Alexander Kovalenko: ICEF Is An Unfailing Provider of Quality. Looking Forward to Having Its Graduates and Senior Students OnboardAlexander Kovalenko: ICEF Is An Unfailing Provider of Quality. Looking Forward to Having Its Graduates and Senior Students Onboard
ICEF master’s graduate Alexander Kovalenko serves as Key Accounts Director at SBER Key Accounts Division – Consumer Sector and Trade Department. We talked with Alexander to find out which courses he liked best as a student, what skills Sberbank is looking for in candidates, if Alexander has his personal recipe for success, and how extreme sports can drive manager effectiveness.
Alexander, how has your career path unfolded?
I did multiple internships during my bachelor’s studies at HSE Faculty of Economics (currently the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences) to finally decide, in my fourth year, to try myself in consulting, with Big Three in mind. I went on to study for my master’s, attending case clubs and participating actively in case championships in my first year, but strangely enough I never even applied for a job in consulting.
In the summer after my first year of master’s study I applied Head Start (currently SberSeasons) internship program and was accepted to Sberbank CIB Relationship Management (Coverage). That job turned out to be everything I wanted – it is my team, my friends, my second home I gladly come for eight years now. I’ve worked my way up from an intern to Key Accounts Director.
Therefore, my advice to students and graduates is use as many internship opportunities as you can. You may have to try a lot of industries, companies and teams before you find you best-fit job. Find a way to overcome the fear of responsibility and promoting the ideas of your own. Follow universal principles and use sequential logic to become a better decision-maker. That’s my recipe for success.
What is the most important thing you learned at ICEF? What was the highlight of your student years?
ICEF had instilled in me a love for learning and desire to achieve more. It taught me teamwork and how to manage tight deadlines. These skills still come in very handy. For example, I am thinking of doing an Executive MBA and currently studying for my international exams in finance.
My best memory of my years as a master’s student is my classmates and teachers. Each of them is an extraordinary personality with their own vision and experience. They are great to communicate with and to learn from.
The hard skills that you gained at ICEF, which of them turned out to be most useful on your path to career success? Which courses helped you develop confidence that you were a good fit for your job?
If you want to succeed in finance, you’ve got to have a good grounding in economics. And the fundamental courses ICEF offers are exactly the ones that ensure such grounding. Take, for instance, Game Theory and its units on decision-making, or Microeconomics and its part on alternative economics, or the courses that shed light on macroeconomic trends.
What also helps to succeed in my line of work is rapid mental calculation skills, presentation making skills, and public speaking skills. These can be developed through elective courses and clubs. I still regret not joining the student debate club. I would’ve come to the job a better prepared candidate.
You hold the post of Key Accounts Director. What sort of decisions are you responsible for in your bank’s decision-making chain?
My duties include:
- building Sberbank’s key accounts strategy and long-term customer relationships;
- managing functional units and product teams;
- assisting companies in their day-to-day and ad hoc financial and non-financial decision-making.
The decisions we are responsible for deal mostly with customizing the approach to each particular company. They include, for instance, joint decisions on the terms and provision of credit and non-credit products. Our job is to successfully communicate the points of both the sides – the client and the bank. So, the decisions that we make surely have an effect on how successful the relationship between the bank and the corporate client will be.
What is your typical work day like?
My day usually starts with getting calls from clients and colleagues about various matters of cooperation. The queries that come up are usually nontrivial, requiring a delicate balance of interests of the parties involved. I and my team spend the day responding to clients concerns, and our main task is to keep them happy. For this, we must know we get their queries right and can address them in the most effective way. Also, we must provide our clients with sound financial advice and sound rationales for the decision choices they are to present to their upper standing managers.
Also, my line of work requires thorough knowledge of the industry – in my case, trade. And because we need to stay current on the food and non-food retail chains, online stores, and wholesale distributors, I and my team attend multiple sector-specific venues as a way to identify new trends and ensure that Sberbank thrives on them using its products and ecosystem.
I think trade, as an innovation-driven and rapidly growing sector, offers a huge room for growth, projects, and opportunities to prove oneself. Trade is where the period between idea generation and decision implementation is the shortest. You see the results of your work turn into physical products almost immediately and can check them out in retail outlets.
What is your ethos of team managing? What managerial issues are most common in your team and how do you solve them?
Our most essential task is to respect the interests of all parties to a project. As a leader of functional units and product teams, I believe that there’s a way out even of the most challenging of issues, even if you don't see it in the moment. How quickly you can solve it is a matter of your aptitudes. The process basically comes down to managing contracting parties’ expectations and following the logic of decision-making.
Another important task is to help young hires ease into the job by assisting them in their first deals and arrangements. It is essential to instill in every new hire a love for what they do and the understanding of the goals and principles of their job.
The ethos I’ve established for myself is this: Be the mentor you yourself would want to follow in your early days as an employee. This is what I try to stick to every day.
Sberbank is a common choice among the bachelor’s and master’s graduates of ICEF. How well are they prepared for the jobs in this large corporation?
ICEF is an unfailing provider of quality. Its graduates demonstrate a high level of skill and expertise in basic finance and modeling, and, more importantly, high motivation for work and growth, fresh thinking, and logical reasoning.
What qualities should your best-fit candidate have? Do you think our bachelor’s and master’s graduates have everything it takes to win jobs in your department and team?
We see the graduates and senior students of ICEF as some of our most preferred candidates. We need people with good hard and soft skills who are committed, can to take on responsibility and think out of the box.
What skills do our graduates need in the first place to effectively respond to the emerging tasks and challenges of the financial sector?
While for any fresh graduate entering the job market it is still very important to have a solid grounding in economic theory and financial modeling, more mature candidates should be able to demonstrate high-level soft skills as prerequisites for effective communication and negotiation with contracting parties. Also, given the pace at which technologies are progressing, it is advisable to have sufficient cross-industry knowledge as what can leverage the collective experience of various sectors (IT and finance, for example) to make more informed decisions. And, surely, strong language skills will be an asset, too, facilitating the communication with our international contractors.
Where do you get the energy to go on with your highly responsible duties and busy schedule? Is it sports or personal interests?
My source of energy is my family and friends. And extreme sports. Downhill skiing, motorcycling and rock climbing are a good way to distract me from work.