I’m a UK chartered accountant with a degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University recently returned to London after six years in Asia.  I have over twenty years experience in investment banking specialising in the support and control of OTC derivatives.  I was fortunate enough to spend ten years at JP Morgan followed by eight years at Barclays and most recently six years at Daiwa Securities and a shorter period at Standard Chartered.  In that time I’ve done numerous projects not just systems development but also organisational creating new departments and functions or restructuring the booking entities for a business.  I’ve also line managed product control, middle office, market risk production and operational risk teams and performed various investigations and cleanups from trade inception to general ledger controls and  FX risk and funding allocations.  I’ve spent most of my career in London working closely with New York and Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo).  More recently I’ve spent four years in Tokyo and two years in Singapore.

Like many in the industry I’ve spent much of the last decade getting to grips with the new regulations, analysing the proposals and consultations as well as implementing actual compliance.  One of the benefits of starting my career before the regulations took off was that controls had to be designed from first principles using logic and a detailed understanding of data flows and system structures as well as procedures and even some psychology.  As well as regulatory compliance we are also seeing the upgrading of accounting standards with IFRS 9 which will address some of the deficiencies identified during the financial crisis.

As an aside Engineering Science is probably the most relevant non-financial degree for derivatives in the world.  We studied the application of second order partial differential calculus modelling to various real world areas like heat, power, fluid dynamics, structural analysis, electrostatics.  Financial derivatives uses identical techniques in the modelling of financial markets so the transition is very natural.