Associate Director Sales Structuring - Konstantinos Katsigiannakis

Investment Banks have the most extraordinary number of jobs within them - it can be completely mind-boggling. Every time we went near one, we found a whole new department or group of people that did something we’d never heard of. This seems to be due to the immense specialisation within banks, where it can be quite possible to sit next to someone but have no idea what they do.

There are a couple of major distinctions worth highlighting. Investment Banking or ‘IBD’ tends to be the department which most people imagine when thinking about an investment bank. They are the ones doing huge M&A deals, putting in incredibly long hours (14 hours plus each day - including weekends, for months at a time - is not uncommon) and schmoozing with business leaders. Work/life balance is not easily found, but on the flipside the work you do will likely be high-profile and give you an enormous breadth of business and finance experience. This means that if you want to leave London or Investment Banking at some point you shouldn’t have a problem, as the skills gained are very transferable. We've met ex-bankers in companies ranging from renewable energy start-ups to large pharmaceuticals.

Capital Markets is where you’ll find the traders, salespeople and research analysts. They’re market-based and are the ones you see on TV shouting down phones and pacing frantically in front of five flickering computer screens. They’re monitoring market activity and reacting immediately to any changes. It’s noisier and a bit more adrenalin-fuelled than IBD. One of the big perks of Capital Markets (other than the actual job), is that the hours tend to reflect those of the market. That means early starts, with most people in the office by 6.30am, but it also means you tend to be out by six in the evening - and there is almost never weekend work. So if you’re an early riser the work/life balance is pretty good, especially compared to IBD. One limiting factor is that you’re in a highly specialised, role usually in a very specific market area, so there’s not much in the way of transferable skills. If you’re an FX institutional salesperson it’s not that easy to move into another product area, and you’re going to be tied to working in London (or another major financial centre).

Beyond these two areas you have a massive range of middle and back office functions. There’s Technology, Operations, Legal, Finance, Marketing and HR for a start. So if banking interests you then it’s definitely worth looking at the breadth of what’s on offer. The other thing that struck us about banks was just how diverse they were. Without doubt, they had the most mixed workforces we saw, with every member of a team often from a different country. While this makes for a really dynamic and interesting work environment, it does mean that when you’re applying for a job, you’re not just up against your peers in this country but across the whole world - so that application form had better stand out!

Who are you and what do you do?

What are commodities?

Commodities is anything that could be physical; for example, within Commodities we have different sections - so we have precious metals, for example, gold and silver and other precious metals; we have base metals like aluminium, copper - building materials if you like; we have energies, so oil, heating oil, fuel oil, coal, natural gas; we have agricultural, corn, wheat, soya beans.

What is Investment Banking?

It’s a meeting place for people who want to get rid of risk and people who want to take the risk and meet in a simple sense. So it is the medium for risk transfer.

What attracted you to this career?

My passion to invest money for myself, to risk a return, to advise our clients, to invest in the areas we produce. I like talking to people. On the buy side you talk to people but it is not about convincing them. On the buy side you give an order and you get what you want. On the sales side you speak to people and try to convince them of what is the trend now, what is the best trade - and this is what I like doing. If I was doing engineering, I wouldn’t be involved in investments. So, people are involved in investments.

Why product structuring?

You put all these skills together, so if you are doing Sales you are doing the client relationship, you are not so interested in your quantitative skills. If you are doing trading it is more about the quantitative skills than the communication skills. In structuring it is about both, so you get to use more of your skills in structuring. We have structuring in the main asset lines: Commodities, Equities, FX, interest rates, credit. So we have all these different structuring things and they are doing more or less the same thing what we do in Commodities, but just different asset classes.

What does your job involve?

It is about the alignment of different kinds of people; we speak to Sales people and advise them about the products we can offer and also speak to Trades so they will know what is going to get executed in the future.

What do you do on a typical day?

There is no such a thing as a typical day. The only typical thing for the day is that is starts quite early usually - seven thirty or eight o’clock - and then from then on it depends really on the day. So I could be speaking to Sales people for half of the day; it could be that I am thinking of my own trade ideas, so I take some personal time and think about ideas to show to clients. I could be speaking to traders or I could be speaking to clients. But throughout the day and week we definitely speak to a lot of people and our main objective is to do trades.

What is the difference between Sales, Structuring and Trading?

The Sales people are responsible for having the client relationship, so they speak to the clients. We as Structurers are responsible for the creation of products and for the technical ability to go and explain to the clients what the product is about, what views that can materialise; how can they participate on the upside and how can they take the downside. In order to actually do the trade, you have to execute the trading, so we will then have to be able to speak to traders to advise them what risk they are taking with this trade and they will execute the trade. Also, while doing all this, there are other functions within the bank and we need to tick all the boxes – it’s Compliance, it’s Legal, it’s Risk - and we’re responsible for making sure that everybody is on the same page when we are doing the trade.

What are the best bits about your job?

I guess the excitement comes when you advise the client, the client sees your points and gets the trade done - so when you have an execution of a trade I think that is the highlight.

What are the worst bits about your job?

I guess the worst bits are that in Structuring you have to convince people why they want to be doing stuff - so you have to convince the client why they want to be doing the trade, you have to convince the Sales person this is the right thing for the client to do, you have to have to convince Compliance and Legal that what you are doing is fine, and you have to convince Trading to do the trade. So there is a lot of communication, and Structuring is the central point where all this happens and the alignment, as I said before, is to take place.

What has been your greatest achievement?

The achievement can be, as a unit, every time you get a trade done. I guess in Barclays we have created a couple of products that are quite big in the market and I take pride in having been involved in these products.

Any regrets?

I think the only thing would be to have done this earlier rather than later.

Interviewer: Did you come into banking late or Sales Structuring late?

My first job wasn’t in banking, so I would have had my first job in banking.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

I think investment banking generally pays higher than in other industries, and there are a lot of perks, at least in Barclays Capital. You get a car allowance, so you get some extra so you can go and get a car, you have a housing allowance. There are typical things like pension, gym membership - not free but discounted - and you get little things like this. But I think what is interesting in Sales you get client exposure, so you get out a lot. So for instance, I travel a lot; I go to Europe, I go to Asia, wherever the clients are, and this is quite nice as you get out of the office, you meet new people and you making interesting decisions. Trading is a risky business and Sales is a less risky business and therefore traders can get bigger bonuses sometimes, but if you take ten years’ worth of bonuses and you take an average of the sum over the next ten years, I don’t think one team or another team would be more or less highly paid.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

I don’t think we have working hours. You start early in the morning and if we have a trade at six o’clock in the evening, then we have a trade at six o’clock in the evening, and you might have to stay until nine or ten, especially if you are covering New York or the US, for example, because in Europe there is nothing after six o’clock when they are closed. There is no such thing as working hours. The good thing is, I don’t know anyone who works weekends in Structuring, because the market is closed and the clients are at home, so there is no reason why you should be there.

Is there much in the way of travel?

Different people in the team cover different regions. So, for example, we have a German speaker who covers Germany, we have a French speaker who covers France, an Italian speaker who covers South Europe; these people do travel a lot. And it also depends what you are covering - if you are covering a product and not a region, then you might be travelling globally. But if you are covering a region then you will travel to that region and will be travelling quite frequently, on average two or three times a month.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

You do need to be based in a big city, you do need to be based in London, and you have to travel and you cannot avoid that.

What is the working environment like?

We have a very diverse team, in my team almost everybody is a different nationality. It is surprising that in my team we haven’t an English person, which is a big surprise, but we don’t have anyone - they are either Europeans or Americans.

We are trying to get the mix right with men and women, but it is difficult because people who study finance tend to be more men to begin with, so it is difficult to achieve this balance - but we have about 60/40 balance.

We have a French person covering France but it is not necessary; we could have somebody else covering France, it all depends on your skills. Obviously, if we find a French person that is good, but it is not required. So we have another person covering another region, we have an Italian person covering Spain and an Italian person covering Greece, we have a German person covering the Middle East. So it’s to do with skills.

How did you get into your job?

You don’t have to have a financial degree. I personally have an engineering degree, although I did do a financial degree afterwards. We don’t really concentrate on these things, so you have to have a good academic performance because it is a sign that you are more likely to perform in your role as well. We don’t look into specific degrees or specific universities - it is all about personality and about whether we believe that person can deliver or not.

What's the application process like?

To get into Structuring there are two ways, either through the graduate scheme or, if you are an experienced hire, then directly through the team.

I actually came through both ways - I was an experienced hire but I came through the graduate programme. I didn’t do the application online but I know there is an application online that you can do, because we receive these applications and we go through them when we want to employ somebody.

Interviewer: And are there interviews and assessment centres to do?

Yes, and we participate with these as well, so when the applicants go, there are people from the team in Barclays Capital there as well to get to know who is going in the assessment days. There are good people around and in the end they take the best of the good people.

What are the key skills required for your job?

In Structuring you have a lot of skills, unfortunately, and that makes it very difficult to get in. Not everybody has them, but definitely when they enter the team they need to be quantitative; they have to have commercial skills, understand where the value is or, if you like, what trade to do or what is trendy now, what is not trendy now. They have to be able to communicate very well at different levels and with different ideas because you speak to Traders who have some views and you speak to Sales people who have other views and clients who have different views. You speak to Compliance and they think of something else. So you have to align everybody and you have to speak in their own language, which is very difficult to do. To summarise in three skills, it would be communication skills, commercial skills and to be quantitative.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

I think for getting into this you have to have good networking. Obviously you have to have the skills, so if you don’t have the skills networking won’t work. Networking can be at any time and at any level so you can meet people at conferences, you can meet people in training, so you can assign yourself some training and you find people work in a bank and you go and talk to them and see what they are doing and say hello. You can even send an email or call direct and find out who is responsible for Structuring in a bank and send them an email and ask them what you need to be doing. Internal networking is very good. There are two things so you can achieve more in your role, if you know the Compliance officer, if you know the person in Risk, if you know the trader, if you have a good working relationship it will help a lot. Also if you were going to change your role or go somewhere else then these people will help you do that.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

There is a structure for different grades, but I think grades are not very important, perhaps more important for the person themselves. But the grade isn’t so important, what is important is being able to deliver trades. You are measured against what trades you can deliver.

How does the role change over time?

Your role does change, and you kind of go away from actively pushing trades to more managing people.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

When I first came into structuring I thought ‘What can I read so I can get acquainted with what I am doing and what other people are doing?’ Unfortunately there is not one source of information. There is the Financial Times and other financial papers out, so read what other people think, read research. From a book point of view there is not much so that is actually a problem but it is about keeping yourself abreast of the information and what is happening around the world.

Where do you see the industry going?

Commodities is the hot spot at the moment, it hasn’t always been that way but if you ask yourself what happened ten years ago Commodities wasn’t so big then. Now almost everyday we are hearing oil is a $100 and gold went to a $1000. So Commodities actually interferes with life so your car is getting expensive to drive, housing is more expensive to build, everything is more expensive, so people are made aware of this and we are trying to give people an opportunity to actually profit from that.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

I guess if you are good at what you do you can always come back. If you resign and you leave and you weren’t good then you won’t come back. Obviously on the second question, given that you have to talk to all these people, you have to understand them because this is the only way you can actually win an argument. There are loads of transferable skills, quantitative skills, intellectual skills, communication skills, thinking through problems. If you are leaving Structuring you can do whatever you like really.

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

It’s a difficult question - something completely different. Because I have an engineering background perhaps I would do engineering, perhaps something to do with research, or something completely different like open a shop or a bar, something like that.