A day in the life of a cross-asset salesperson at Crédit Agricole CIB
Cassandre is a cross-asset solutions salesperson at Crédit Agricole CIB in London, pricing (and thereby selling) structured trades for the Bank's clients who approach her with complex requests. She joined the Bank straight out of University in Paris in 2020 and - after stints in Paris and New York - has spent the last two and a half years with the Bank in London. This is a day in her life.
07:00 – My alarm goes off. I live close enough to walk to the office, which is a nice way to start the day. I'll leave the flat around 7:40 and be at my desk by about 7:55, just before the European market opens. I usually grab coffee when I arrive at the office.
08:00 – The European market opens at 8, and we’re ready from the start. Usually the mornings are quieter than the afternoons, so I take some time to train the new joiners and interns. I'll walk them through our processes, show them how our platform works and, importantly, explain who to interact with, because some of our traders and structurers are not necessarily based in London, so they need to know exactly who to go to for any client request.
08:30 – On Mondays, we have a sales meeting with colleagues mostly in Paris, and sometimes elsewhere in Europe. It's a good chance to talk through what happened the week before, discuss the pipeline, and share the client feedback and themes we've been seeing, so we can work out how to act on them in the days ahead. Structuring will sometimes join those calls too.
10:30 – We often have a meeting with the IT department around this time. We're constantly trying to improve the platform, automating some of the more repetitive processes and building new tools to develop the way we work. But we can also have a lot of client requests – if one comes in, it’s a top priority, and an internal meeting can be interrupted or pushed back.
Clients come to me when they want to buy a structured product — for example, an Autocall or a Participation note linked to an equity index like the S&P 500 or a single stock. When a request comes in, I assess whether I can price it directly or whether it needs to go to the structuring teams or trading, who may need to verify parameters such as current implied volatility for a given underlying. If the client decides to proceed, I book the trade: confirming the size with trading, preparing the full pricing, entering it into the booking system, and providing the delta for execution. 12:30 - I usually get out of the office for lunch around half twelve or one for just 20 or 30 minutes. Normally I go with a colleague from my team or from another team we work with regularly. There's a good market near the office with a lot of variety, so it's easy to grab a salad or whatever I fancy; I like Korean, Italian, French, anything. Every so often lunch is with a client instead, which is a nice, more informal way to build relationships.
13:00 – When I get back, we start getting ready for the US market open at 2:30 UK time. We'll usually already have pending requests from clients for the US open, so, just as we do in the morning, we're discussing those with our traders and structurers, because clients often need a reply the moment the market opens, and we want to be ready before then.
14:30 – This is the busiest part of the day, and my favourite. Between half two and half four, both the European and American markets are open at the same time, so it's a constant flow of requests, calls with clients, bookings and discussions with traders. It's a lot, but everyone's busy together. I really enjoy it.
16:30 – The European market closes. After that we move on to the post-trade side of things; drafting documents and catching up on any emails from earlier that didn't need an immediate reply. The US market is still open at this time, so we can still be busy on that front, though it's quieter than the previous two hours.
This is also when a lot of our longer-term work gets done; the platform development I mentioned or onboarding new clients, the kind of medium-to-long-term projects that are easier to focus on once things calm down. We have a team in New York covering the US and Latin America (I was part of it myself for about 18 months a few years ago) so there's plenty of contact across the desk.
19:00 – I usually leave around this time, although it really depends on client requests and how the market is looking. After that I try to make the most of London; seeing friends, going to musicals or concerts, or to the theatre. During the World Cup, I tried to watch that, especially when France was playing.
20:00 – If I want to relax and have a quieter evening, I'll go home and call my family and friends back home. I used to play a lot of tennis and I miss it, and finding a club over here is on my list of things to do. I usually grab some takeout or cook myself a quick meal at home.
22:30 – I usually try to get to bed around 10pm or 11pm. It depends.
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