From No Experience to KYC Analyst: How a Fresher Broke Into Finance
Every fresher knows the loop. You open a job portal, find a role that looks right, read down to the requirements, and there it is — “minimum one to three years of experience.” You close the tab. Reshu Singh did that dozens of times before she understood the problem was not her ability. It was that she had nothing an employer could look at.
Today she is a KYC Analyst at Slice, one of India’s better-known fintech companies. The distance between those two points was nine months and a change of approach.
Reshu joined Meritshot’s Investment Banking PG Program in August 2025 with a degree and no work experience. The first thing the programme changed was not her skills but her aim. “Finance” is not a career; it is a dozen careers with different entry points. Working through the options, she narrowed to KYC — know your customer — the customer due diligence and financial-crime-prevention work at the front of every regulated financial institution. It hires freshers, rewards careful and methodical people, and sits in one of the few operations areas where Indian hiring has been growing rather than shrinking.
Over nine months she attended live classes, submitted assignments, and built the thing that changed her applications: a business enterprise valuation across 21 worksheets — a discounted cash flow model, a comparable company analysis, a full weighted-average-cost-of-capital build. When one comparable company had negative earnings that would have distorted the result, she recognised it, removed it, and documented why. That single judgement call is exactly what a technical interview probes.
She finished with 91% attendance and module scores in the high eighties and low nineties — good, not flawless, which is what a real record looks like. The attendance figure matters more than it looks. Over nine months, the learners who finish strongly are rarely the most gifted ones; they are the ones who keep turning up after the novelty has gone.
What makes Reshu’s story unusual is how direct it was. She applied to Slice, and it landed. Not because placement is guaranteed — it never is — but because a prepared candidate with work she could defend did not need fifty attempts to find a fit.
“The hardest part wasn’t studying,” she says. “It was not knowing what I was even allowed to apply for. Once I knew what I was aiming at, it was just work.”
Reshu’s full verified record — admission letter, attendance, scores, capstone and certificate — is published at Meritshot’s placement stories, where each detail can be checked independently.
Her story is a useful correction to a common belief: that a fresh graduate with no experience is stuck until someone takes a chance on them. What Reshu built was the reason to be hired, rather than waiting to be chosen. For anyone staring at a portal full of jobs that all want experience they do not have, that is the more useful lesson — the door is not closed, it is just waiting for evidence.
