Equity-Linked and Hybrid Barclays

Don’t work there, but it sounds like its the convertibles team within ECM. Maybe they do SPACs too.

sounds like back office to me

Sounds like a converts deck in an ECM group. Most converts desks have pretty sharp people as it's more quantitative and you touch all groups at the bank unlike most ECM teams who will never interact with levfin or M&A.

Pay will be like ECM (same base, slight bonus discount), you'll have better exit ops than other ECM bankers since you're doing more modeling, with better hours than traditional IB groups but can be worse than other ECM bankers given the dynamics of the convertible market. The only con in my mind is that you won't be well versed in a specific industry, but most convertible bonds are in tech and healthcare anyway. If I could go back I would join a converts desk.

Equity linked derivatives are derivatives that perform based on guidelines specified in the contracts, and are combinations of derivatives, like options and bonds. These notes are linked to underlyings, and these underlying could be anything (stocks, bonds, defaulting companies within an index, indices, water, etc). The term for these products are bespoke solutions, as they can be tailored to meet the needs of the client. Additionally, many banks have this team create bespoke indices, which are indices that are created to give exposure or provide some type of benefit to investors that no other product offers.

Ex: Commodity Trading Advisors, who trade commodities, are expensive for investors to use because of their fees. A bank might create an index that will use mathematics to track the performance of commodities, and will market this index to investors as a way for them to pay less to be invested in commodities, in addition to other benefits such as passive investing as opposed to active investing that can result in large losses for investors.

Example of equity linked note: You could have a note that gives you an absolute return up to a certain %, which benefits the investor in times of high volatility. In my example let's assume this % is 5%. Your gains will end up capped at 5%, so if the underlying performs above 5%, you will only get 5%. However, if the underlying's value starts performing poorly, you will continue to make gains as long as the negative performance doesn't exceed -5%. because you're getting absolute returns (-3% on the underlying means you'll gain 3% on investment). If the negative performance falls above -5%, you'll lose 6%.

There's a lot of financial engineering in this role, and in general these are the groups supporting this team:

-Sales team - They sell the product -Financial Engineers - They create it -Traders - They buy and sell it -Marketing -They help create presentations that make the products easy to understand but also legally accurate. They also have to make sure the right disclaimers are put on everything.. -Legal - They review the presentations, and ensure as many disclaimers are put on these presentations as possible.

In the US, French banks are dominating in this space. Societe Generale, BNP Paribas. Other banks that are active include Goldman, JP, and RBC

Your exit opportunities are limited to other banks that sell these products, and institutions that buy them.

The financial engineers are the brains behind these things, and I would argue they have the best exit opportunities given their knowledge of finance and programming. Unless you have a mathematical background (most financial engineers have a masters in financial engineering), you don't stand a shot at becoming one.

In interviews, expect to be questioned on financial derivatives, black scholes, options, futures. There's a book made by Hull, Options and Derivatives. This is the bible of financial derivatives.