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A Global Perspective
Jackie (Davis) Brady '89 pulls no punches when assessing the current pool of college graduates seeking employment in the banking industry. "Too much of education at higher levels runs the risk of becoming too technical," she claims. "We run the risk of becoming one large vocational school where everyone's just taking accounting." Brady, vice president for Nomura Securities International, is not spouting theory. She sees the shortcomings every day in the students she recruits and hires. "They come in having spent all their four years doing accounting or discounting cash flows," she observes.
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What gets missed in such an approach, according to Brady, is the ability to think and critique, and therefore the ability to write and articulate. "In order to write really well," she explains, "you've got to be able to think, to dissect an idea or opinion into its composite parts, to challenge the ones that you may agree or disagree with, to really hold an opinion, and make that come across verbally in writing. All of the accounting classes in the world won't teach you that."
Brady, who recently joined a task force appointed by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to improve the City University of New York, jokes that her comments probably sound elitist. But their implications, she believes, are quite serious. "If you can't write and articulate, you can't lead. We have an inordinate amount of people who are trained to be employees, but few who are appropriately trained to think and articulate well enough to lead them." She also recognizes how fortunate she was that Haverford is "incredible" at providing the training she sees lacking in so many undergraduate programs. "Haverford makes it relatively integral to who you are and how you operate going forward," she explains, "such that you have the luxury of being able to take things like that for granted."
Brady is living proof of the contention that liberal arts grads possess skills that allow them to grow and adapt well beyond the boundaries of their undergraduate training. A native of Barbados and a political science major at Haverford, she admits that she found the idea of business "boring," and instead envisioned a career in international politics. She in fact passed up a Prudential management training program after graduating to pursue what she calls "fun things" -- a master's degree at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). "I thought I'd end up working for the United Nations, or the Inter-American Development Bank," she recalls, "something that has a greater pull on ongoing diplomacy work, where politics actually comes into play on a regular basis."
Only after her arrival at SAIS and her exposure to "the practical way they teach economics" did Brady realize what she calls "the true benefit of being able to have economics experience to all these jobs I thought I was going to go do." Although an internship with Price Waterhouse's international consulting group, which included projects with the World Bank and the Agency for International Development, presented her with a career opportunity in her chosen field, her SAIS professors suggested that she obtain some more applied finance experience before joining the Price Waterhouse staff. So Brady headed off to J.P. Morgan to join what she calls "the most renowned training program on the Street."
And she's been on the Street, so to speak, ever since. "I thought I'd get two years of training and then go back to consulting where people were doing the cool work," Brady remembers. "I never thought I'd be in it for a seven year horizon." Her reservation was that Wall Street, fresh off its heady success in the 80s, would be filled with "relatively narrow people, 'nerds' who had done finance since they were two." What she found, at Morgan at least, was a lot of people like herself: "history majors, choreography majors -- a whole bunch of people who, if you'd just pulled out a transcript, wouldn't have shown any predisposition to finance whatsoever. That was really attractive to me."
In her early days at Morgan, Brady witnessed the birth of a new financial market-- commercial mortgage-backed securities -- that allowed her to integrate her experience in international policy with her burgeoning interest in finance and economics. At the time, Asian investors were "taking a bath," as Brady describes it, as the bottom fell out of the real estate market. She and her colleagues at Morgan worked with Asian clients to bundle their mortgages and other longer-term loan assets into securities that could be sold in capital markets to raise large amounts of capital very quickly. Since that time, she has continued to work in securitization, and joined Nomura just over a year ago. Her goal is to expand the technology into small and developing countries, helping companies raise capital by securitizing their receivables. "They would benefit even more greatly from this process," she explains, "because they have fewer choices to access capital than the clients with whom I normally deal."
To the uninitiated, the intricacies of securitization may appear impenetrable and intimidating. "My husband still refuses to understand what I do," Brady laughs, "but I could explain it all to him in two minutes. It's actually simple concepts." But to get caught up in the numbers, Brady claims, is to overlook the lessons of a liberal education. "Doing business is more about making an idea appealing to a client; it includes diplomacy, and the ability to deal with people from various cultures to reach a consensus among them. If you only focus in on the finance," she warns, "you'll never get there."
