Area of work
Structuring, Fixed Income

Studied
Master of Science in Industrial Engineering and Management, (concentrating in Financial Mathematics), Lund University, Sweden

Joined
2006 Internship, 2007 Graduate Trainee

Working in
London

In Structuring, we are the liaison between the Sales, Trading and Research teams. My job mainly consists of receiving requests from internal marketers, which are usually either proposing new products or client requests, coming up with ideas, pricing them, and then examining the risk to the client and to the bank.

I started with BNP Paribas as a summer intern and then moved onto a long-term internship, during which I was lucky enough to be able to complete my masters thesis. So, even though I was working full time, I was actually completing my university thesis on Modelling the Inflation Curve. To have access to the extensive resources of the bank and be able to learn advanced modelling techniques and the most recent inflation theories from our experts was an enormous advantage and obviously something I could never have had while at university. After my long-term internship, I knew I wanted to continue on and work here full time.

The graduate programme here is structured so that almost straight away you join your team and start learning through one-to-one coaching. Of course there are other more formal training programmes as well. Initially all the trainees have a five-week orientation course, which focuses on a different area of finance each week, and then after that FSA training. Another training initiative that’s open to everyone is regular evening lectures where someone quite senior from within the bank talks for 30 minutes about a different topic of interest. I usually attend as it gives me a chance to learn what people from different business areas do, things I would never have a chance to learn in my daily work.

Any extra knowledge I can gain is especially useful to me as I work in an area that has a lot of interaction with different areas of the bank. I really need to understand the needs of our Sales, Trading, and Research teams and also the business and needs of our clients. It’s a position that requires a lot of creative thinking, coming up with new ideas and exploring different opportunities. Our team is also focused on trying to identify opportunities, to see where the market is moving and decide which products will be useful in the future. Product development is a big part of our team’s resposibility, making sure that we offer the most attractive products possible. Inflation has been a hot topic recently, so we’ve been developing bespoke products for our clients to protect them against deflation/inflation .We’re working with both bonds and derivatives, looking for opportunities in the market. On the derivatives side we’ve also worked on hybrids, which involve a number of different asset classes including inflation, and path-dependent inflation structures, which vary over time depending on whether certain conditions are satisfied.

It’s great to be working on these really sophisticated products so soon after joining, as that’s the type of thing I studied and am really interested in. I think that’s one of the good things about BNP Paribas, if you can show you’ve got the aptitude and the drive you’ll be given the opportunity as soon as you’re ready. There’s no rigid progression path – instead the bank tries to find the best way to develop each graduate’s individual career long term.