Manifesto: Educating the next generation of financiers
From railroads to Bitcoin — What is this all about?
Corporate finance in the early industrial era was largely gentlemanly business. Bankers were people who wanted to help the community by building railroads and making trade happen. Deal were made by shaking hands.
Fast forward to the modern era, and it all became about compliance meetings and pointless hours spent placing text boxes in PowerPoint presentations (pro tip: hold CTRL while using arrow keys to nudge the damn thing one pixel at a time). Bankers became as fungible as the cash they provided.
Then the digital revolution came along, allowing every nerd in a hoodie to set up a new interpretation of finance — with mixed results. Those who want to reinvent finance normally have no idea what they are talking about (looking at you, Bitcoin traders), and the ones who do end up being trapped in their own comfort zone (looking at you, big banks).
Even today, financial innovation is mostly incremental rather than transformational.
There is some value in traditional investment banking. Less than what an investment banker would like you to think. But alas, there is.
A lot of this value is hidden in the knowledge of the thousands of nuances in the different branches of investment banking, private equity, capital markets, you name it. Then come the “hand-shaking” skills, which can however be transferred from any other sales job.
If we really want transformational innovation in the corporate finance world to become a thing in this generation, we need to increase financial literacy.
The best way to do it is to find the common denominators across all these branches, make it easily digestible to the ones who don’t know what it is and couldn’t care less.
Who Am I
I have been an investment banker for the good part of the last 10 years. I did not come from a pedigree background nor I took a conventional path to get there. This allowed me to never become a fanatical, suspenders-wearing (or whatever the gen-z equivalent of that is — suspenders are cool btw) Gordon Gekko’s epigone.
Due to a random combination of factors, I was one of the few junior bankers lucky enough to see and work on A TON of different desks. Securitisations, CDS, project / leverage / corporate finance, transaction banking, M&A, capital markets, credit risk. I developed a very broad view of this environment at an age where most people are still figuring out what their boss does.
I then spent a couple of years in a fintech whose mission is to reinvent banking. I remember being shocked at my first few months in the shop. Their approach rocked my finance beliefs to the ground — for better or worse.
Now, locked down in my apartment, I have time to reflect back to what I’ve learned in my journey. Some things make no sense. Some things are so trivial they should be automated without thinking twice. Some others… well, there is a reason they have been around since the babylonians.
I plan to use this space to describe, in layman terms, how the world of high finance works, with some fintech wisdom thrown in every once in a while.
My goal with this project is to achieve mostly an internal “cleanup” exercise to put order in the thoughts I’ve accumulated in these years.
I also aim to educate the youngest about the the workings of this interesting sector, and — who knows, maybe help shed some light to some entrepreneurial mind.
I will write everything I know as if I was explaining it to a 15 years-old me, who did now even know what Investopedia was, let alone knowing anything about finance.
Updates will be random, inconsistent and moody.
