Evita Zanusso from Big Society Capital was our speaker this week, and she gave us an overview of ‘Social Impact Investment’: investments that have a social benefit as well as a financial return. Dan Robertson from the Finance Society has provided us with a review: In today’s industry insights talk, Evita Zanuso provided a fascinating insight into the world of social impact investment. After having a more … Continue reading Industry Insights: Investing for Impact

A review of last night’s talk on the challenges of managing fixed income now that interest rates are likely to rise. Essential knowledge for anybody interested in asset management. http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/events/review-managing-fixed-income-portfolios-rising-interest-rate-environment/ Continue reading Industry Insights: Managing Fixed Income

A review of last night’s event http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/events/review-cooperative-banking/#more-info Continue reading Industry Insights: Why Cooperative Banking

Once again my colleague Dan Robinson has reviewed the event for us: Anannit Sumawong is a Quantitative analyst at GAM, and he’s an alumni of the ICMA Centre where he studied a masters in Financial Risk Management. In his talk he shared what a typical day is like, and told us some of the things he wished he’d known when he was starting out in … Continue reading Industry Insights: “A life in a day of a buy-side risk manager”

What are the key turning points in a career? We will all have two or three key moments in our working life that define the direction of the remainder of our career. In this talk we learned how to seek out and make the most of opportunities for career development. Stuart Sinclair Non-Executive Director, Lloyds Banking Group   Stuart Sinclair currently holds the position of … Continue reading Industry Insights: Career Turning Points

This was an excellent talk – a more in depth topic than we normally cover, but personally I really learned something! I was surprised at just how many risk models there were. I had always associated them with pricing risk, but there were models for market risk, credit risk, operational risk and decision making risk, as well as many other categories. Within each of these … Continue reading Industry Insights: Model Risk

My colleague Dan Robinson has written this week’s summary… In this week’s Industry Insights, Siddarth Malik gave us a fascinating and intriguing insight into his career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Sid (as he likes to be called) had a truly international upbringing, growing up in Switzerland, with Indian heritage and an American education, giving him a … Continue reading Industry Insights – Investment Banking

  Last night we heard from industry thought leader Tim Skeet, who basically asked – should bankers be in jail? His short answer is no, not the majority. The long answer is that outright criminality (cf the recent HBOS scandal local to us in Reading) and incompetence boarding on negligence at the top (maybe Dick Fuld?) should be punished. Tim Skeet is an experienced banker and … Continue reading Industry Insights: Politics, Regulation and Finance

This week Jai captured his thoughts about the talk for us all: What is it like to have a job of a Private Wealth Manager? This week we got a quite comprehensive perspective on the job role of a Private Wealth Manager and the conversation was made more enriching because Konstantinos took the time to describe how to develop personal objectives with regards to career … Continue reading Industry Insights: The Secrets of Private Wealth Management

How do you build a career in finance? Last night we heard how Aasif went from being a business analyst – an IT job essentially – to working in M&A for an investment bank, via a role producing management information (MI). You might have thought that was enough to demonstrate career flexibility, but Aasif didn’t stop there. He moved onto a trading desk (which had … Continue reading Industry Insights: Career snakes & ladders: how i built and sustained a career in finance