A highway to the tasks of a well-established asset management house

Rotations and top-tier colleagues guarantee an enhanced learning curve. Evli summer trainee program lasts 3-4 months and speeds up your way to become a financial expert.

Evli’s trainee program offers a great place for young professionals to see and experience different functions and units of Evli Bank and gain practical knowledge while working with the best financial experts of Finland. During your months as a trainee, you will have an opportunity to see e.g. fund management, corporate finance and/or private banking units – different aspects of investment banking, and you can influence, where you will be located to work during your summer at Evli.

I spent the two first months of my traineeship in the fixed income portfolio management team, which is one of the crown jewelries of Evli. Evli’s institutional wealth management has been awarded as the “best institutional asset manager” in Finland for five consecutive years in a row, which is why it is justified to say that I was able to work with one of the best portfolio managers in Finland. Evli’s AUM reached over 13 billion euros during this summer, of which approximately 7 billion belongs to Evli’s fixed income funds. Hence, it goes without saying, that Evli’s fixed income funds are one of the largest in Finland and a major contributor for Evli’s total AUM.

During this time, I was able to see the full lifecycle of fixed income investing and portfolio management. From the first week, I was able to participate in investor roadshows of new bond emissions and screening potential investment targets and to see how portfolio managers are selling existing bonds from portfolio and maintaining reasonable cash balance while complying respective client mandate limits. When joining Evli, you gain first-hand experience and you are a trusted colleague from early on. In addition to sitting in a same investor table with CEOs and CFOs of bond emission companies, my summer at Evli consisted of several other assignments. I conducted company, credit and market analysis, build an Excel model from scratch and helped integrating a new software. Furthermore, I constructed fund comparison analysis, weekly credit updates, and helped portfolio managers with smaller or larger ad hoc tasks while needed. Overall, I enhanced my prior knowledge of fixed income investing rather quickly.

I spent my last month in Evli’s execution team. The execution team consists of six traders, four specializing in equity and fixed income and two in ETF and Derivatives sales and trading. All the traders have an ample experience and history about trading and execution. Primarily, they execute orders from the asset management unit but also orders from institutional or private clients. During the last part of my internship, I was able to see their work in practice, learn a bit more about algorithmic trading and dark pools, which I found very fascinating. I studied Nasdaq trading terminology, rules and conditions in order to do equity trading in Nasdaq Nordic exchanges. Furthermore, I conducted and passed Eurex’s Exchange Trader Exam meaning that I can trade options and futures in the Eurex exchange. All in all, Evli Summer Trainee Program exposes you to a variety of challenging investment banking activities, in which your learning curve can be as fast and deep as you want it to be.

Björn Bergman, KTK, rahoituksen maisteriopiskelija Aallon kauppakorkeakoulussa