Imagine your journey into your current job. Did you have to go through multiple interviews? Perhaps even apply for dozens of roles before you snared the right one?
If so, you might benefit from a different approach – at least, according to the experiences of one very successful figure in the finance world.
Yana Shkrebenkova is the chief executive at Revolut Trading UK, the investment product arm of the company you’ll know from app stores, adverts and quite possibly your own accounts.
At Exeter University by aged 16 before undertaking a degree there, Ms Shkrebenkova had worked with or alongside Deutchse Bank, Accenture, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs before Revolut. The sum total of job applications made during her career sits at zero.
“I took advice from all my lecturers to build your network very seriously – my first job found me rather than I found the job. People I studied with referred me to Deutsche Bank,” she explained to The Independent.
“None of my jobs I’ve applied for. It’s all about network. You build it not just at work but through people you work with and all the referrals happened through people who worked with me or for me.”
Deutsche was only the beginning of the theme; working alongside employees from Accenture led to another job offer while industry upheaval beset colleagues and the wider firm alike. Then, along came a new name on the banking scene.
“Revolut came up. Somehow it found me, I was approached for the role and I’m not going to lie – when I saw CEO on the job spec I was surprised, but the recruiter was convinced, the interviewers were convinced and, by the end of the process, so was I,” she explains. The CEO title is one of two parts to the day job: Yana is also head of wealth and trading at the company, bringing the features most users actually interact with.
It’s a long way from her original tasks of reading company reports or helping large firms with digital transformation, but speaking with her, it doesn’t take long to realise that new horizons are there to be embraced, not avoided.
“I’m the most curious person you’ll probably ever meet and it drove me to new challenges. Even when I had no clue what it was I took it on,” she says. “I just jump into some opportunity and learn. Looking into something new, diving into something new…I love it.”
That’s not to say working in finance has been routine or easy all the time.
Ms Shkrebenkova isn’t afraid to acknowledge that part of it has been down to her gender and her success – an in industry where change has come slowly.
Being the only female on the team was a regular theme early in her career, while she also pointed out that once senior positions came her way she began to “realise what those articles were about” – assumptions and comments were both made, where previously male colleagues had been helpful. “I had to deal with a lot of that. I had to put pressure on myself to be better and better and not care what anyone said.
“But change is coming. I see increasing amounts of women in these rooms, at startups and venture events there are a lot more women being founders, CEOs and investors – this is great,” she points out.
Women working within is only one side of the story though in finance terms. The other is in what women do with their money.
In case you haven’t heard, data shows they earn better returns than men with their investments.
Revolut’s data on the subject led Ms Shkrebenkova to partner with Female Invest; ripping up the social media “girl math” tag, the idea was not just to embrace the numbers but to empower more to begin their journey of wealth-building.
“Girl math is understood differently by different people. A lot of people in the UK use it as a joke when things go wrong so no, I do not like that connotation,” she said.
“For me from Russia, I had to ask the copy guys what was wrong – I thought girl math was good thing. So it was really refreshing to see women doing well in investments…but it’s not a new thing. But it was very exciting to see that in real data and I wanted to see what could we do to empower more women.
“What i see in new investors there’s a lack of fear, a lack of knowledge in terms of the jargon in the industry for decades destracting people and putting boundaries in. I wanted to reduce those boundaires and I guess if you use the products, we’re trying to make it easier and put as much information to allow people to learn and make decisions.
“That message empowers them, saying you’re doing really well as a cohort.”
Reducing language barriers, giving examples and increasing accessibility to investing isn’t just a women-specific thing; if the UK government are serious about developing a culture of investing then education has to be far better for everyone, and start far earlier.
For companies like Revolut, the challenge has to be about how to contribute to that discussion and education without appearing – or better yet, without being – self serving over the matter. After all, they are an investment platform, among other things.
Ms Shkrebenkova gives the example that some people already invest without knowing it, due to their pensions, and speaks of “learning on the job” in investing: seeing when a company is in the news, what affects share prices and more.
As for her own investment ethos? Naturally, it follows that curiosity approach which dictates other areas of her professional career: what she sees, learns, takes interest in and understands of its place in the world.
And, like investing, her career is a journey, with a chief exec role just another successful step – with more to take clearly still ahead.
“Not many people ask what’s next because CEO feels like the end,” she ends our time talking by pointing out. “But I’m early in my career, I could potentially go into academia and do research. I could teach students because the energy and questions they give are a really rewarding part of this job.”
