After earning a degree in Mathematics, specialising in Finance, in 2009, I joined the ISUP (Institute of Statistics of the University Pierre & Marie Curie). I was able to take a gap year, which I began in July 2010 at Crédit Agricole CIB. I will go back to university in September, to validate my actuary degree in finance applied to the insurance profession – in 2012.

The opportunity to take a 13-month gap year enabled me to join the professional world and above all to become part of a team with an excellent reputation. At university, I heard a lot about Christophe Michel and his colleagues specialising in research into interest rate derivatives. I was very keen to benefit from their expertise during a first professional experience that would offer the best conditions.

I have two assignments: one is to answer the daily requests coming in from the front office teams (traders, structurers, etc.), and the second concerns the long-term research projects.

For the first assignment, I support the work of the traders and structurers who are in direct contact with the clients. They pass their clients’ requests on to me, and with my team, we study the products in question and their risks. We also provide applications (calculators) that we work upon with the IT division and which model the proposals made by the traders and sellers. This information helps the front office teams to guide their clients towards the best investment choices. 

The second aspect of my work concerns long research projects. I have been lucky enough to work on one of them, which focuses on insurance products: studying new products, born of the increasing convergence of the banking and insurance sectors. This assignment can be broken down into several stages. Firstly, I collected information from several sources: a colleague’s thesis, the Internet, etc. After studying and compiling all this data, I integrated it into an application which models longevity and is used by the front office. In the insurance sector, ‘longevity’ means measuring people’s probability of survival and understanding how this parameter evolves in each given scenario.
I had the opportunity to meet several experts during this assignment. For example, I was in contact with a trader working in the trading room, but also with people from INSEE, insurers and corporate clients to whom I presented my work.

I really enjoy working on this long-term project. It is especially interesting because I have time to see it mature and I can organise my work time as I see fit. As a quantitative analyst your mind is constantly ticking over: sometimes I don’t find the solution at the office and it comes to me while I’m commuting home by public transport!
I also like working with the front office because it demands great reactivity: you have to respond to the clients’ requests as quickly as possible.

I will be finishing my studies next year, but I am already dreaming about working in a finance job that combines mathematics and technical expertise. I will very probably head towards the profession of structurer, exotic trader or quantitative analyst.