LISAVETA Ramotar, daughter of former President Donald Ramotar, became the first Guyanese (in Guyana) to complete all three levels of the Charter Financial Analyst (CFA) examination and will be applying to the CFA Institute for the use of the CFA designation.

The CFA exam has been described as the “hardest” exam in the world in finance and Wall Street’s “toughest qualification” by various outlets including Business Insider and the Financial Times.
It was reported that over 250,000 persons, globally, registered to sit the exam in 2019, but the pass rates were as low as 22 per cent, Ramotar said that it was probably the most daunting undertaking in her life.

Her final results were emailed on July 28, 2022, and while upon the conclusion of the exams in May she thought that she did well, she said she could not bring herself to check the results and hence handed her phone to her mother and said: “If the first word in the email is not ‘congratulations,’ I did not pass”, thankfully she said with a smile, the first word was congratulations.

The CFA Institute website states: “The CFA credential is the most respected and recognised investment designation in the world as it demonstrates superior competency in advanced portfolio management, financial expertise, and technical skills, underpinned by ethical conduct and the highest standards of practice. Successful CFA Programme candidates report that they spend an average of 1,000 hours, in aggregate, studying for all three levels.”

When asked to describe her family background and her interests she said: “I come from a political family.”
She said that coming from such a background, when it comes to interests it tends to always surround development.

“I would say that every child of every political leader of the PPP or anyone associated closely with the PPP…, the development of Guyana is generally what we constantly hear about and what you yourself think about, so even if one works in the private sector, I think they would think how does this work help to improve Guyana and the lives of Guyanese,” Ramotar said.

She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Guyana in Business Management and successfully applied and obtained a British Chevening Scholarship which allowed her to pursue a Master’s degree in Finance and Investment from the University of York in the UK. Subsequently, she attended the University of Toronto and earned an MBA.

Ramotar said that although her entire educational background has been business and mostly private sector oriented, “before we discovered oil, the opportunities for work in the private sector, I believe, were limited in terms of both their depth and scope, as such once I completed my undergraduate degree I joined the Bank of Guyana first in the International Department and then in the Research Department.

“I can say that working at the Bank was where I got the greatest exposure. I was able to apply a lot of the subject areas that I studied at UG, for example statistics, economics obviously…so I am obviously very grateful for that and for the people I met and the bosses that I would have had that would have given me interesting assignments and pushed me.”

Ramotar also noted that she was Guyana’s representative in the Executive Director’s office at the World Bank Group; this was an opportunity given by the government particularly former President Bharrat Jagdeo.

LIFTING PEOPLE OUT OF POVERTY
She said: “As you would know, the World Bank’s goal is to basically see a world free of poverty, and so they do a lot of developmental work on many different levels and with a private sector educational background, I have a bias in my belief that working through the private sector to create different types and quality of job and to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurship to blossom is the most obvious way of lifting people out of poverty.”

Upon the completion of the MBA, Ramotar was retained as the General Manager of the Guyana Gold Board from 2015-2018.
She noted that it was during a conversation with the former Minister of Housing (now President Dr. Irfaan Ali) that he encouraged her to enroll into the CFA programme, noting that those were skills that would be needed in the not-too-distant future in Guyana.

Ramotar said that she started the programme and then stopped after the first level because it was quite a grueling process and it was a specialisation that, at that time, would not have been utilised.
In 2018, during conversation with a lecturer at the University of Guyana and Assistant Dean at SEBI, she was encouraged to complete what she had started (the CFA programme).

Ramotar decided to pick up back the CFA in 2018 and travelled to the US to write the second level in 2019, when she secured a pass (the institute only provides a pass/did not pass ‘grade’). She was supposed to write the final level in 2020, but it was postponed to December 2020. However, the test centre she was enrolled in cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She sat the final level of the exam in May of this year.

Ramotar said that with the discovery of oil, she sees her skills being beneficial to both the private and public sectors, since there is need to manage Guyana’s resources.
“It shows that right here in Guyana we Guyanese have the technical knowledge and skills to manage assets and make various investment and finance decisions,” Ramotar said.