Director Quantitative Analyst - Claudia Yastremiz

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 is Investment Banking?

I think a perfect description of what an investment bank is, is that it is a risk management and finance institution that helps other businesses thrive, it is not necessarily there to invest on their own accord, it is there to help the clients which are the focus of the bank to achieve their objectives in terms of managing the risk and in terms of financing the operations.

What attracted you to this career?

I am a physics graduate and I got a PhD in theoretical physics and it was a way of using all the maths skills and all the quantitative skills and all the reasoning in an environment where the results were important in an academic environment but it was where what I did was very valuable to someone.

What does your job involve?

My job normally involves programming, to do some calculations and at the moment I manage people as well so involves coaching the young graduates that come in and help with projects. I participate in group wide initiatives to help improve the way we develop, improve the way we test, improve the way we serve our clients, not just a trader but also the risk managers and the product control groups, and IT groups help us deliver this to the business and it mainly involves just getting this done at the same time, so it is a bit of a juggling job, we have lots of meetings to work out how things have to be done, it is all done very much by consensus, it is a team effort. It may seem at the very beginning that this is an IT job and you sit and keep typing but it is not true - there is a lot of cooperation and collaboration among the teams. It is very exciting in an intellectual sense because there are lots of challenges to things to solve, it is not like a big crossword puzzle because you know what you do actually matters afterwards.

What do you do on a typical day?

On a typical day, I will get in to the office about eight - people turn in between eight o'clock and nine o'clock. We will check our emails to see what has been happening overnight because we have got centres in Singapore and New York and you need to know what has been happening in other places and not just in your office. I will revise my list of things to do and depending on whether there is a meeting early in the morning or there is something particular has to be delivered or I have to go and talk to the traders, there are weeks on which we are on support, which means we have to go and sit with traders and answer their questions and we take this on a rotation basis, so it is not always the same person doing it. There would be meetings everyday but not necessarily every day, we have once a week a group meeting where we all sit together and someone usually does a presentation of the work the are doing a the time to the rest of the group. We have in the week several lectures as well for the whole of the quant team, these are either given by the group or external people which are part of our continuous training and part of our continuous keeping up of what is going on, and everyone is invited to those talks. This will go on until about six o'clock, some people stay until seven or eight but it is very much up to you how much work you want to get done, what type of commitments you have. You are expected to be there during working hours but it is up to you what you do after that. So much of the time I would be sitting at the computer doing programming, if I am lucky and I have got time to do it, or sitting down doing mathematical calculations. Much of the time I will spend helping people in the team, especially the people who report to me, to get their work done.  It is not that we don’t chat to each other or go for lunch but most of the working time is spent doing those sorts of things.

Who do you liaise with on a daily basis?

I interact with many people in the whole quant team, in particular, I work in foreign exchange so the sub group that deals foreign exchange certainly on a daily basis, the people in the infrastructure. So our team is  about a hundred people and I will talk every day to at least twenty or thirty of them, I say hello to everybody. We have a lot of contact with the trading desk, we have a lot of contact with the risk management desks we have a lot contact with the product control group, lots of contact with the IT side of the business. Those are the main people we deal with, we also deal with structures and sales people on the rates side. Other people in the team interact with other teams because each of them interacts with their own desk, the desk of the business they support and they may have different ways of dealing with different teams in the bank.

Describe the process of your work?

Me in particular, I tend to work on more generic things, that is my taste but also I like the softer engineering side, I tend to work on general frame works on which you could do many different things. So they need to price a particular option, I prefer to go in a generic way to write a way of solving these things or calculating these things in one go and get other people to write the specific bits in there. Of course if there are specific bits I have to write I will do them but on the support question it will say 'This is my spreadsheet and I am trying to calculate this particular option and I am getting this error message can you please sort this out'. The error message might be they have got the wrong market data, the data being things like the spot level of FX or FX exchange rate or your interest rates or it could be that the spreadsheet has not been set up correctly, which happens, or it could be that actually there is an error on our side or it could be that they are trying to price that particular trade that doesn't fit in the frame we are trained to do. In other cases they say 'A price I am getting through is a value and it is a very different to the value I got yesterday, can you help me explain this difference', and we have to help with that on a day to day basis. In a generic project, they will say 'Ok, we want a general frameworking which you can price all these type of things'. Another one is we have something called a cripting language, which the traders can specify what the option pays according to the sheet and we have a generic engine like a big mincing machine and you put this on one and you get a price on the other and they want us to check that the term sheet matches the script they have written because it is a bit of  a programming task and they want us to check. In other cases it is very specific, they want this particular product priced and we want it priced in a particular way because we know there are risks associated with the moves in interest rates or risk associated with the price of gold or what ever it is and the model we had before was far too simple and didn’t take those into account to we have to extend our models so they take into account the movement of these other things that will influence this price and we can say ok if you want to cover yourself or hedge yourself or the risk that comes from the interest rates going up or down, then apart from selling this product or this trade, you have to buy this other thing. So you are hedging your bets, that is one the main things traders do is to hedge the trade, it is not a bet it is a trade, and you try and make the risk as flat as possible so the whole portfolio is if this goes up  this will go down so the whole thing stays flat, so they don’t make money but they don’t lose money and the money they make is when they sell it but it is not by trying to bet on things because when you bet on things, things can go up but they can go down as well. The whole idea is that you don’t want to be able to lose money and therefore you just want to be making money, unless you are very lucky or very skilful but our job is to tell them what they need to do so they neither make or lose money, and how much is a fair price to charge for this so you cover the cost of buying all those hedges. An option when you sell it, you have to go and buy something to cover yourself against the risks, we have to tell them how much you have to buy and how much this is work, because how much will it cost to buy all these along the life of the option has to covered by the price they sell it by and that is our main jobs.

What is a quantatitive library?

What we produce as a group apart from the support to everybody, every week we release a software library that does all the quantitative work in the bank so the library meet the quantitative analytics library which is a programme, a piece of computer software that gets installed in computers around the bank and which is used to produce all those numbers that we produce for them.

What are the best bits about your job?

The intellectual challenge is very exciting, it is nice to be able to do something and find it works at the end. It is good to see the trades come back and say 'That was a great piece of work, my risk is getting better' or 'I can manage my risk better', or 'My prices are a lot better than they were before', or 'It is a lot faster or a lot clearer than it used to be, thank you for that piece of work'. They are some of the best bits, the feeling that you are actually making a contribution to what you are doing, it is nice to hear someone say 'That piece really helped me with my piece of work'. Interacting with people in the team is fantastic, it is a great team, they are really nice people and it is a really nice team to work in, the quant team most people are very cooperative and very team oriented and very friendly, so it is a nice place to be there and go and chat with everybody and do something all together, much of what you are doing is a team effort it is not just sitting in a corner completely isolated.

What are the worst bits about your job?

Much of the admin can get very boring, you can get 25 things on your list of things to do that have to be done by yesterday and that it puts you on lots of stress and pressure but on the other hand it spurs you to get things done so if you are one of those people who thrive under pressure, it is a good thing, because there is always plenty to do it, it is not as if you only get lots to do because you are procrastinating because you haven’t done it last week when you had to do it, you get lots to do because there is lots to do. But it can be one of those things that gets you down because you haven’t finished everything by the end of the week because twenty other things have appeared without a priority so that is sometimes frustrating you feel like you haven’t finished everything you wanted to do.

What has been your greatest achievement?

Being where I am is something I am quite proud of, I have been here for ten years and I think people appreciate what I do and I am quite proud that people like my work and they come and ask me about things, they think I am knowledgeable enough to be someone that can be asked and will come back with the right answer for things and will help them. A particular piece of work is always the first thing you have done is a greatest achievement because they get incorporated into the day to day run of things that get forgotten as big pieces or work, the thing I am working on at the moment is great because people are saying, 'Oh you have done a great piece of work because I had to extend it and it took me no work at all and it was really easy to put things in because you designed it so well', so that is quite good achievement it makes you feel very proud of it. But when I did the previous piece of work I was proud of the previous piece of work so it is always you feel you are doing better because you are always learning things all the time.

Any regrets?

Possibly but I wouldn’t know how to in a way, it is a personality question rather than a decisions question in a way, it is like the way I interact with people, I tend to be more on the technical side more than the networking side and it would have been better to do more networking, and it is something I am trying to do now, so in a way I am trying to correct the errors of my past, but it is not something I could say I should have done something completely different before.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

The pay especially for people who start is very good compared with other places, one thing you have to take into account is much of the pay comes as a bonus rather as base salary in investment banking, it is not something that you get a base salary and a small bonus on top, in many cases and the further up you go it is a bigger part of your compensation. There are quite a few perks, you get non contributory pension, so the company pays into your pension, you get private health cover, you get competitive rates for dental cover, there are quite a few salary sacrifice schemes, so for example you can get a bike as part of salary sacrifice as long as you use it for commuting, so it is helping make things greener as well. Things like maternity benefits have improved a lot since I had my children and are very good at the moment. There are lots of diversity networks, lots of things that are helping everybody make their life better in a way by the company. There are quite a few other schemes but I haven’t used them so I'm not sure about, the gym membership help or the loans for season tickets, things like that.

On the social side there are lots of sports clubs in the company and lots of social clubs in the company, internal for people to do things, I am a mother of two young children so I don’t tend to go out to the pub every evening, if people want to do it they will do it, there are not many company organised things, it is just the personal thing, but there is as much social life as you want to have in the company.

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

It is certainly not nine to five. As I say I work from eight o'clock in the morning - when I had the children I negotiated to leave at five thirty rather than six o'clock. I used to come in at eight thirty, now I don’t need to because of my childcare arrangements, so I can be here about eight o'clock and be here until five thirty or six depending how much they need me at home and also I get to see the children. But you don’t get paid by the number of hours, there is no overtime pay but you do as much as you need to do to get things done, on occasions I will ring up home and say I am not coming home until eight or nine because I want to get something finished and it is not because someone is saying you must stay here until nine o'clock, occasionally we have to stay a bit later because we have to interview people for jobs and they can’t come during the working day so you have to extend it but it is very rare, usually it is your own internal pressure saying I want to finish this piece of work, I want to get that done to get it over and done with or because it has to be done because the traders need it tomorrow and I couldn’t do it during the day and I am going to stay a bit later. So there is general culture in investment banking of longer working hours but most people do it because they want to get things done rather than because anyone asks then or forces them to do this.

Is there much in the way of travel?

I haven't done it because having two young children, it is hard to take it but there are quite a few opportunities to travel, many of my colleagues have been going to Singapore or New York to see the office to talk to the people there. Next week three of my colleagues are going to Paris, there is an office in Paris so people get to go there and if you actually would like to relocate to one of those centres we have got people in Hong Kong, there are people in Tokyo, there are people in Singapore, there are people in the States so there is chance if you want to, to move to anywhere else on a temporary or permanent basis and generally we are told if you would like to go, let us know and we will try and arrange something.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

Mostly people do it in big cities because the concentration of mathematical talent you need tends not to be spread around very much. Also some of the work could be done at home, and on occasions I have stayed at home writing documentation or writing code but much of the work involves interacting with other people so if you were going to tele-commute you would have to have video conferencing switched on all the time. I don’t know of quant work being done outside big cities very much. It all started in Chicago about twenty years ago and then it has gone to the big centres, so it is mainly New York, Frankfurt, London and now the Far East and it is slowly spreading out but I think it would be very lonely to be in a small place, also what you need is the closeness to the trading desk, rather than being in a particular place. If the trader happens to be in one of the regions you would be able to work there but you need to keep contact permanently with the business and the traders and the rest of the bank you are not isolated in a corner and then someone is between you and the bank, it is very much interactive with all the teams that use your work so if you happen not to be able to have that direct contact with them it is very hard to get your job done.

What is the working environment like?

The working environment is informal, it is smart casual dress code all the week, you see me in a suit mainly because skirts tend to have no pockets and I need pockets in the jackets to carry things like handkerchief but if I an wearing trousers then I won't wear a jacket.

It is smart casual so no ripped jeans and t-shirts but you expect that sort of formal environment, that level of formality but not a suit or a tie - unless I am meeting clients, in which case you are expected to wear business dress.

The demographics are the business is incredibly diverse - we have got, for a quant group, quite high proportion of women because mathematics tends to be a very male-dominated subject. Especially in the new graduate intakes in the last few years, we have got quite a few women working in there. I used to be the only woman in the team when we were twenty people, now we are more than 100 and we must have 15 or 10% women in there. People are from all nationalities, I went to a meeting with the directors of the team and out of 11 I think there were only three native English speakers, we have got people from almost every country in Europe I would say or nearby and many people from other places, I come from Argentina; it is very diverse because what we want is the best mathematical talent it is not a social job it is not a personal interaction job, it is an actual 'getting things done job' and we try to get the best from wherever we can.

How did you get into your job?

There is no formal requisite for a formal degree. Most people in the quant team have higher degrees in mathematics - not necessarily a PhD but at least something like a Masters or part three or one of the advanced diplomas. The way a graduate would get in is by using our graduate intake programme, there is a link on the website of Barclays Capital where you do an online assessment first, if you make the grade, then you go on to the next stage and get invited to an interview or and assessment day where there are more formal interviews on the mathematical skills or your experience as a student and there are also ways of assessing how you interact with people with games and more informal ways of doing this. 

If you are not very academic it is very hard to choose to be in a quant career but you are going to be a mathematician, it is not a sales job and it is not a trading job, it is not a risk taking betting job, it is not a risk management job, it is a mathematical job and a programming job, so people tend to be quite academic when they come in and even though we won't say you need to have at least a level of degree from a particular university, we would check that your mathematics, your general quantitative skills and your intellectual skills are up to the mark that we are requesting and I must say we are getting high calibre of people coming in to the team, they are extremely bright, extremely driven and very good at what they do, it has been very, very rare that you had got people in who don’t make the mark and you have had to say sorry this is not for you. The recruitment process has been very good in that sense in general. I have been interviewing people with a couple  of years of experience in other banks to cover some places we have to fill in for slightly more experienced people than graduate and I found nobody gets up to the level of the graduates we get. So the graduates we get are better that these people with two years experience from other banks, it is very, very hard to get people who are as bight and as skilled in what they are doing as the people we have been getting as graduates so it is very hard to hire someone with some experience given the level of graduates we are getting.

What are the key skills required for your job?

You have to be mathematical, you have to like computer programming, you don’t have to be very good when you start but you have to be willing to learn on the job and be interesting enough, we have had people who were very good at abstract mathematics and then they froze in front of a computer. But much of your work involves fixing existing code or writing code that implements your mathematics, there are not many people in the team whose job it is to sit there and write mathematical papers. I know there are other banks who have teams of financial mathematicians who do the maths, then other people to do the implementation, we don’t, we do everything. So you need those skills, you need to be able to get on with other people because  a lot of it involves team work. You need to be able to get results out of things, you have to want to finish stuff, you cannot be one of these procrastinating people that always some other bit to do, some other bit to finish. You have to have an eagle eye view at the same time you have to be able to concentrate on the details. You have to be willing to learn all the time, permanently, you can’t sit still, once you have learned to do it that is it there are always new things coming up and you have to be able to pick that up and incorporate into your work.

Even better if you are able to generate new ideas and generate new mathematics and generate new stuff and in the end you have to do that because you have to find new ways of solving problems, because the problems that get thrown at you are not all problems you know how to solve when you do them again, it is not like carpentry where you make another chair or another table, it is more like, 'I have to invent a new version of what a table looks like' or 'I need something that will work out something new', so problem-solving skills are extremely important in this.

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

In the case of the quantitative things, and for a new graduate, what stands out is how well they have done in the assessment, is not necessarily what you have done but how well you have done. Of course if you don’t have a mathematical background it is going to be very hard to do well in the assessment, an engineering background, a financial mathematics background. The tip first is wanting to do it, another tip is to be interested in finance, not just because you are a good mathematician or a physicist and that is enough and you can get by with it, you have to be interested enough to think that the subject is interesting. 

There are things in finance that are not maths and not physics and you have to learn them as well, so you have to have the broad view on that side. That said there are some in our group who are IT people and not necessarily financial engineers or quants but they help us with our infrastructure of our library so there are many people who come in from the IT side rather than the mathematical side, because we need them as well.  Of course if they have both sides even better because they understand what we are trying to do and if we say oh we need a solver for partial differential equations, they don’t think “what is that”, they know what we are talking about. But if they are very good at the computing side they don’t need to know that because we need very bright computing people, because part of our job is to work fast and reliably, it is not enough that the numbers are great, it is important that they come out in a timely manner and it is important that they are correct and reliably correct and they are not going to crash your computer each time you try to calculate something. So those sort of things we tend to be helped more by the IT-orientated people, while we concentrate more on the way you calculate the numbers rather than the thing underneath.

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

The career progress is not as in other industries where it is very formalised and very much into scales. A new graduate will do a graduate training programme to get exposed to a wide number of subjects and groups in the whole bank, and then for a quant associate they will go on the quant analytics training which is very specialised and very specific and it is quite advanced in the mathematical sense and the programming sense so they will get intensive courses for programming and mathematics for the final side.  Then they will join a group as a new graduate as they have completed the first part of the graduate training. Then in many cases they will be given assignments which are not within the group they join or the sub group they join in the quant group but either to sit on the trading desk as if they were a junior assistant and understand how the trading desk works or in the past hey have been in the teams that do the IT side, the spreadsheets that are used by the traders directly so they understand how we interact with the trading desk they need that as a basis. Once that happens, formally, if they have a PhD they become managers. If they don’t have a PhD they become associates and they have to progress to managers. But the structure in that sense is very flat and not that many levels, I know people in other banks that no only do they have five or six levels but each level is separated into little grades with numbers and things. We don’t have that, you are given more responsibility according to the way you respond to the work and how well you do the work and you are given more autonomy to your own work.

Of course there will be a senior person with the responsibility for what you do but it is not a formal you get up on the ladder of grades, it is a very meritocratic process, if you are good you are given more to do, with more responsibility comes more work but people are not going to be on top of you, saying type this number or type that thing in, if you are good you are given the responsibility to do it and the people in other industries who you would think are quite junior, are given other people who report to them because they have proved that they have the maturity and the ability to do that. That is not necessarily a company with a formal change in your position in the company but it is your real position in the company that is important in that case. Much of it, the career progress is via remuneration  and that is something other people don’t find about so you only know about how well you are doing. You will know every year how well you are doing yourself rather than compared to other people.

Where do you see the industry going?

The quantitative analytics area is a very specialised area, it is very separate inside the bank in away, it is not like the whole industry, of course we are affected by the events around us. Credit derivatives were a very hot spot nowadays things are changing slightly with all the events that everybody knows about things that have been happening, that have been changing a bit. Commodity derivatives have been quite hot spots as well because they encompass a very wide range of things so commodities can be precious metals but they can also be energy. Things which are really interesting because they are very different from other things, people have been doing things like derivatives on funds, so you have to decide what is going to happen to a fund that someone else has deciding on what they investing in and whether the fund is going to go up or down, you don’t know how it is being invested in but you have to make a guess on how these things can be managed and those are all interesting in the mathematical side. I think that the quantitative skills are always in demand because the people with the ability is not that high, the number of people that make the grade to the level you need them to make it to actually be good at it, is quite small so if you are good you are going to stand out and it is not a matter of which area you are in it is a matter of how good you are that you are going to be able to go ahead and also because those skills are always in demand in other things, and many mathematical skills are useful not just for the quantitative analytics but for many other things, but quantitative analytics is a very challenging area so it is good for an intellectual sense.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

Particularly in Barclays, many people have been moving from being quantitatives to being traders to do risk management, there is lots of movement if you want to do it and have the ability clearly. But I know many traders who started as quantitatives and became traders afterwards, that is an easy leap in a way relatively. If you have been doing mathematics you can do mathematics elsewhere. If you have been on the IT side you can use it on an IT side. If you like risk management you can move on the risk management or validation side quite easy and I think we a bit conceited, we physicists think we can do everything so theoretical physicists have been contributing to all sorts of things just because we are so clever, so in that sense it is transferable because it gives you lots of experience in a high pressure environment to do things. Some people have left to do teaching for example because they got quantitative degrees and at the moment everybody is desperate for maths teachers, physics teachers and science teachers. People have left and become a doctor because they have decided they prefer that interaction with people and lots of things that I have seen moving around it is not as if you get pinned into a corner and then you can't do anything else.

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

There are plenty of magazines - academic and trade - and the best thing to do is to go to a web search engine and say risk management or quantitative analytics or financial analytics and they will find this. There are many reading list for books and the basic books if you go to the financial mathematics department of any university or the financial mathematics group and they will usually have a reading list for people and I would recommend going down that route if they want to see what they would be interested in or what things they want to know about. Usually people will be able to read this if they are doing a financial mathematics degree which is usually post graduate degree. If they come from a pure quantitative side which is not financial, it could probably get the first books to start reading before you get into the articles in the journals so I would recommend to do that rather than give a specific recommendation for anything.

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

I didn't pick this career, someone rang me up when I had finished my PhD and I didn’t have a job and I hadn’t gone back to Argentina, I finished my PhD in Cambridge, and someone rang me up and said they are hiring physicists to do quantitative analytics, I said 'What is that?', they said 'Oh, you just come along and take the interview and we will see.' I thought 'Ok, fine', and I got the job in a tiny outfit with thirty people in the company. From there you start and keep going.

In the middle I had a break and I helped the people in the mining engineering department in the University of Montreal because, talking about transferable skills, the things I learnt about optimising portfolios of stock and shares, were actually applicable to calculation in mining engineering or stability of excavations in mines. It is a bit complicated the link but it was exactly the same mathematical and processing background and I also had to sit down and learn how to programme all of a sudden and it is something you just sit down and do it shouldn’t faze you, that is what you have to do all of the time. So in that sense it is a nice challenging career, it is also provides well for my husband and children so I am not sure what I would do, I would probably like to work for a charity or set up doing some catering or anything very different but as long as it is interesting and you can keep going and earns a living I will probably be fine.