Charles is a financial associate in the capital markets division at the Royal Bank of Scotland. His job is to help raise capital for companies in the energy sector. Charles tells us of the “shell shock” he experienced at first but that he’s now grown to love the ever-changing aspect of his career.
Transcript
>> My name is Charlie Cavanna. I'm an associate with RBS, Royal Bank of Scotland. I work in their Investment Banking Division, specifically within capital markets. And within capital markets, I'm in the Debt Capital Markets Group. So that involves helping companies raise capital. I cover the energy sector, so oil and gas companies, utilities, names like Shell, BP, Northeast Utilities, Con Edison. I also work with project clients as well, so some of the big solar farms being built out in California, wind farms, et cetera. And basically we just stand in front of our clients, and when we have needs for capital, we help them issue bonds. So within our group, RBS is a large bank in the US. We have a pretty significant sales and trading platform, so we actually have the second biggest trading floor in the world after UBS, who is just across the street. So we use our sales and our trading floors to go out there. They go out and contact investors. Some names that are pretty easily recognized like Black Rock, Pinto, insurance companies like the Hartford, Travelers. They'll have needs to buy money for either their investment portfolios or their insurance portfolios. They come to banks like RBS with orders for these bonds. Our sales floor is in close contact with all these names. They go out and talk to them on a day-to-day basis. When we have a bond issue, they literally call them up on the phone, shoot them an email, shoot them an instant message, you know, talk to them about the offering that we have on the specific day. You know, we go out there and market it for the company. We put together sales materials for them to show the investors. We, you know, we announce the transaction through various news wires. We'll put it out on Bloomberg. We'll put it out on the Wall Street Journal. We'll issue news releases, sometimes through some of, you know, like ABC, NBC, CNBC, and just drum up support and, you know, take the orders once they come in. It is not 9 to 5. You know, for anybody looking to get into a career in finance, I think you need to be a little bit prepared to work outside of normal human business hours, but it's not the worst thing in the world. You know, there are times where you're incredibly busy and there's times where you're not. You know, during the month of December, I spend more time on ESPN.com on some days than I spend on my work. But, you know, like this month, a huge amount of [inaudible] for the companies we cover, so there's a lot of nights where I'm eating dinner at work. But for me, it's engaging. I tend to find that, you know, I've had internships where it was that 9 to 5, punch in, punch out, and you know, you kind of leave your work at work. But for me, those days went by. It seemed a lot longer, 9 to 5, when I'm staring at the clock in the corner of the computer screen all day, just waiting for the day to be over versus maybe working until 7:30, 8:00 and, you know, by the time it's dark outside, I can't even believe that I was really engaged with what happened during the day.
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