meeting colleagues in the APAC region, my afternoons are more often spent in conversations with our API leads and colleagues across Europe developers and technology teams. It’s always good to get an update about what they’re working on.

3pm. I have a meeting with a client. With some clients I will have a weekly or biweekly catch-up so that we can look at how products are evolving, how testing is proceeding and whether there are any potential roadblocks. These meetings usually follow a set agenda, and we will often put a PowerPoint deck together to present our points.

4pm. I’m talking to our external vendors or internal developers for a few demos of the new platform. We’re planning to launch a new API soon and I want to understand whether we have the right product approvals, the status of production testing and when it can go live.

5pm. I have a meeting with colleagues in Europe.

6pm. I spent some more time working on new product requests and preparing communications about products we plan to launch in the next week.

7pm. Once a week I’ll also have a late meeting with clients in the US.

7.30pm. I usually end my day between 7.30 and 8pm and am back home at around 8.30pm. I’ll have some dinner and do some journaling or some dancing – I like to do a 15-20 minute high intensity dance workout from YouTube and if I don’t do that I’ll have a walk around the block. Then I’ll come back and have a shower and read my book, although I also procrastinate a lot and end up looking at my phone and emails!

On Friday evenings, I’ll sometimes go out with the team from work. We try our best to organize a fun event every quarter if not we usually go out to get an ice cream or some food together.  

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