By: Wesley Milillo ’18
I currently work in Prime Services at Societe Generale. Societe Generale is a French-based, global investment bank with branches and offices around the world. Prime Services is a division within Global Markets that helps clients borrow, sell, and trade financial products. Clients ranging from hedge funds, to other banks, to mutual funds, seek to engage in execution services—i.e. trading, as well as clearing and settling which consists of updating and reconciling the accounts between two parties. Prime Services helps them to do this efficiently.
At Society Generale, I am a Transition Manager. Transition Management is a consultative, project-management team that helps clients come into the bank and do business with us. After a Salesperson ‘makes the sale,’ and the client agrees to terms and prices, there is still a lot that goes into getting the client up and running. There is a lot of documentation that is involved, ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) procedures to ensure our clients have compliant backgrounds, Credit terms negotiation, customer due diligence, and technology and reporting set ups. I work with our clients to help them through all these processes with our internal teams, and get the client “live” and trading in a timely manner. Through this, we help build long-term partnerships with our clients and ensure that all necessary checks and balances necessary for a good relationship are in place.
Being an IPED student has helped me to see the big picture with respect to the much internationalized financial services sector. Aside from the holistic international economics courses I’ve taken, I’ve also taken some coding classes as well as data and modeling courses as well. Having a background in data and quantitative skills are highly regarded in the financial services sector, so having learned this while working has allowed me to better contribute my skills on a daily basis.
As a student in IPED, I am much more exposed to others who also have a background in developing countries. Hearing their perspectives, and learning about the interactions between both the political realm and economic realm, helped me to understand not only the developing world more clearly, but also our economy and background. Gaining an understanding of global capital flows and markets has given me a much deeper appreciation for our global economy and has helped me better contextualize our place in it.