#FYI: Daniel Hazel, Financial Engineer, First Derivatives - YouTube

My name is Daniel Hazel, I am a financial engineer and I work for First Derivatives.

Financial engineering is financial consulting on a kind of more high level and then financial consulting

you get put out on to client site. Currently, I'm out on a client site - one of First Derivatives' big clients: State Street.

The main thing that we do is that we review State Street's customers and kind of ensure

that their customer profile within State Street is up to the latest compliance

and regulatory standards for anti money laundering.

I suppose I would have come to First Derivatives in not a very straightforward route. I would have done finance

for four years in college which is a mixture of accounting and finance. At the time I started finance

I would have been hell-bent on doing an accountancy role, doing audit, that type of thing, and I would have

actually done an internship for six months in an audit firm. I just found that while audit is obviously very good

for some people it just wasn't my cup of tea. I was just looking for something a bit more refreshing,

a bit more dynamic and where things might change day to day and then I went on to do a Masters in UCC

and financial economics and First Derivatives came to do a presentation for our masters and they would

have just went through kind of their whole process. How many clients they have, how many projects you can be

on over your whole period of employment and that kind of really appealed to me.

The first thing I think is really important is that you need to have the appetite to learn. Because a lot of things

no matter what you do you go to college for 4 years you might be on an internship but when you go into a new job,

a lot of it is on-the-job learning. And you need to have that appetite to learn - the appetite to absorb

that information and then implement it in your day to day practices. And then a thing that I find is really important

to my job - is your attention to detail and it's being thorough in what you do. I find these days

people are obsessed with efficiency, obsessed with getting things done as quickly as possible whereas sometimes,

if you just take a breath make sure you do it right and make sure that it only has to be done once,

then it's probably more efficient than it was otherwise, so it's just that attention to detail

is important and then obviously in consulting your communication skills are really important.

You're going out onto client site, you're dealing with clients, they're coming to you with their problems

and you need to understand what their problems are, and see it from their point of view,

so you need to have both your consultant hat and then you need to put

your client hat on at the same time and see it from both points of view use your

skillset and solve the problem.

Besides obviously what you learn in college and the technical skills and the

domain knowledge you pick up along the way, I feel in today's world that people

are neglecting their people skills and their communication skills and their

teamwork skills. In any job unless you're an entrepreneur working in a basement

and God knows where you're going to be dealing with people you need to be able

to communicate for your point of view, you need to be able to realize what

their point of view is and you need to come to the best possible action.

Just those communication skills - they're really, really important.

The main thing for me is how dynamic it is. You can never say that I'm going to

have a standard month. We're very lucky in that we get the opportunity to

work a lot of the biggest banks and biggest financial institutions in the world and

we get to do with a lot of exciting locations so as I said I am on a project

at the moment with Stage Street but very soon I could be on a different project in a

different location with a different client and while I'll have learned a load

of things at Stage Street and I would have met a lot of people, when I go to the

new project I'll have a whole new team, whole new learning experience, whole new

amount of people to learn in a whole new location and just that variety is very big to me.