In my role as a quantitative finance analyst, I work in the Corporate Audit division, specifically in the model audit team. Our role is to independently audit the models used by the Bank across all business lines and functions to manage the risk we expose ourselves to as a firm, and to ensure compliance with global regulations and standards.

This requires a lot of technical knowledge about the financial and mathematical underpinning of these models, which include Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning methods, in order to critically assess their performance. We need to be diligent, with a healthy amount of scepticism, to look for potential areas of weakness or improvement.

A strong understanding of financial mathematics and quantitative modelling is fundamental in the role, so the course set me up perfectly for this role, offering a broad range of mathematical and statistical theory, economic background, as well as technical skills such as coding which are massively useful.

My course really prepared me for the working world in a variety of ways. Firstly, it taught me how to work on multiple projects simultaneously, often needing to process information from many sources in different ways i.e., lectures, online resources, books.

This is similar to life in my role now, as important information and work can come from anywhere, so you always have to be ready for it. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, my course at WBS taught me that attitude can make a huge difference. I learnt quickly to approach my studies with a healthy desire to learn and this has carried over into my working role, where I’m always looking for opportunities to absorb new information.