BNP Paribas and Wall Street

Many people have been asking about my internship with BNP Paribas and how things are going there....so this blog is to update everyone on 1)who it is I actually work for and 2) what I actually do there. BNP Paribas is a french international bank. The company has HQ in Paris and has a huge presence in Europe, but also throughout Asia and a small presence in the U.S. Unless you work in banking/finance you may not have heard of them. What was surprising to me was that there are some people (in Seattle) who work in the industry (or who want to work in the industry) and have never heard of BNP Paribas. That was a little surprising and disappointing given they are one of the strongest and largest banks in the world. I work under one of its 3 main business units, Corporate and Investment Banking. Under that business unit, I work in Client Coverage. Client Coverage is responsible for managing the bank's relationships with its core banking clients (corporations and institutions). Client Coverage also manages the bank's entire exposure to these clients to make sure that the bank's "portfolio" maintains a healthy level of credit risk. In other words, we need to make sure that BNP Paribas makes a profit from providing products and services (loans, swaps, fx lines, M&A services, etc.) above and beyond what it costs the bank to borrow money itself. We also need to make sure the bank gets repaid the billions of dollars it lends out to companies. So far I've worked on the analysis of companies in the steel and chemicals industries. All the companies that we manage, analyze and do business with are multinational companies so it gives me the opportunity to learn about and better understand industries from a global perspective, not just the U.S. 

About 50% of the people I work with are French and french is spoken all the time. As expected, BNPP is  very international....there are young people from France, Romania, Argentina and Italy that work in our group. The french people are not as socially outgoing as I was expecting, but they are nice. In general the group (which numbers about 30 people) is very nice. I'm happy to be working with a non-US bank because everything from culture to personalities are refreshingly different. And my working hours are completely reasonable....probably a combination of the slow credit markets and the fact that its corporate banking, not investment banking. 

There are about 18 people in my graduate internship program, most of them are from NYU, Cornell or some other private east coast school. I am the only one from the west coast. In general all the other interns are pretty nice, once you get past the cocky first impression they give off. I've made good friends with one Indian girl who goest to NYU's Stern, so I'm asking questions and getting all the info/dirt on what its MBA program is really like. I'll report that at a later date. 

I'll admit, I've always wondered what its like to work on "Wall Street" and here's what I'm finding out. If the majority of your happiness and self-worth is derived from the brand name of the company you work for, your title within that company, the social status that goes with that job title, and the size of your paycheck, then working in banking in NY is the place for you. The glamour of working on Wall Street is a powerful thing for many people (within and outside of the industry) and the hope of living that "glamour" is what draws so many young MBA's to NY. But what young professionals don't seem to think about is that in a downturn in the financial services industry (currently happening) you have no job security here. People are being laid off all the time here from their glamourous banking jobs with no other banks wiling to hire them, despite having an ivy league degree and 10+ years of Wall Street experience. The reality is that even within the labor market in the financial capital of the world the laws of supply and demand still hold. There is just so, so many people from all over the world (mostly young) all wanting to work in finance in a market with not enough job opportunities. Its highly competitive and sometimes I feel like I'm just another ambitious MBA looking for a job on Wall Street like everyone else. Its gets tiring. I've realized that I don't want to be that person, its not who I am. I want to create my own "blue ocean" career. I can't say exactly what job I would like to have upon graduating (it will certainly still be in financial services), but  I have a good idea of what my skill sets are and what job characteristics suit me. I also have a good idea of how I envision my career fitting into my life. Sometimes I feel like I know or have realized things that other people my age here in Manhattan have not. I'm not sure what that is, but some higher knowledge certainly exists....above and beyond the rat race and the daily grind that most new yorkers have come to know and accept.