You must dare to step outside your comfort zone
Ida Faber started her journey with SEB at the bank’s foreign exchange department in Gothenburg. Today, she works in the New York office offering risk advisory services to some of the largest financial institutions in the world.
When Ida Faber gets to the office in the morning, she never knows what she will be doing that day. In her role as Advisory Sales within FICC Markets, she lives with the market and the news flow and is continually updated about what is happening in the world. “I like the excitement this brings. I also enjoy the freedom of the role and that no one is telling me how I should sell the products. I can really run my own race.”
Why did you start working with FX?
“I started at SEB’s FX desk in Gothenburg when I took part in the bank’s International Trainee programme. I had no idea how complex – and fun – this area was. Four years later, I am basically working with the same thing – but in the USA instead of Sweden.”
How does SEB help you to develop?
“When you work with the market, it’s really busy some days while on others nothing much happens at all. Then it is important for me to use my time for something productive, for example a training course, getting an extra licence or taking part in some internal development project. There, I really feel that I get support from my managers who encourage me to do what I find fun and are open to discussing my ideas. Ever since I joined SEB, I have felt that they have encouraged me to constantly develop and take on new challenges.”
What do you personally do to develop in the right direction?
“I make sure to tell my managers what I want to do. After all, it’s not something anyone can guess, and it’s important to talk openly about what you want. I have also forced myself to do things that are really outside my comfort zone. You have to do that in order to develop. One example is when I took on the task of building a business intelligence interface for our sales organisation. We generate any amount of data every day and this was a way to make the data readily available and easy to consume. Now we can get information about customer trading patterns and, among other things, work more proactively with our advisory services.”
What made you dare to step outside your comfort zone?
“I have been good at finding people within the organisation who have become my mentors and whom I can contact at any time of the day if I need help or advice. Then there is a high tolerance for failure within SEB which makes you dare more and continue to be inquisitive.”
What do you do to stimulate your curiosity?
“I am greatly inspired by New York as a city and by the people here. But sometimes I also need a break from it all. Then I usually go away and hike in the mountains.”