Business Analyst - Saad Mirza

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?

An investment bank helps raise money for companies, the state or government by issuing and selling securities to a capital market. Capital markets could be debt markets and equity markets and also provide advisory or give private advice on transactions for mergers and acquisitions. I think that is the general high view of what an investment bank does.

What attracted you to this career?

What really attracted me was I really wanted to go into a business analyst type of role so I wanted to work in an organisation that I could come up with the strategies that would move the company forward. So this was the best and it is a fast paced environment that you can see the changes there and then. It is dynamic and also the fact that it is very cutting edge so the technology you work on is right out there, it is new, and it is innovative and you always have to come up with strategies for cost saving mechanisms so that you increase your profit levels.

Why did you choose the Business Analyst role?

I did an internship in sales and trading and I have done an internship in asset management, and those really did fit my own characteristics, and the type of growth and development I see myself in the future. So I think the team I moved into was quite an informed decision, a lot of people ask me, because I come from an economics background, why didn’t I move into front office, IBD front office and trading and it is because I have done it and I don’t want to become too specialised in the work I do. Sales and trading is quite a specialised environment, you focus on the markets, even IBD, you could be product based or sector based. So working in my team I need knowledge of every single business line there is so I know all the work that IBD does, all the products that sales trading trade along will all the risk management, it gives you the whole know how so if in the future you want to move off somewhere you are coming from a very solid knowledge base to use some years ahead from now.

What does your job involve?

You have a simple product like Office 2007, everybody gets it in their new laptops they buy, people think it is really easy to use, Word, Excel, putting your real documents there, but within a bank such a suite as Office can become really complicated to launch to every single business line. All our front office traders and their application developers team use Office as a calculation engine which will support all of their plug-ins and add-ins, so they get feeds from Reuters, Bloomberg, you have got add-ins there to do risk pricing, you have got the pricing lists. Presently we are operating in an Office 2003 environment so we would actually go to the business as and when they would like the new product and what benefits they want it to provide, do a benefits case analysis and then present its findings to a steering committee and find out if there is enough business drivers to move the product forward. So whether you feel your product should be launched in eighteen months from now, whether you think the business will mediate it, and how much effort will be needed to change the apps to the new environment.

So it is really getting the feel and the business drivers that exist within a business organisation for any new application that needs to be launched. We wouldn't do any IT work at all, so we would just act as a plain business analyst, an unbiased business analyst to be fairly honest; so we would go there not knowing the environment is like, do a complete case study analysis of it and then present the findings. As I mentioned it could be for anything at all, it could be Office 2007, it could be a new trading app going in or even simple things like how to maintain the relationship between front office trading and engineering for example, so how to put in workflow processes.

What do you do on a typical day?

Initially a typical day could start fairly early in the morning because we are a team that is global, so any strategy that we implement will be implanted in New York, London, Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong and any other smaller offices we have, so you would be talking to the guys that work there as well so you could have conference calls at seven in the morning. Usually what happens we have what is called a requirements gathering, so you would see where the flows are in the current systems, see what they would like changed. Even when you are having general discussions perhaps something we can pick up from them that we feel could be a cost saving initiative. Really at the end of the day you have got to look at how to make more money for the environment because we are working in a bank and that is what it comes up to at the end of the day. So we are looking at that and taking meetings and then coming back to our desk, putting all the data into Excel sheets and analysis if there is a case moving forward for them and if there is, working out questionnaires, setting up working group, seeing what impact it will have, working out risk analysis, doing a financial case study and then talking to the business owners as well so really going out to the business as well, but this could be anyone from head of credit IT, head of IT, comms, you could be speaking to traders, speak to guys in automatic trading, speak to guys who do high performance trading. So it’s really the whole business you have to talk and you have to see if there a case for moving the strategy forward. If not, you put it aside and move on and see if you can find other ideas to work on.

Interviewer: Then, once you have decided the strategy, do you then have to talk in technical detail to the people who might be putting these together?

For example Excel has so many plug-ins and add-ins, you can go in just thinking Excel is a normal sheet and you can do your normal things like Elookup and Vlookup etc, then when you talk to these guys and really start to understand the complications, the dependencies they have on each team and what feeds are coming through, how they are going in to the back to do their calculations and coming back the price to market risk and you start building up also the knowledge. Prior to this you have to do your research in depth, read all the Microsoft documents out there, any industrial analysis that is probably on that product, so you cant go in there like a lay person - it has to work both ways, so you meet half way in between, so I understand what you need, this is my understanding of what you need, how low level or high level do I need to take that so I can complete a thorough research on what you are saying.

Who do you liaise with on a daily basis?

We deal with everybody from traders to everybody working on credit control to the guys in structuring to the guys in trading to MDs, to application managers. So there is a whole plethora of people who you really talk to and interact with so it is not just one business line that you interact with, the type of people you deal with, the names could change every day. So it would be hard to specify who we really work with.

What are the specialisms within your industry?

Obviously if you've got the front office, you've got IT, equities, you've got commodities, you've got IT finance, you've got corporate comms, and you've got IT exotics. Then within those teams you have got different teams as well, you have got credit derivatives, you have got HBC, you have got oil and gas trading, you have got emissions. So there are lots of different teams you could join so each of them are servicing a certain division and sector and they will all have their own dedicated members to serve that particular industry. You have got client reporting so it is too big a group to give you all the names there but that why there is easy to make the moves.

Each front office facing the bank team has their own support functions as well but in terms of that all those teams have got a support function team and an application developing team who develop apps all day long they could have long term development or short term development, depending on the type of requirements a trader might have. Obviously those teams have their own dedicated development team analyst so those only work for requirements of that team trader and back to the application development team. So they will look more of the functions specifications, what exactly they require on the functions spec and the systems spec, which is different from our team where we look at more company-wide initiative strategies rather than team based. So that is really the difference between the work we do and the other teams.

We don’t have other guys in our team at all so like I said we just come up with the strategy, say whether the strategy has to be pushed to the back or not. If it has to be we will tell the application developers out there who work with each team, how to implement it, what the roll out procedures are, finances and other resources, who to work with, and they will take it from there and really whether to push or pull depending on which mechanism you are taking. They take it from there.

What's the difference between Front Office, Middle Office and Back Office?

Front office are all the run the bank divisions, so those will be everything from the sales and trading, research, equity market, exotics, credit derivatives, commodities, etc. Middle office will be risk and finance and back office will be all the support functions so those would include HR, operations, technology is in the back office as well depending on what type of technology you are working in. So those are the functions that support the front office.

What are the best bits about your job?

To be fairly honest, when I started I was just pushed right in at the deep end, so it does actually give you quite a buzz because you feel you are actually making a difference. Working on quite a few big projects as lead analyst along with the architects on the team - the whole thing about going out there and working on a piece of project is really going to make a different and impact so many people out there. Also you get to talk to the whole business and see where they are going and that really gets you up in the morning because it is not monotonous and you won’t be doing the same thing every day, because it is project based and there are new projects every day, and there is always something else to learn.

What are the worst bits about your job?

Nothing up to now but you never know something in the future might happen, but right now it is absolutely great.

Interviewer: Is it not high pressure?

That is true, but to be fairly honest you know what you are getting into - you know it is a high pressured environment, you know you have to deliver day in, day out. So I think if you are going into an industry you have got to know whether you are fit for it, whether you will be able to handle the pressure, and the multitasking you have to do on every task. I get a buzz and a feeling to work in such an industry, so for me it is not a big deal really.

What has been your greatest achievement?

I worked on a big project with my previous team but I can’t really talk about it in detail because of the confidential project, but just a gist of that project was that we had a general Outlook mailbox, all these people without knowing had been given access to the whole company to look into the mailboxes, so it was as simple as that, you could go into someone’s mail boxes and pick up all their trading sheets and MNA documents without anyone actually knowing. So it was really going through the whole estate and see how many people out there hadn't got a default setting on their mailboxes and going out and talking to vendors and seeing what the best products are there, seeing what the prices are and how people can be competitive and brining them in and trying to personalise it to the Barclays Capital environment because it has to fit with the infrastructure here because you have got lots of security risks you have got technology risks, so I worked on that and then they were able to implement it. So it does feel go to when you have worked on something that is implemented and that goes back to my other point that you can really make a difference if you work hard.

Any regrets?

Nothing. This will sound a bit strange but I tend to plan where I see myself going and perhaps when I was doing my GCSEs and my A levels, I had already planned a career to go into investment banking. So working in a certain division or role that fits me so I don’t see anything I would have done differently. If you ask me twenty years from now, what I would do differently I would say the same answer because this is what I know and what I like to do and any other industry I would be completely lost in.

Interviewer: So tell me, because there aren’t too many people in the world as sure as you at such a young age. How did you know this is what you wanted to do at such a young age?

On a serious note, I have got too many bankers in the family, so that kind of teaches you where you want to head and since childhood I have known about stocks and shares and what price to market your bonds at and how the exchange works. At the back of your mind that is what you want to do, you think 'That is a great career, you get to wear a suit every day, work in a nice big building'. So that was it.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

To be fairly honest I think once I joined the pay was in line with industry averages and you are pretty much rewarded for the hard work and effort you put in so it is pretty competitive within all divisions as well.

In terms of other perks you do get gym membership which you can take with the Credit Suisse Gym, so you can share their gym with them. You get the normal pension scheme and you get health benefits and all the perks which HR gives to you when you sign into the company.

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

Luckily when we started, I got remote access which basically means you are able to log on to your computer screens from home and actually work from home as well but that said I got that from the type of project I have been working on so there is a lot of weekend work involved. You don’t physically have to come into the office, you can log on from home, you know sit in front of the TV with a bag of popcorn; it might take longer because you are working with the TV and more distractions. In terms of hours and stuff, again it depends if it is crunch time or not, it can range anywhere from six in the morning to eleven at night or it could be a normal working day of eight to six, so they different creations and it depends on the time you are in.

Is there much in the way of travel?

I haven’t travelled right now but within the team I work, yes they have travelled and obviously because I am quite junior in level but my managers they go to all other regional office, especially in terms of the work they do they have to go and look at the environment there. Recently my boss just came back from a trip to New York talking to all the application managers out there so there are opportunities to travel depending on what work you are doing.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

You could be in a cottage in Somerset doing this job if you could get all your systems up and running, with perfect internet access. You really need to be where the business in because you have to liaise with the business everyday so you have to be close to your traders and your structuring and all the other teams there because if they have a meeting, how are you going to make that meeting in five minutes? So you have to be pretty close to the business, which is one of the reasons why Barclays actually kept its technology divisions close to all its front office functions because they feel the closer you are to the functions, the better communication you get.

What is the working environment like?

I guess it is a good mixture of both but perhaps more men that women, just because of the industry; you don’t get a lot of girls going to do computer science or going to engineering. But of those who do, there are quite a few in the front office developing roles, business analyst.

In terms of what type of attire we wear that also depends on your meetings - obviously you do have to wear suits and stuff. Business casual, if that is a correct term to use, so obviously it has to look appropriate, so you can’t come in in jeans and t-shirt - so you have to well-dressed but don’t have to wear a tie everyday.

Some of the people in engineering are very technical, while you have people who've done economics degrees so they are quite business analyst-type skills. Then you have people who have done mathematics - people who work in the quants team. But you've got quite a mixture of people you work with, we are all friendly - that is one of the reasons I actually joined the organisation because everybody is quite friendly and quite willing to teach you if you don’t know something.

They are also quite keen to make you learn and quite interested in your development as well, so it's actually important for the dynamics of the team to work well. Another reason I really chose my team is because I felt I really fitted in the team and that we all work together, because we are all kind of loud and kind of fun and also the fact that we enjoy what we are doing. We all get along with each other which is really important because when you are working for long hours in the day and it becomes your home from home, and you're seeing these people every day, so they are like your second family really.

Interviewer: Is it quite diverse? I notice in other departments there is diversity in terms of backgrounds - is it the same in technology?

It is really diverse, you have quite a lot of ethnicities and a lot of people coming from different countries, so it isn't UK based at all. You have graduates on the team who entered the industry in India, people from Singapore, the US, Europe etcetera, so quite diverse.

How did you get into your job?

You don’t have to do a particular degree to get into any division you are working in but obviously when you are answering the questions you have to show your interested for that particular division and why you think you will fit in, irrespective of the fact that you might do history or politics and then come into technology - and I do know people who have done that. As long as you can show you are willing to learn while you are working in the industry and also be a productive member of the team. In terms of how you apply and stuff it is really the general graduate process you go through the online application, called for assessment centre - obviously since it is competitive, the better you do in your degree the higher the chances are of you getting a good job and career rather than being at the lower end of the pool.

What's the application process like?

It is online based so you fill in online and give your details, fill in why you want to join the industry, which role you want to take on, your achievements and grades etcetera, and I think you are screened by HR to see if you joined that pool where the bar level stands. If you meet the bar you are called for a telephone interview, this could be with a director and they ask you why you want to join the team you want to join and your interests and it is kind of characteristic based or competency based interview where they see if you are fit for the company and if you make that you are called in for an assessment centre where you are judged and assessed on all your other characteristics or skills you may have.

What are the key skills required for your job?

The skills needed in our team are quite varied. Obviously you do need the general skills but also you need to analyse and be able to come up with different options so it is really being able to be out there and having an unbiased view because you don’t want to go in and say 'Oh, this is a strategy that I'm working on' and if you go with the buyers view you kind of at the back of your mind you start to structure questions and you just drive it in a certain method and in the end it will go the way which perhaps it will go. So it is going in with an unbiased view and being able to talk. To be able to present really well is important because you are talking to the whole business so you have got to have a knowledge about each product line, the business in particular, so you have got to be able to maintain your client relationships pretty well because if you are able to do that you are able to get more out of them when you speak to them. So those are the general skill set that you really need.

Everyone comes in with a certain set of skills which are quite general and when you actually go to your job you pick up skills, for instance traders pick up skills which make them able to trade better or able to come up with bid offer prices, do calculations in their mind pretty quick, looking up the systems out there and being able to react very quickly to market conditions. Whereas we have to be able to take in what other people are saying and analyse that data and really filter it out and come up with options to see where the business is going to go. So it is a hard question to answer, because somebody could have skills set they don’t think you need and they come into a team and you think 'Wow, you are really good at what you are doing'. So it is one of those answers that you have to answer as you go along really.

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

Really do your research on the industry and whether you want to join it or not. If you can prove that in your interview, the employers can see that, then they are very willing to take you on board. It is a Catch-22 situation where you may have somebody who is not skilled at all but if you can show you are wiling to learn they are happy to employ you - rather than someone who has all the skills and the employer wondering how much more you can add to your skill levels. It is really about doing your research to join in the industry and having the enthusiasm for working in finance.

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

Obviously that is individual progress and how well you are doing in your team obviously it depends on the results you produce but in terms of general progress it is after you are an analyst, you move on to an executive, after that you become a manager, and after manager you become an associate director, director, managing director. If I am correct I think that is the progression. It can come very quickly depending on how well you do so you can’t attach a timeline to it.

How does the role change over time?

You have a lot more people reporting into you, a lot more responsibility because you take on a lot more work you are directly responsible for your work and the type of work that is produced so when you go to a managerial role, it is about making sure everyone is meeting their targets, or producing the correct results. Then obviously steering the team towards a certain goal that may have been set at the beginning of the year. So I think it comes with a lot more responsibility, so at the moment I am doing the analyst work at a junior level, getting the requirements, talking to the business and seeing all the comments advisory etc but when you become a senior business analyst you are the one who comes up with ideas and strategy and talking to heads of infrastructure and seeing what exactly what their budgeting costs are and how you can place them down into your funding for certain projects so that obviously changes the way of you looking at a case.

Where do you see the industry going?

Just within technology you have got to look at all the ways to make cost savings, so if there is any new system out there, which gives you a price market faster or is improving your existing environment by changing the number of servers you have got or coming up with new products like scavenging or new trader repositories. So it is knowing where you can do those savings and in terms of within Barclays Capital technology it is quite a good area to work in simply because they really want to become the market leaders and the innovators in in-house technology creation and now most trading systems are automated as well so it is taking from there and kind of seeing how you can improve those processes because that is where you are most likely to make your future profits or more likely cost savings.

In terms of where the market is going as well as looking at technology you have to look at where the market is going as well because you deal with Reuters and Bloomberg. So you have to work out how this is going to affect trades you do every day, because you could have several thousand different future trades going through a day just because of the market positions and if your current systems can’t support it, it might crash. Presently I think the situation is volatile; a few months ago you probably knew what liable there was but how can you really explain the term liable because you know it the mono-line went below the base line and then has gone up again so you really can’t see where the market is going right now but hopefully it is stabilising in the future and that is how you can work your systems because your systems have to support the activity which goes on in the markets.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

Obviously working in Barclays Capital I can tell you the actual internal structure. They really support internal movements. If you feel you have found a job which looking at the requirements it fits you perfectly and you feel like you can’t give any more to your present role simply because you have filled all the ticks in your personal development goal boxes and you feel it is time for a change, they are really supportive and you can apply. They have an internal job section which you can search and apply through there. You can easily move across from division and stuff and obviously showing you have the requirements and why you are making the move.

But also you mention about the possibility of taking a career break, I have been talking to my manager generally and if I wanted to take an MBA break, just do it for a year for example, how well the management support that as long as you can show that you will be able to bring more skills back to the table and is going to add something towards your job and you can actually prove your case then come up with a scenario of how it is going to do that, they are more than happy to support that break for your. So it depends what type of break you are trying to take. When you come back to the industry, obviously you have been out of it for a year, you perhaps have to move down two levels simply because the industry has moved so much forward in the time before you came back so you really have to analyse it at that point in time where it is a good decision but they completely support breaks and moves, etcetera.

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

In terms of magazines the biggest one out there is the Financial Times so reading the Lex column which is at the back, reading the money market section and really that just gives you a gist of where the markets are going because you are not going to have time to read the whole paper because you have to get on with your MBA activities during the day. There is the Economist where you have got all news from the world and different analysts and economists so that is a great read. But generally whatever is out there, type it in Google, or even Wikipedia, if you don’t know a certain term, bring it up and try and get an understanding of what that term is so it is really building up your knowledge base every day.

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

If I am honest, I have now idea, no idea, this is what I know and enjoy doing. Perhaps there is no other career out there which interests me or gives me the buzz or gives me a high to come to work every morning.