Area of work
Fixed Income Derivatives, Sales
Studied
Business Studies at Cass Business School, London, Management and Economics at Wspiz University, Warsaw
Joined
July 2006
Working in
London
My desk is involved in finding optimal risk hedging solutions for institutional and corporate clients in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as providing them with investment products.
When I first started here I spent nine months on the interest rate structuring desk. This is quite common for a graduate starting in Sales as it helps you really get to grips with the technical aspects of the products that you'll be working with.
I mainly deal with emerging markets in my role, particularly Eastern Europe. When you work in emerging markets a lot of your time is spent finding new clients and developing relationships with them; we also do a lot more work, comparatively, on the legal and compliance side. There's a great mix of clients that I deal with, some of them are highly sophisticated and have a good understanding of the markets and know what they're looking for. There are others who aren't as familiar with the products and so we spend more time with them explaining how things work and which products may be most suitable for them. It's an exciting time for us right now because we're expanding quite rapidly, bringing on more people and more teams and there is a lot of opportunity for those who perform well. Even though I only started three years ago, I'm now pretty much solely responsible for selling a range of Fixed Income products in Poland. I have my own clients and a lot of independence on a daily basis.
What really excites me about my role is the great learning opportunities. I interact with very interesting clients, often at their highest levels of management and I also have a lot of contact with the top management within BNP Paribas. We all sit together on the trading floor so if I want to speak to the Head of European Structuring, she is sitting two rows away and is available for me to seek guidance or test ideas. I think one of the most important things that you need to learn here is not to wait for people to tell you what to do. You need to follow your own initiative and deal with things yourself, but at the same time know when you need support. You need to lead your own projects and have the initiative and ability to ensure that whatever needs to be done gets done.
Succeeding in Sales is about finding solutions to obstacles that arise, it's about not giving up. If you're trying to forge a new relationship with a client, you need to come up with a reason to talk to them, a way to reach them and then you can develop the relationship from there. We are always introducing new products into the market and we need to make sure we update our regular clients on new things and how they work. You need to be able to look at the product, and know whether it's viable or not for a client's business. So you screen the product for your client's portfolio and then if it's relevant, suggest how it could work for them and tailor it to their needs. When a slightly more complex product is being launched, the product development team or structuring team will come along and help explain it to clients.
I love the independence of my role and the travel. A typical trip for me would involve four or five client calls, either lunch, an informal dinner or a meeting at their offices. A call could involve exploring investment ideas for retail clients, or meeting the head of treasury from a major bank to discuss asset and liability management strategy. You have to be fairly flexible when you're meeting clients, you also need a lot of patience and resilience. It's fantastic to be able to meet the top management of big corporates and financial institutions and offer them something unique - access to global markets, cutting-edge structuring platforms and latest tailor-made solutions.
