In this interview, you will learn about the co-founder of PRJ Analytics, Michael Chang. Before co-founding PRJ Analytics, he was a successful financial professional with extensive experience in both commercial and investment banking. We will cover the story behind the company’s creation and the founder’s experience. We will also try to answer some common questions about PRJ Analytics. So, let’s begin.
Before PRJ Analytics, I worked in investment and commercial banks focused on capital markets, financial sponsored, and M&A transactions for over a decade. My banking experience exposed me to some of the greatest minds and leaders in their respective fields. I learned a great deal from them, especially their entrepreneurial spirit and problem-solving thinking.
One day, a friend of mine, a senior software engineer, suggested that I help my daughter, who was 7 years old at that time, learn about coding because it would be an essential skill to have. He gave me some online courses to begin with. So, I started by learning alongside my daughter. As you guessed, my daughter was not interested in it, but I was hooked. From then on, I could not stop thinking about how technology could make my work more efficient to better serve clients and decision-making. Sometimes I would even stay up late at night just trying to solve a problem with coding. For those familiar with coding, you guessed it; I did a lot of Stack Overflow searches in those days.
In short, I think what led to the founding of PRJ Analytics was attributed to my banking experience and my passion for technology.
A routine task for bankers was to DESA, discover, evaluate, structure, and advise on potential transactions. Both decision-making and dialogues come down to how the future performance of the company in focus could be realized based on its historical performance in a numerical way. In the other words, a company's future strategy, growth, execution capability, quality of management, and forward-looking market condition must be quantified in a financial projection analysis to facilitate objective decision-making.
However, building a detailed and fully-integrated financial projection with Excel was, and still is, very error-prone and time-consuming. Normally, at an early stage of a transaction, a financial projection analysis would not be prepared until a later stage when an enormous amount of resources had already been spent. However, finding out that a transaction was not feasible after already spending a lot of resources would mean a tremendous waste of time and a huge opportunity cost.
With what I knew about technology and a little bit of my entrepreneurial spirit, I started asking myself: wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that would allow me to quickly create detailed financial projections? How about sharing my financial projection analysis with clients or co-workers in real-time without emailing back and forth ending up with a colossal amount of emails with different Excel files? Would clients appreciate it and help me to discover more opportunities? Why do I have to download the data from Bloomberg, Capital IQ, or FactSet to Excel and manually build a financial projection analysis every time? There must be a better way to streamline this routine and tedious task. This is how the idea of PRJ Analytics came about.
It took over two years of brainstorming, soul searching, and market research before the concept of PRJ Analytics was born, a cloud-based financial analytic application that helps financial professionals create and collaborate with fully-integrated financial statements with data from all major stock exchanges in the world.
In a nutshell, a financial projection analysis provides an overall picture of a company’s past and the action it will take in the future in a quantifiable way for better decision making. Financial projection analysis is an intersection of all business data. All business decisions and top-level strategies are reflected in a company's finance, from income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. Without it, decision-making would be like a pilot flying blind without a clear direction.
The financial projection is absolutely vital for financial professionals and decision-makers to obtain a clear understanding of the past and a clear view into the future by revealing any deviations early on to mitigate any concerns quickly and accurately. PRJ Analytics is designed for that and a whole lot more. Our cloud-based solution is a financial projection analysis tool that makes financial projection easy without ever using Excel or writing any formulas.
PRJ Analytics is proven and tested by world financial leaders with precision, speed, ease of use, and listed company data from the major stock exchanges in the world. These are the most critical factors for those who require precise results and information with speed. It helps financial professionals gain crucial insight into how the company will perform and how each different scenario may impact the company’s financial standing quickly. In addition, it lets users present and share their analyses with others. The key is, now, creating financial projections only takes minutes instead of hours.
With PRJ Analytics, you can communicate better, increase client engagement, and spend more time on what matters the most with just a few simple steps.
Contact us at info@prjanalytics.net to learn more or check out our website.