What Value Can You Add to Investment Banking?

Successful bankers are not born to be, they can be trained to be. If you are able to bring additional value to a banking role, investment banks are willing to train you.

Maria Leung is an outstanding female in her career change from advertising to investment banking. After graduating from the University of Hong Kong, Maria held a number account servicing roles at a couple of top ranked advertising agencies. At her late 20s, she joined Citibank and started her banking career at their Card Business. She joined ABN AMRO in 2004 as Head of Wealth Management. She was soon promoted to SVP and pioneered the Bank’s Van Gogh Preferred Banking Domestic Business.

What has advertising and banking in common? What has lured each other to make Maria’s career change? Advertising clients are among those toughest and most demanding clients in the world, especially those who spends huge amount of money in adverting campaigns. Likewise, rich people looking for people to manage their money are equally demanding. You would need to be confident in dealing with and satisfying these extremely demanding clients. Analytical skills and strategic thinking, together with the ability to make decisions and execute them timely and accurately are all necessary in servicing private banking clients.

What other skills can you bring to investment banking from your field of business? Review what you are doing. Are you able to motivate, influence and manage others? You would need these skills to work with a pool of talented staff like researchers and analysts while you work your way up.

After all, if you want to build a banking career, there is a basic element you need – a flair for numbers – be able to read spreadsheets and earnings reports and be able to take those numbers and crunch them into financial models and projections. So you would need to love numbers and not afraid of them.