Ivan Grunenko, Member of the ICEF Class of 2023, Senior Sales Trader at Raiffeisen Bank: “Starting a Job at a Large Company Is Easy When You Are a Graduate of ICEF”
Ivan Grunenko majors in Economics and Finance and earned his bachelor’s from HSE and University of London a year ago. Meanwhile, his work experience is impressive. Here’s what Ivan benefitted most from while an ICEF student, the internships he completed, and why he thinks one’s Excel skills can be a saver.
Ivan, you are a Senior Sales Trader at Raiffeisen Bank. What are your responsibilities and how well were you prepared to enter the workplace?
I’m in capital markets sales department. Our clients are large institutions and corporations. We engage in brokerage operations such as liquidity injection into instruments as diverse as repos, bonds, and currency swaps, and we use these same instruments to recover funds.
And because we need to be clear on all touchpoints with our clients, we always keep in touch with them to identify their needs and perform transactions on the terms most favorable for them. So, because I interact with clients I’m in sales, and because I’m the one who supervises the transactions I’m in trading.
That means you are in charge of the entire process. How well were you, a fresh graduate, prepared to enter the workplace? What helped you ease into a corporate culture and standards as high as here?
ICEF quips students with solid hands-on knowledge. This puts its programme above all counterparts, I think. After my four years of study I was able to enter the workplace with well-digested knowledge.
And the knowledge that you gain in ICEF isn’t just theoretical. Theory does form part of nearly every course here, but it is always accompanied by real-life cases. In the spring of 2022, right after completing the Asset Pricing course, which teaches derivatives and forward rates, I started a job in Rosbank. At that time Rosbank didn’t have a software for automatic pricing of derivatives and forwards. So I, a student who’d just learned asset pricing theory, decided to use Excel to create a model what would use spot rates to evaluate and calculate the forward rates for different dates. What I did, in fact, was translate the Bloomberg model into Excel for the department where I worked to use it for indicative quotation.
ICEF maintains very high academic standards. With all the hands-on knowledge that it gave me, entering the workforce and thriving in your career confidently are easy.
CAN YOU NAME THE COURSES THAT WERE THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF YOUR EXPERTISE?
They are three.
My first, and most important, building block is Macroeconomics. It teaches how nations operate economies and how closely they are dependent on investment business. Particularly, Macroeconomics explains, among other things, how key rate increase decisions affect exchange rates and money supply in an economy, and how inflation rates relate to exchange rates – the strings the Central Bank can pull to regulate economy and its parameters.
This kind of knowledge is essential if you want to be in the investment banking. Without it, you won’t be able to predict market performance if anything happens, for example, a key rate increase, in which case you will need to know how bond prices will react to it. All these relationships within the market processes are explained as early as year one.
In the subsequent years of study, the macroeconomic knowledge continues to be expanded through courses like Asset Pricing, Financial Intermediation and more. They give exhaustive knowledge of various banking instruments including derivatives. And their other major focus is risks. These two courses teach the ins and outs of banking, i.e. what banks gain profit from and what products they offer.
These three courses, plus Investment Management, which is taught in year four, represent the building blocks of that solid grounding that makes one a productive money maker.
You did your first internship in your first year of study and went on to do more. Were your internships an enriching experience and did they give you extra confidence?
I decided I needed work experience right after I enrolled. My first internship was with a major oil trader and I did it after my first year of study. Over the course of one month I explored petroleum market and its trading mechanisms. My work there involved calculating some of the financial performance factors, and they even trusted me to do some communication with clients. It was then I realized I liked that line of work.
So with that I mind I started to look for internships in trading, securities management, investment business and investment banking.
My next internship was in the derivatives department of a large bank. I did it after my second year of study. Then, I joined Rosbank, namely its team responsible for issuance of bonds for diverse emitters. That internship marked the start of my professional career. I had worked at Rosbank for about two years.
While exploring the nuances of investment banking, I gained pretty good experience with basics like investor search, bond issue documentation, and bond placement. Those, too, were important building blocks of my training.
What soft skills proved most useful in your line of work?
Communication. Especially in the first few weeks when I needed to build rapport with my new team and integrate into the workplace. I still rely a lot on my communication skills because I interact a lot with clients and because there may arise a problem which is non-routine, requiring me to be flexible, take the perspective of others and get my message across. ICEF cultivates all these skills in its students through a diversity of group projects.
You can expect skills like teamwork, PowerPoint, public speaking, and argumentation in almost every course in ICEF. Their importance in my work cannot be overestimated.
Ivan, what is the most important thing you got from your ICEF education?
The ability to work hard. Real hard. ICEF had instilled in me the thinking that hard work matters for success.
ICEF isn’t a place where one can study carelessly and score good marks in the exams. Studying here takes a lot of effort, if you want to succeed, but that will only make you stronger. I benefitted greatly from this training while doing job interviews and in the workplace.
And another thing: here I got friends for life. I met the people I want to stay in my life and to work with.
What skills do you think the students of today need to learn first in order to effectively respond to challenges in the banking and finance sector?
They need to learn to be one hundred percent flexibility in the workplace and to quickly adapt to new circumstances as they arise. As the market changes at lightning speed, your success depends on how quickly you respond.
Those who get a solution that’s workable today, not yesterday, or still better tomorrow or next month, will always get in first. Or, imagine your workable algorithm fails but this has the least effect on you because you already figured out how a build another one, with new contractors and supply chains. That’s what I call success. This is what I mean by flexibility and why it is key to success in business.
And my last question: favourite pastimes. I know you practiced videography at ICEF and quite successfully. Can you tell more about it?
I’m still into it. I started out as an amateur and was making videos for ICEF Crew’s media center. ICEF Crew is an internal event management team that organizes everything from Freshman Day to Faculty Birthday at ICEF. I was completely inexperienced, unprofessional when I joined their cameramen and directors, but they helped me level up and here I am making quality videos. End-to-end production of clips, music videos and ads is still my hobby. I now have less time for it, but am still practicing.
My advice to everyone is try yourself in as many roles as possible. Leave roles that don’t work for you and go on trying more until you know what suits you. Your four years of student life are just the right time to do it. Don’t be afraid to try. The sooner you discover what you really like and where you want to be, the better. You can become successful faster!