Structurer
Assembling investment products out of a bond and some options — and deciding which client should own which shape.
What the job actually is
A structurer builds the products a bank sells to clients who want an exposure that does not exist in the market as a single instrument. Every one of them, without exception, is a bond plus some options: a capital-protected note is a zero-coupon bond and a call; a reverse convertible is a deposit and a short put dressed as a coupon. The engineering is genuinely interesting, and it is the smaller half of the job.
The larger half is deciding who should own the shape. The identical note is a responsible trade for a hedge fund that understands it is short volatility and a mis-sale to a pension scheme that was told it was income. Nothing about the instrument changes between those two conversations — only the person on the other side, what they need, and whether they can survive the worst case. Suitability is not a ranking from safe to dangerous; it is a match.
The structural tension never goes away: the richest product for the desk is very nearly always the wrong shape for the cautious client, and the mismatch stays invisible for as long as markets are calm. Structurers who ignore that make excellent quarters and then lose the relationship, their standing and eventually the desk, all at once, on the day the barrier breaks.
The calls that define it
- Which shape actually answers the client's constraint — not their stated wish
- Where the floor, the cap and the barrier go, and what each one costs
- When to sell the boring instrument that earns the desk almost nothing
- Whether the desk's whole book is quietly short the same barrier at the same level
Sits between the sales desk that wants a headline coupon and the trading desk that has to hedge whatever gets written; answers to both, and to a compliance function that reads the term sheet afterwards.
What you'd need to know
The concepts this chair runs on — each one links to a plain-English definition.
Sit in the chair
Reading about a job is the trailer. This simulation makes you do it — free, in the browser, nothing to install and nothing locked.