The 25-year-old managing a team of 15 engineers and traders
If you're 25 years old in an investment banking division (IBD) now, the best you can hope for is probably to earn $175+ in salary at a major bank on Wall Street while managing a handful of disgruntled analysts who think they'd rather be doing something else instead. The pay is unquestionably impressive, but there are other options - especially if you prefer to measure success in the size of your team and scope of your responsibilities.
Iskren Peev gave banking a go. - The 25-year-old Imperial College mathematics graduate spent three months at JPMorgan and three months at Bank of America, albeit in trading and structuring rather than IBD. Ultimately, though, he avoided big banks entirely: Peev went to Revolut; three years later he's managing 15 people.
25 year-old Peev manages Revolut's in-house electronic treasury trading team. Comprising 13 engineers and two traders (Revolut's in the process of hiring one more graduate trader), the team trades across multiple asset classes (eg. FX crypto, commodities) and places hedging trades to facilitate client activity. Traders on the team include Edoardo Busetti, another recent Imperial College graduate. Engineers on the team typically code in Python and Java, and traders are expected to code too.
Peev declined to comment for this article, and Revolut didn't respond to a request to contribute. The app-based bank, which is valued at $33bn following a recent fundraising round seems to have a habit of recruiting bright Imperial graduates and promoting them into big roles. As we noted this week, a 27 year-old - Alan Chang - is in charge of Revolut's profitability worldwide, and as one of the original employees seems destined to make a lot more money than the average banking associate or even VP and MD when the company goes public.
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