ER in a Boutique Firm vs International Graduate Standard Chartered

Water Cooler Careers
#1

Hello,

i would like to ask your opinion about the International Graduate program from standard chartered.

Basically I am in the middle of a dilemma to choose whether to go with

1)Stanchart’s IG - Financial market Stream:

https://www.sc.com/en/careers/graduates/financial-markets/index.html

or 2) go to become a junior ER analyst for a boutique firm. The job will include to all the equity analysis plus additional request duty for assisting the fixed income and IB department.

My initial plan was to go for an ER job (either sell side or buyside) and move up the ladder to become a PM.

But now i start to think that maybe the IG program in Standard Chartered won’t be so bad as the program will be dynamic and i will have a lot of batchmates (compared to an ER job since the people on the team are not that many and the job will be repetitive) and I assume that i will learn more in the IG program and finally end up with more options.

My question is, how good is the program considering it is a “financial market stream” but at the same time it is a commercial bank. Will the position somewhat related to capital market ? will the skills that i am going to learn be transferrable to ER/PM if i choose to start with the IG program?

I welcome any feedback from all of you and thanks a lot !

#2

I would pick #2. You are waay underestimating how much you can learn there

#3

Hi Itera,

Thank you for your response, i really do appreciate it.

But i have one more question, how do you see the commercial bank like standard chartered which does business banking in financial market for their clients. They stated that the 6 business areas for this financial market stream are sales, structuring, capital market, trading, ALM management, and research mostly are done in emerging markets (in my case South East Asia).

I assume that it will probably be somewhat similar to someone (maybe ur colleague or friend) who has a senior financial market role in a commercial bank in US. Are they as good as let’s say a senior equity analyst?

#4

what kind of program is the standard chartered one? is it in equity reseach? i might apply too if they have a program for equity reseach or IB?

#5

^ you can check it here. I don’t think that it will necessarily be similar to ER and IB though.

https://www.sc.com/en/careers/graduates/international-graduate-programme/