The CQF has helped me in terms of the work that I do on a daily basis, mostly around modeling and building frameworks for valuation and risk management. Partially, because I am acting both as an advisor but also sometimes helping my clients on mitigation work, speaking to courts and tribunals, so I often have to go into detail. That’s the first thing that I liked about the CQF; is that I could get access to some material that would enable me to present information in a slightly more accurate way with all the references and research papers and articles I wouldn’t have had access to before. 

The second important thing in my career is that, as I was progressing through my job and managing more people, making sure that all the skills that I had accumulated throughout my career were set in stone and recognized by an independent body such as the CQF Institute. That was important to me. Now I can promote it to my team as well and help them go through the program. 

The third important step for me was that, I’d been working in banking before as an Asset Manager, and also as a quant for consulting companies but I had not had any sort of academic recognition of it. My background was in financial engineering, I studied in France and there was no such recognition as to how I would apply mathematics to my day-to-day job. The CQF was a brilliant program offering this.

In terms of the content, I like the orientation towards the computational finance and the algorithmic trading and the insights around how practically modelling ties into the day-to-day trading activity. Since I have left the banking industry, during the crisis, a lot of things have changed in terms of market practice. Although the foundations of modern finance theory and applied mathematics to finance are moving slowly, there is still quite a lot of knowledge involved I need to catch up with.

It was very intense in a way but at the same time very practical and very much going into depth on the topics I was interested to learn more about. Similarly, in terms of the breadth of the program, it was also quite interesting because it allowed me to go through some of the work that I had already done throughout my career again but probably in a bit more theoretical and practical way on the job, and at the same time also learn more about new asset classes and new techniques for modelling products, which I had not come across during my career.

When hiring, I tend to look at experience on the job, which I think is the most important thing, but I also like checking whether people have kept up with their knowledge and their personal developments. I think certificates like the CQF, but there are many others, are an important criteria when looking through CVs.