Kay Rajagopal | Vice President; Portfolio Delivery Manager | Bank of America

 

I have been interested in STEM from a young age. I did not grow up with the perception that girls could not excel in Science or Maths or Technology. My parents taught me I could excel at anything.

I graduated with a degree in Chemistry and then moved into the world of Investment Banking, within Finance. I qualified as an accountant and successfully established myself as a high-performing Finance Manager within Bank of America for over a decade.

However, with the fast-paced changing landscape and focus on digitization and technology, I knew I wanted a career in technology. I was not a developer, and consciously, I knew that my strengths as facilitator, enabler and connector were the ‘value-add’ that I would bring with me. It is an art to translate business requirements into technical deliverables and act as the intermediary across the various groups involved.

I had the opportunity to join Credit Risk Technology as a project manager three years ago. This was an exciting challenge for me. I managed the roll out for multiple products across the organization and facilitated intraday live ticking valuations for these products. Working with a global team, across Asia, EMEA and the US, my role was to manage this new initiative which included planning the milestones and delivery, setting up controls and agile routines, stakeholder management and showcasing the development efforts.

The learning curve was exponential, and I believe my skill set demonstrated my strengths – the ability to navigate difficult discussions, manage stakeholders and manage multiple moving parts of the project.

After two years in the above role, a successful global project completed, I had a new opportunity, a horizontal move to the London eTrading team. I accepted this role to look after a global algorithm application roll out. My role then expanded every three months to date, from owning the algorithm roll out globally to owning MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) II regulatory reporting for the entire Fixed Income, Commodities and Equities lines of business. I also owned the software that captures and reports voice trades across Fixed Incomes. My role has since expanded to oversee the Securitised products technology team in EMEA.

This is a challenging and rewarding role and I am grateful for all the opportunity to grow and develop within this organization. My goal is to continue to leverage my strengths and continue to establish concrete and respectful partnership between our business stakeholders and development technology teams.