Voices of finance: chief operating officer (equity division) at a bulge bracket bank | Joris Luyendijk | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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We're meeting in a bar in Canary Wharf at seven in the evening. It's one of those places where once inside, you realise you might be anywhere; the interior design is nondescript airport chic, the TV is set to an international news station and clients as well as staff are one big racial mix. She is a woman in her early 40s, well dressed and with the demeanour of someone who is not uncomfortable making important decisions fast. She is a lively talker and interrupts herself a few times, saying: "OK, take a breath." She orders a glass of white wine. When we're done talking an hour and a half later, she goes back into the office to finish things up. "I am managing the operations of a 400-people-strong trading floor at one of the biggest banks in the world. In a strange way this work is incredibly free. It's down to you how you go about what you're expected to do; making it easier for your people to make money for the bank. "It can be irritating and infuriating, when you're dealing with dickheads. The best moments are when I have streamlined some small or bigger part of the organisation, which from then on will run smoother. When somebody at a desk cries out: 'Yes, this makes my life easier.' "I can't explain to my parents what I'm doing, let alone how I am enjoying my job. When my children were younger they thought I was a teller, one of those people in a polyester jacket. For them that was what someone who works in a bank looked like. "There's a huge bureaucracy surrounding each trade [buying and selling of shares and other financial products]. Say you place an order with us to buy 500 shares of Vodafone 'on a certain price', meaning that our traders try to buy Vodafone shares for that price. This may take several hours, as the price fluctuates around the one you're prepared to pay. When it's complete, you 'ticket' the trade and the operational or ops people pick it up. They follow what we call settlement instructions. Where should those shares go? Some clients want them all in one fund, others across a whole range. Our clients, usually major pension funds and other investors, have ops people too, so our team is in direct contact with theirs. "The traders are the face of our industry, but the ops people play an essential role behind the scenes. Yet they get paid considerably less. As I said, our clients have ops people too, and they have a very low tolerance for mistakes. At the end of the year they vote and grade us how fast and accurate we were. These grades then play a role in determining who gets what part of the commission wallet. "I check my email no later than 6.30am, and I am in the office by 7am. Between 8am and 4.30pm the markets are open, so it's chaos, in the sense of constantly having to react to events and situations. After 5.30pm people begin to leave, and I will be checking up on the administrative side of that day. I am out by 7 or 8pm. Sometimes I work on weekends. "You can't be good at this on your first day. You need to learn to see who's lying to you, what's happened in the past and when people have made mistakes. For that you need people's respect, so they tell you, and respect is something you earn over time – you can't have it handed over to you by your predecessor. My people need to be sure that I've got their back, and that I am their first point of contact – they need to come to me. "I'd say there are three kinds of traders. You've got the owls, very intellectual people, withdrawn, who will not talk much to clients or salespeople. They are inward focused, they try to understand what is happening in the markets and act on it. Then you've got the punters who are intuitive. They do a lot of 'click trading', where you have to be really quick. They get an order to sell 500,000 shares and they work that through the day, incrementally, selling 10,000, then another 5,000, exploiting little fluctuations. Clients don't have time to do that. Finally there are the hybrids, who unlike the owls, do talk to clients and who, unlike the punters, do have a sector they're specialised in. They're dependable and thoughtful, let's say they are labradors. "Part of our operation is trading by humans, another by computers. The human element will never disappear entirely, if only because computers can't deal with unexpected events. You can program computer algorithms to trade. The thing is, you can program only within certain tolerances. Recently when America was downgraded, everybody turned off their algorithms. If Greece defaults, we'll do it again. "When things go horribly wrong on the trading floor and billions are lost, it's generally not because traders are trying to make money for their own gain. What happens is that a trader makes a mistake, tries to cover it up by making an even bigger one, and so on. Jérôme Kerviel was not a monster. He was a child with a lot of operational knowledge. "There are some small boutiques where traders are paid simply a percentage of the money they make. At our bank it is a complicated composite of factors. We go through our population, as we call it, the personal assistants, sales people, sales trading people, support, the whole lot. We look at how much revenue they have generated, we look at feedback from brokers and clients and others we deal with. We look at whether somebody is a good co-worker; if you whine and whinge a lot, for sure that affects your bonus negatively. With traders you don't want to give them a simple percentage number of the money they have made; maybe a client asked them to take a position [buy shares] they didn't like, but this helped the relationship with the client – you want the trader to think of that relationship, not just about the money he makes that day. "I deplore the way people rant against 'the banks'. Corporations need banks. It's that simple. It's about expertise in a complicated and global economy. Amazon is growing as fast as it is because it is good at what it's doing; selling and delivering stuff to customers. Amazon is not good at raising the capital necessary to grow further, nor at explaining their plans to potential investors, showing progress on promises made, managing the debt they've already taken on. For all of this and more, corporations needs banks. "Part of the Guardian's revenue is in dollars and euros. The Guardian will want to protect itself against a sudden drop in the value of these dollars and euros. So the Guardian will ask a bank for a financial product through which they insure themselves against such a drop. Then the bank will take that financial product, called a currency hedge, to the market for these things where it gets traded; in other words, where some 'counterparty' says: OK, if the value of the dollar or euro drops, I will pay the Guardian the difference – but if the value rises, then I make some money. "This is how much of finance works, and you can't have a global economy with companies buying and selling stuff across borders and currencies, without financial instruments to manage the risks involved. Then you need a market to trade these instruments. "I don't have a degree and yet I have this demanding job. How it happened: I went abroad and I didn't go back. Instead I got a job at a bank there, really at the lowest level imaginable. I worked myself up and many years later returned to the UK. Finance is surprisingly meritocratic, they're not looking at your degrees, they want to know if you're good at what you are doing. "I am adamantly opposed to affirmative action; it turns us into 'special needs' people, making it seem as if there's something wrong with us, to be compensated for. Affirmative action holds women back, we've moved beyond that point. Finance is like working in medicine, it's not for everyone. I have been a Guardian reader for all of my adult life. But when the other day I read Zoe Williams concluding an article about a successful female banker who also has five children with: "The world still needs you, Superwoman. Though hopefully next time you won't work for a bank." That felt like a slap in my face. Why can't women be proud of those who made it in finance? Feminism for me is the opportunity to do whatever you want. This job is what I want. Now there are groups that may need help. I am running a trading floor with 400 people, 95% of those are white. And I know only perhaps three or four people who are gay and out. "Never in my working life have I felt discriminated against as a woman. There is casual sexism, you have that in any industry … but the teasing and the sarcasm, it's directed at the individual, not at his or her gender. "People don't talk about bonuses. It's not what we do all day. It's very important and a big focus towards the end of the year but it's not something that gets discussed. "My salary? I am making something in the vicinity of £200,000, plus bonuses, which vary from year to year but on average fall somewhere between £50,000-£150,000. Often the bonus is partly paid in stock [shares] that can be cashed in only after a number of years and vary in value with the welfare of the bank – so called deferred compensation. My bonus can also be zero, as in the disastrous year of 2007, and salaries go up and down. "It's not about deserving, it's about earning. I wish more people had good salaries. That's why I vote the way I do, that's why I read the Guardian. It's funny how it works. You get used to getting paid well, because I still run out at the end of the month."

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We are meeting for lunch near where she lives, as she's working from home that day. She is a tall woman, in her early 30s, born and raised in an African country, with impeccable English and a vocabulary that sent me for the dictionary a few times. Dressed as if she is going jogging next, she has lively eyes and a sharp tongue. She smokes one cigarette after another, while taking sips of her green tea. "Sometimes I help people out, when they hear that I work in banking. I tell them: 'But you know what, it's really boring.' This helps deflect resentment, but it's not true. It's somehow not acceptable to work in finance and love your job. I did not choose venture capital as a career, quite the contrary. But I have totally fallen in love with it. In venture capital (VC) you connect entrepreneurs looking for capital with investors looking to invest. How it works: we are constantly on the look-out for entrepreneurs with a great idea, and for smaller businesses with the potential for growth. Then we go to our investors and ask them for money to invest in these companies. If we raise the capital we commit for a number of years to advise and help the entrepreneur or small business. We get a seat on the board, at least once a week there are intense consultations, quarterly reports, annual meetings … Amounts invested vary from $5 million to $25 million. A commitment of 10 years is maximum, most VC firms hope to 'exit' after seven years. These 'exits' can be really emotional affairs. You will have spent five years or more with that entrepreneur, going through highs and lows, seeing the business go from something run from his kitchen to a company employing 200 people … The man is now a millionaire, his life has completely changed but you still know him from the days before all that. Then it's time to say goodbye. This is what I love so much about this job. Very soon you forget it's about money. You're helping companies grow. And results are very measurable, it's difficult to blag. Reputations flounder really quickly. If you lose investors' money in such a tight-knit community you're finished. So the world of venture capital divides in two streams: one is finding the promising small businesses and the entrepreneurs with the brilliant ideas – Dragon's Den style. The other is raising funds from investors. As a firm we get paid a percentage of the invested sums we manage, plus what we call 'carry': when there's an exit, we share in the profits. 'Carry' is quite controversial because in the UK it is taxed at a lower rate. There can be really good exits – a return of 10 times the amount invested is not unheard of. My venture capital fund is sharia-compliant, which means we can't invest in gambling, alcohol and tobacco. Most importantly, there can be no leverage. The company we invest in cannot have debt on their books, or use debt in any way for expansion. So we need to go through their operations and check. There are some really exotic financial instruments out there, so sometimes I need to find the right Islamic scholar in Malaysia to make sure it's all right. Compare it to the Jews and their kosher laws: just like there are rabbis with food specialisations, the same is true for Islamic scholars and financial instruments. I assumed being a woman might be a problem with the bearded sheikhs but the contrary is true. They like the change, there are not so many women around in this sector. There's something to sharia-compliant venture capital; if the entire economy were run like that, you'd probably have no desperate recessions and no booms. Same for companies, without debt injections you don't have that freakish growth, but neither do you these busts when suddenly borrowing becomes much more expensive. If you're happy to forego huge potential, I'd say, sharia economics is fine. I never planned to go into finance. My parents expected me to become a writer, or active in politics. I interned at the UN, thought about working for an MP. But work at the UN was so bureaucratic, so inward-looking, so few tangible results after all the work that is being done … I did take some courses in university about Islamic finance. My parents were quite disapproving, their interests were more cultural and intellectual. But they soon came round when they saw what a help my income was to raising and educating my siblings. I started in investment banking, a huge international bank. And I was enamoured. The massive lifts, the food corners, the expensive suits. I thought it was arrival. But after a year I began to have these serious doubts. This feeling as I walked out of the building: what have I actually accomplished today? At the end of the year, what has my team achieved, in a physical, real life sense of the word? I felt a bit of a fraud. So I moved to a private equity firm next, which was a nightmare. This was the world of the big buy-outs, you'd buy a company, strip it to make it meaner and leaner and try to sell it off for a lot more. It's a terrible world, but very lucrative. You'd buy a hospital conglomerate, grow it by 50% and sell it for a big profit. After a while I realised that really, anyone could do this, it's not something incredibly special. I find that in finance, everybody goes through a few years of this; you work insanely hard, you will have no social life, no weekends … It is temporary and you know it. Seen from that perspective, my time at the private equity buy-out firm was very useful. I learnt a lot and made many good contacts: investors all over the world. All of them have their specialisations and preferences and strengths and weaknesses; if they trust you, and they know you are not going to waste their time with proposals they won't be interested in anyway, that's very valuable. So when this venture capital firm hired me, I could take these investors' contacts with me. In my earlier job at that major investment bank, the senior people were frighteningly similar to one another. Without fail they went to Eton or Westminster, then Oxford or Cambridge, then Insead, Warton Business School or Harvard. They married young, to someone they had met at university, and by the time they're in their 40s they have teenage kids and – this took me some time to figure out – then they seem to have decided 'this is my life'. I am done. These senior people were completely different from those in venture capital. That world is full of eccentrics, whereas senior bankers are often crushingly boring, I find. They seem to have lost interest in anything that doesn't help them meet the demands of their jobs. Sometimes I got to look at their CVs and it would list among their hobbies 'reading French literature' or 'mountain climbing' and it was hard to see when they had any time or inclination to indulge. Such a CV item is purely performative. Even these fabulous holidays can be like that: look at me, being successful on this fabulous holiday. I have been in this job for eight years and in the industry for about 10. I have not experienced sexism or racism beyond the occasional idiot. It's such a meritocratic environment, people simply don't care how you look. That's this job at its best, when I find myself in a room with people from every corner of the globe. You hear different accents, different levels of English but even so, people don't even seem to register those different backgrounds anymore. It's really colour blind. It can be hard work and a tough life. Travelling is not glamorous. When I am in Hong Kong I have 10 meetings, go to my hotel and work some more. Yes, it's a five-star hotel. But I am still all alone, eating a sandwich in the bathroom. I suppose only with strip clubbing (which is confined to certain circles of banking) and maternity leave there is a very clear gender divide. This job is not like teaching, where you can step out and back in with relative ease. If you are on maternity leave, somebody has to be trained to fill in for you, especially if you have a complicated job that took years of training and experience. When you come back, you need to be retrained because so many things will have changed. Now if you then announce after six months you're pregnant again, how do you expect a manager to react? A colleague was offered and took $1m to leave, after she announced her second pregnancy. The organisation simply couldn't cope with having to train another substitute, then after four months taking her back and getting her updated again with everything that had changed in the meantime. It wasn't about the money, the firm was losing so much more through the disruption. I am single now but I find that working in finance is not a downside when dating. Men tend to assume you are of reasonable intelligence and not a pushover. Men who work in finance may get a girl because they make a lot of money, but it doesn't work the other way round. Some of my male friends don't take it well, which they tend to express in an indirect, passive-aggressive way. When I have to cancel because of work, they paint me as this Cruella de Vil money-obsessed creature. It's all done in a jokey, teasing kind of way, but underneath there's something more sinister going on. 'Did you kill any interns today?' and that sort of thing. They go on about how they don't make a lot of money and this is a conscious choice on their part – implying that they could easily do the work I do, they have simply opted not to. I spent a great deal of the money I made on my family. So it's not like I am rubbing it in their faces. But if you can afford something and they can't, it makes some people very uncomfortable, insecure even. There's this paradox with some of my friends: they accept me having a high-powered well-paying job, but I have to seem to be suffering for it. So I cannot also have time to see them and travel and have a work-life balance and also enjoy my job. Some people need to see that you have made a pact with the devil, compromised something. They want me to be one of those lonely career women with nothing in her fridge but one bottle of champagne and a carton of milk, out of date. And then there's the moral grandstanding. You may have this great job that pays really well and which, apparently, you even enjoy. But. You. Are. Evil. And I may be an underpaid teacher. But. I. Am. Good. I have this female colleague at our firm, incredibly bright, really ambitious, partner by the time she was 30, razor sharp. Then I saw her husband and he was typical of the kind of men to marry those high powered women in that industry: what you call a beta-male. He was a bit younger, good-looking, bohemian, hopeless with money, not very hungry for status, when people talk markets he simply tunes out. He loves a family and will push the pram while she is out there doing huge deals. She will come home, all worried and stressed about something, and he'll say: oh sweetie don't you worry about all that, I have found this free open air concert in the park nearby, let's get a bottle of wine … It would appear the typical husband of a female in finance is a grounding force, whereas the typical male banker's wife is an asset; an extension of his desire to project an image of success. You really can't generalise about men in the financial sector. It's too vast, too diverse. But lots of men do spend years of their lives building mathematical models; such an activity must have an impact on them. At some point they become scared of things you can't measure or quantify. Like love. My pay? I make £100,000 a year in salary. There can be a bonus but it's not factored in. In banking when you don't get any bonus, it's really a message that says: go! In venture capital a bonus is really what the word originally meant; something extra. Finally there can be 'carry' when we've had a good exit. On average bonus plus carry comes to another £50,000, in a good year they can be multiples of your salary many times over. But as I said, it can also be zero."

Voices of finance: fundraiser at sharia-compliant venture capital firm | Joris Luyendijk | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

This is rapidly becoming my favourite thing in the Graun, even though the comments pages inevitably find a million things to loathe about the people they interview.

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What's so intereresting? Just that they are relatively rich?

Peering into other people's lives is always interesting, especially when they belong to a world that you sort-of know but not really.

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Fair enough. I just don't find it any more interesting tham any other role I guess.

Well it helps that everyone hates them at the moment too. If everyone hated icecream men it'd be interesting to get their point of view too.

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What Z said. Also, I find it interesting that, since everyone is telling me how the City is full of misogynist racists, two 30something females have confirmed what I told you: It's a pretty meritocratic environment and most females are actually respected if and when they contribute.

The only exceptions being sales. In sales, a pretty female face helps and they do get recruited on that basis. Although they'll also have the diplomas.

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

What Z said. Also, I find it interesting that, since everyone is telling me how the City is full of misogynist racists, two 30something females have confirmed what I told you: It's a pretty meritocratic environment and most females are actually respected if and when they contribute.

Shrug. It pretty much read to me like they were confirming the criticism. And they're wrong to say its just like anywhere else - thats the same fake macho bullshit.

It's the idea that it's possible and desirable that business culture should be feminised that's bullshit. It's not the Evil Wombyn-Hating Patriarchy that makes success difficult, it's life. You don't catch lionesses out on the savannah discussing solutions that'll take everyone's input into account in a nurturing and responsible way over tea and red velvet cupcakes, for the very good reason that the first one who tried it would end up dead. Some shit you've just got to be tough for. If you don't like it go and be a housewife.

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Yes well the irony is strong. hunting groups like that are HIGHLY cooperative, becuase if fthe guys backing you up don't do what you planned to do you;re in the (lion's) shit.

This has nothing to do with "feminsing" workplaces; that's just misogystic shit. It's merely being equally respectful of all your people, which is really the minimum anyone should be able to expect. Yes, some shit you've got to be tough for, and apparently treating women as equals is something the city isn't tough enough to handle.