But the bosses?
Before the 2008 collapse RBS was briefly the largest bank in the world…subsequently, RBS fell sharply in ranking, lost confidence and needed significant support from the UK government. They and their bosses were in the bad news...
We know it, the Lehman earthquake grew to a financial tsunami..
But still, did the management not listen to the quant team? Ignore them? Were the new products inside their investment banking just a mystery to them? Some say, they micromanaged the wrong things, see Braveheart banking; the fall of RBS.
I'm not a management expert, but I had a lot of bosses myself, before I started up my own business.
We all hate our bosses, right?
They always let us do the hard stuff? They just harvest our great output?
I never felt that way…and I did a few hard jobs: I cleaned the slag gutter of a blast furnace, arbitrated bulky scrap for input into a steel mill, harvested tobacco…in hard but above medium wage summer jobs.
The bosses enabled my full time studies. No reason to get mad on them.
Work hard to become a managing mathematician?
Later, I became a boss myself...responsible for a hundred people developing factory automation software. I reporting to the C level…It was an exciting time. Our own CNC machine and robot programming systems with operation and tool lifecycle management, shop floor control…intelligently combined with inlicensed CAE, resource and production management systems…ran in automated factories of renowned discrete manufacturers.
They were work of talented engineers, mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists…obviously we applied quantitative theories.
But in the late 80s, the C level managed a dramatic downturn of the entire enterprise and got fired completely. I got a new boss. A bureaucrat managing in the sense of "nobody has been ever fired for buying IBM"...
I quit…but I left the work without any bad feeling. It was a great time. I felt, like an entrepreneur in a large, old firm (actually, I started with a group of three)…and started up my own business.
I don't know any CEQ
in a financial institution that is not part of the entrepreneurship.
In My Life as a Quant, Emanuel Dermal relives his exciting journey of a high-energy physicist becoming a managing director...he worked with Fisher Black at Goldman Sachs...and they were celebrated for their models and methodologies and they enjoyed working in a collaborative environment. They were kind of entrepreneurs in a large, old firm.
This was in the infancy of quaint finance, there were not so much proven and affordable technologies available.
But, discussing in quant finance forums, I'm surprised that
Reinventing the wheel
seems to be still attractive.
I want to create a FinancialEngineering library with generic financial engineering functions throughout the various models and asset classes. Create a parent class in C++...?was a question at a home page Serving the Quant Finance Community>>Programming and SW Forum.
Really? Was the first reply, but then the discussion went into details of C++ 11, modern C++ design…
But, there's great technology available
Obviously, it's not only us who can say: We spend years developing. Carefully choosing the mathematics. Mapping every practical detail. For pricing and calibration. For derivative and risk analytics. For structuring. For portfolio across scenario simulation…thousands of practitioners test our technologies on a vast variety of deal types, valued hundreds of billions of USD on a daily basis…
Quantitative managers optimize market risk?
They empower quants becoming a new generation of quantitative managers. Do on a much higher level what renowned quants did in the earlier days of quant finance?
You can't manage and do the plumbing. But you also can't be a quantitative manger without knowing the theories, methodologies and technologies either. To do one thing for your financial institution: optimize risk.
This would qualify for a C Level position?!
Back to factory automation. There's a vast variety of great technology available now. It's not economically feasible at all to build your own computer aided manufacturing system...from scratch, now.
It was never so easy…
RBS seems to have an insight sales strategy…RBS Insight…but do they have a CEQ?
