2020 has been a year of disruption – how has your desk coped with the pandemic? What key learnings can be made?

 

2020 was a challenging year but we could be proud of ourselves as we were since March working from home  and we were coping an increase of our flows with no disruption in the quality of the service provided to our PMs. It clearly shows our resilience through the Covid Crisis and our consistency in sourcing liquidity in  these challenging markets. Our agility and adaptability were key in an unpredictable situation.

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Which projects have you successfully worked on this year?

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Since last year our road map has 3 pillars: ongoing automation through equity Wheels, Auto RFQ for ETF, futures algos, order categorization and clusters in order to better select the appropriate execution strategy and integrate ESG in our broker selection.

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How do you envisage the trading desk of the future post the pandemic?

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Personally, I think that it shows that we could adapt very quickly to the context, moving our operations to a full remote setup worldwide. At AXA IM, 2020 has seen us use the pandemic’s challenging context to further accelerate on rolling out new Smart Working principles across our organisation. Smart Working is about making the employee experience meaningful, rewarding and more respectful of individual needs and situations by proposing an optimal balance between onsite and remote working.

 

What are your top tips to inspiring traders about how to reach to the top of their profession?

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To be passionate but to stay humble. No one could predict what happens in 2020 and the move that we are seeing today from US retailers is also very surprising!!!! Our activity is constantly changing and evolving and we learnt every day from our experience.

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What top tips do you use to optimise your mental health? #buysidementalhealth campaign by the Buy-side Trading Community (BTC)

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I think it’s important to know where are your priorities to optimise your mental health. I keep thinking that this crisis demonstrate that health and family are essential to every one’s life and it’s important to protect it.

 

What has been your career path before your current role?

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I started my career as an equity sales for Meeschaert Rousselle which was at that time part of the Axa Group. I joined Axa IM in 1998 and was working for the trading desk in London from 2001 till 2004. I’m in charge of the Execution for the Paris office on Equity and Listed Derivatives.