Y n Wu
Returning clients
Client response rate
Creating
quality
products
Equity Derivatives is a small team based in
London, designing and manufacturing
equity-linked structured products for
private and retail banks internationally.
'We do better every year,' says Yin Wu,
Managing Director of Equity Derivatives.
'We strive to serve our own network better
and the private banks that are our clients
better. There's no one solution to figure
out how to make your business grow,
because the competition is fierce in this
mature market. You need to be able to
put in place a team that can turn around
what the market demands quickly, and
that's what we've done.'
'A lot of the success we see today is due to
decisions we made last year,' he continues.
'We spent a lot of time ensuring we prop-
erly allocate scarce resources. Our traders
today are more client-focused; creating
quality products that get good secondary
markets, are a good buy and sell, and have
a good risk/return profile for the bank. I
think the fact our clients are returning in
larger numbers than ever before shows
they like what we're doing. The figures
support this shift. The equity derivatives
unit's reven ues have grown from €30
million four years ago to €55 million to
date this year.
Much of this success is built on a strong cliënt relationship and being able to
react quickly to the market. The fund derivatives arm of the group is a good
example of being able to quickly develop the necessary resources to satisfy
cliënt demand. 'All private banks work with an "open architecture". This means
they buy structured products for their clients from a variety of suppliers. It's
a very competitive market so you need to be able to talk to your sales people
to find out what the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the market are. A lot of
the larger banks work with bigger infrastructures that are inherently more
difficult to manage, but if you're small like us, more nimble, with shorter lines
of reporting, then you can respond faster. Once clients get used to you, they
will often prefer to stay with you. Even when they come up with an idea, and
they are supposed to shop around in the market, if they like us, and get great
service from us, then they will give us the business. However, we have to
make sure that we can deliver the product quickly.'
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The Word
