I am the Sales Director for UK and Ireland wealth management business.

I work in IT in an investment bank.

My name is Mark Howden and I am the Head of the Consumer Industry Group.

I’m the Vice President of the investment banking department of Merrill Lynch.

I’m involved in research - commodities research.

I work at Barclays Capital in Foreign Exchange institutional sales.

I’m a Pan-European Equity Salesman on the hedge fund sales desk at Merrill Lynch.

I‘m an Equity Cash Trader.

What is an investment bank?  An investment Bank is a bank that does not deal with the high street customer.  It is not a bank where you nor I would take our savings, it is not a bank where you nor I will have our cheque book, or get our mortgages.  An investment bank is, slightly by definition, involved in all things that are investment related within the economy.

I break it down into two separate groups. Corporate finance, that is the investment bank most people know about, you have got mergers and acquisitions, you have got debt financing, mezzanine financing, all very technical terms basically what they do is they are the ones who raise finance for corporates, and governments, so that is investment banking.  My side of investment bank is to do with markets so we are on the trading floor monitoring prices activities going on across the world, anything that is causing movements.

So at the very start of things, is the research report and you have the research department who sit in a different place from us, legally they must be in a different place.  They will be writing their reports, lets take Glaxo, one of the stocks I cover.  So a research analyst will make his discount cash flow, look at the accounts of Glaxo, look at their potential going forward.  He will come up with a price he thinks Glaxo shares should be trading at.  He will look at the place they are in the market and if they are different he will say you have to buy this stock or you have to sell this stock.

The challenge of being an analyst is you are trying to be the most knowledgeable person in the industry and it is a long road to get there.  So when you first start out in this industry you are going to be given some tasks that basically help you understand the basics of what you are looking at.

Now the research analyst skill is very different to the sales person, so he will then essentially hand over the ropes.  When he has gone public with his research report, he will hand over the ropes to the sales force.  The sales force get on the phones and tell all their clients that they have the reports on Glaxo, we love it and you have to buy it.

This is a nice kind of sales, because it is not about selling a fridge and then never seeing that customer again, it is about building a relationship with somebody over a period of time, having them understand and respect your view and what you have to offer, understanding how they work and the kind of things of interest to them and building on that long term sales relationship rather than the short term.

Then if the client says “this sales guy is good, this analyst is good, this research analyst, I am going to buy Glaxo shares”, and that is when we make money from them, only when they trade with us, we take commission in the same way every other commission industry works.

First of all it is a fairly young environment.  I think people come in they are enthusiastic, a twelve hour day is no problem and they want to forge a career and make some money or whatever it is that is incenting them. That attracts a certain level of youth and vigour.

I basically work on a football pitch which has got rows and rows of desks, decked out on each desk with about four or five computer screens and two or three actual computers underneath. 

I think generally I would say if you are on the trading floor the adrenalin just keeps you going and I think that is fantastic.

The televisions are on, the computers are on, Bloomberg ringing, the phone ringing, you need to be heard and sometimes the trader you need to speak to is three rows away from you.

People just go completely mad they just throw phones at each other, they are yelling at each other, they don’t consider whether you are the junior or the senior they are just trying to make money and not lose.

We have loads of different products available from a loan, to a bond to risk management.  All those product teams are sitting within debt capital markets.  So they are kind of, if you look at a structure, you would have IBD here and then the product teams feeding into IBD who then compile the different things and present that to the client.

So if you are client and you want to acquire a competitor, we will advise you how much you should be paying, how you should raise the finance and what the company you are buying is actually worth, what are the strength and weaknesses of that company, what you should be aware of, how you should structure that acquisition, the tax and legal implications of it.  We will essentially hold your hand from start to finish

The first thing we have to do is upfront legal and conflict checking to make sure this engagement is right for us and there is no conflict of independence or things like that.  So there is a lot of up front paper work you have to do, then what we would normally do is go in to the target business, meet the management, talk over the operations, just get a good understanding what the business is, what market it is in, the different clients it has just get a real good understanding of the business.  Then we can start to look at the numbers and get a lot of the information from management accounts and things like that to stop doing the analysis and put together the report that we give to our client so they can base their decision on their investment.

It is just slightly more quiet than the trading floor, some people call it subdued, you have got a slightly more analytical atmosphere, you have got more time to think about stuff and it’s more about long term projects.

The front office basically covers trading, investment banking, sales, structuring.  The middle office is essentially operations and product control.  Back office is settlements and basically everything to do with actually executing payments.

There’s a number of things about operations, basically it sits at the heart of the bank, it is often described as the engine room of the bank, which is quite a good description because basically you get to see the whole end to end life cycle of a trade.  So you are not just concerned with the trade itself, you are not just concerned with the settlements at the back you get to see everything that happens.

Each front office facing on the bank team has their own support functions as well    but in terms of that all those teams have basically got a support function, you have got an application development team, who develop applications all day long, you could have long term development, short term developments depending on the requirements a trader might have

You can go from being a developer to project management to working on the database, being a database analyst, you can work with severs, there is a wide variety of topics and roles which fit within the technology that we have and we house.

The worst bits are when you don’t get it and you come up with a strong idea, you should be buying this stock and over the next six months the stock falls by 30 or 40 percent.  At which point the sales are pretty upset, the traders are pretty upset, the clients are giving you grief and you have got to work through it and there are a lot of intelligent people out in markets believing their stock may be worth £30 and you think it is worth £50, you have to stand up there and say it is worth £50 even as it is falling down to £25 and if it turns again you look like a super start but those first £5 when if falls can be quite painful.

A client will not hesitate to call you whether it is midday on Tuesday or 11 o’clock on a Sunday evening.  The hours are long, the demands are high but then on the benefit side the remuneration is very good, it is a fantastic industry to work in from a variety perspective and the travel that it brings as well.

I think the greatest satisfaction you get from a job is when any transaction completes and you wake up in the morning and you see the on the front pages of the FT or the Times or any other newspaper, the deal which you have done, suddenly something you have been working on in secret for the last three or four months, suddenly hits the public world.

There are times, and it doesn’t happen very often unfortunately, but there are times when you really understand what is going on.  You understand why stock is moving the way it is, you understand what all the investors concerns are and you are just that little step ahead.

It is about wanting it and it’s about having a level of enthusiasms and focus and drive because a lot of people have all these wonderful CV’s and they have all these wonderful A’s and all the rest of it and they send a CV in and they look great, “get them in” and they arrive and they are a plank and they sit there and they are scared and they don’t say much and they give one word answers, or worse, they have read through the companies annual report, backwards, and they trot out all these lines that don’t mean anything like a robot.  All of this wonderful potential that you saw on the CV turns into this very robotic, very unimaginative and actually uninspiring performance.  So the single top tip is, if you get to sit the other side of the table from me or anybody else, look like you mean it, look like you want it, if I can see that level of enthusiasm, that focus, that drive, that commitment, that energy, that is someone I can see rolling their sleeves up learning what they need to learn and making a shot of this job.  That is someone you can see yourself sitting next to every day.

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