Investment Management

How investment management works…

The client facing role here belongs primarily to the relationship manager. They will meet directly with clients, who may be individual investors (with lots of dosh…) or institutional investors such as pension funds or insurance companies. It’s their job to find out exactly what the client wants to achieve through investment, make sure they’re getting the most out of the services on offer, and recommend the right services to them.

Fund managers are the guys who head up the investment management/wealth management side of things. They will actually do the investing on behalf of their clients if that’s the service they require, making the big decisions on the selection of assets for portfolios.

Fund managers liaise with risk managers to find out the risk levels associated with each asset class and potential investment opportunity. They work closely with investment analysts at the bank, who themselves will often specialise in a particular asset class, market and/or geographical region. The investment analysts spend their time researching hundreds of potential investment opportunities and feeding this information to the fund managers either through face to face meetings, email/telephone correspondence or written reports. Fund managers can then select the assets they see as most appropriate for investment based on all of this information.

Fancy investment management?

If you want to get into investment management, you’re going to need a finance related degree – and generally at least a 2:1 result. This is a competitive industry, and be aware that investment banks don’t often take on graduates without them having had internship experience in the industry beforehand…So time to get applying for those internship opportunities if you haven’t already!

Find a role in this industry though, and you can expect very long hours and a high pressure work environment; but the salaries can be incredibly high! Graduates alone start on salaries of £40,000 upwards.