Sophie, who will begin studying a full-time MBA at Imperial College London Business School this Fall, worked for Standard Bank Group for eight months after landing an internship fresh out of the University in 2008. She graduated from the University of Leeds with a BA in Philosophy, a subject far removed from the pressures of interning at one of the biggest investment banks in the City.
Standard Bank Group, of the Standard Bank of South Africa Limited, is one of South Africa’s largest financial services groups. It operates in 30 countries around the world and has since struck up plans to sell its London operations to the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) for more than $500m.
Sophie was initially set on a career path in Law. But the fast-moving, high-pressure way of business at Standard Bank convinced her to search for a job in the City, instead of joining a conversion law course after university. “I got hooked,” she said. “I definitely wanted to go into law, but that changed.”
But her career switch to trading was also down to chance. During her second year of study at Leeds, Sophie applied for several internships at law firms, all to no avail. She took up an internship offer at Standard Bank because of a lack of opportunities to work in law.
She landed a role at RBC Capital Markets – the Canadian investment bank – as a Junior Trader in 2009. Sophie went on to work as a rates trader for two years, but the job market is tough. “It was pretty challenging,” she said. “Graduate roles are much harder: it took from August until December (to get a job at RBC).
“You send off 15 applications and you only hear back from six, and of those you get interviews at three.”
In 2012, Sophie became a sole trader of the $ SSA flow trading book, working with a strategic focus on using the secondary flow to build the primary issuance side of the business. Part of her role was to liaise with sales teams’ across different countries, facilitate client orders and build up a bigger market share.
But she left the company in June this year. “I took on that job and I thought it would be different than it was,” she said. “In terms of moving up the ladder it was a step up, but I felt that over the next five years the role wouldn’t change for me.
“That worried me, because you have to improve, to look for the next challenge, and the role I had at RBC wasn’t going to do that.
“The people I respected and worked with began leaving and lots of regulation was coming in. I thought about moving to another desk but in the end I decided to leave… I had always thought about doing an MBA when I was a bit older.”
Sophie will begin studying a full-time MBA at Imperial College London in October. The university boasts a 42 world-wide MBA rank by the Financial Times and has an average salary increase of 74 per cent. But the profile of the university was of no interest to Sophie. She chose to study at Imperial to improve herself. “It was an easy choice for me,” she said.
“Most of the places I looked at were so impressed with the ‘name the school will give you’. I felt that I didn’t want to be one of another 200 graduates: I quite like me.
“Imperial said: ‘we’ll take you and make you the best’. It was the only school that was interested in what I wanted, and not what they could offer me!”
After graduation in September 2014, Sophie has thoughts of joining the venture capital side of finance companies that have a bit more of a modern approach to business. “What I did like about my old job (at RBC) was studying companies and looking at where they were in the market. I often found myself more interested in my company, and I wanted to see an overall view of RBC.”
Studying in London and working in the City has never been more attractive. Forecasts for Britain’s economic growth see some commentators predicting some of the strongest growth rates among the world’s top economies for the second half of this year. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that the UK’s GDP will rise by a quarterly 0.9 per cent in July to September. In the final three months of this year, GDP is expected to rise by a further 0.8 per cent, shaking off the legacy of the financial crash.
There are many reasons why MBAs work in the high-pressure buzz of the City in London. But Sophie was hooked from the moment she stepped onto the trading floor. But, ultimately, it wasn’t meant to be. Now set on studying an MBA at Imperial College London, her decision to leave the hustle and bustle of the trading floors is surely justified. Sophie looks forward to studying at the London campus this autumn.
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