Miya was 26 and living in London as a South African sales specialist on the emerging-markets desk for Deutsche Bank when her work-hard, party-hard lifestyle was interrupted by the global recession of 2008. She recalls the time as one of the most frightening of her life.
“I sat on the trading desks and there were about 800 people altogether. It was like a factory – rows and rows of people working for the European desk, the American desk and the emerging-market desk, with everyone gunning for the same clients,” she says. “People would go to all lengths to be the go-to person for clients. It was incredibly aggressive.”
She’d been working for Deutsche Bank for four years, having joined in a “menial” database management role after graduating with a BSc in finance and accounting. She says she consciously accelerated her career with the help of a sponsor in the form of then CEO Murray Winckler.
“When working in an environment like this, it’s really important to create a network of support for yourself. Having a senior sponsor is critical because when things get really tough, you need to know that someone’s backing you from the top. We don’t survive on islands,” she says.
After Miya’s stint as a research analyst in Johannesburg, she moved to London in 2006 to work in equity sales during an indulgently bullish market. At the time, the city was notorious for its “Wolf of Wall Street” party culture. “Those first few months were tough. I’d walk into the office just before 6am, so I was the first to arrive and the last to leave because I had nobody to go home to. And as I walked, there would be bankers stumbling out of pubs. It was a culture shock,” she says.
Two years later, the situation turned on its head. “We had Lehman Bros crashing and half the banks being nationalised; I had a lot of friends in the industry who lost their jobs. And as London’s full of non-Londoners, many of them had to go home to their respective countries. So Canary Wharf, which was actually an extension of the financial district, where all the apartments were built, became a ghost town.”
However, her own job survived the tumult and with a new marriage and a son who was born in 2010, she decided to move back to Johannesburg in 2011 and remain on Deutsche Bank’s equity sales desk. Two years later, she was appointed co-head of the sales desk, collating research and creating investment ideas for clients.
The post Powerhouse: Yolanda Miya appeared first on DESTINY Magazine.