Morocco sounds like a great place to start a career, but when Fabien Oreve got his first job in 1994, he wound up in Casablanca, where he worked at a modest stockbrokers.
The firm’s business was flourishing after the country’s biggest firms had been listed and the market modernised.
As history shows, this is a big undertaking in a developed market, but this was a major shock in an emerging country.
It could have been the end for him, but instead, this trial by ordeal has coloured and influenced Oreve’s whole career and it gave him knowledge of financial markets from a back-office standpoint. It also allowed him to prove he was highly adaptable, dealing with a new environment in a different culture with new technologies.
From here, he moved to a French stockbroker handling securities lending in a collateral management position before taking an opportunity to go to the front office.
Here he helped create a program trading division, armed with no experience but his technical background and an ability to manage data.
Oreve has built a multi¬asset desk that is also experimenting with traders crossing into other areas – for instance equity into fixed income – but with certain safeguards.
Done to improve capacity, it has had the effect of improving working relationships as the traders interact more with each other, according to Oreve.
”Our productivity ratio has grown amazingly and I’m very proud of that, but it’s reached a point where we have to hire,” says Oreve.
He says more bodies are needed “to absorb the flow”, carry out transaction cost analysis and enhance relations with brokers. He sees this as key to Candriam’s development in the new post-Mifid II world.