2018 Summer Intern

The Internship Offices Network is pleased to announce the selected McGill student for the 2018 summer internship at CIBC Hong Kong, and the recipient of the McGill Undergraduate Internship Fund, Florian Wong.

Florian Wong, BCom Finance and Information Systems

Florian is pursuing a Bachelor of Commerce at the Desautels Faculty of Management. Impassioned by the inner workings of capital markets, he is excited about his internship with CIBC Capital Markets at the Hong Kong office. He holds great anticipation for the opportunity to leverage past experiences and apply theories from the classroom to face real-world situations. Florian is thus determined and looks forward to the steep learning curve.

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I am a third year student at McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management, majoring in Finance with a concentration in Information Systems, and this past summer I pursued an internship at CIBC in Hong Kong where I obtained paramount exposure to the financial sector and valuable experience that I will carry into my career.

CIBC, which stands for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, is one of Canada’s Big Five Banks. It was formed in 1961 through the largest merger between chartered banks in Canadian history, a merger between the Canadian Bank of Commerce and the Imperial Bank of Canada. The bank has three strategic units, with the Capital Markets division (commonly referred to as “World Markets”) being one of them – this is where I interned.

Working at a Canadian Investment Bank in Hong Kong proved to be a very refreshing adventure; the work environment was an absolute cultural melting pot and the deals we worked on were impactful.

This summer was meant to be a period of exploration. Having previously interned in real estate advisory and at a proprietary day-trading firm, I was hoping to immerse myself in a sell-side role where I would get to experience different asset classes in order to explore what I would enjoy most. It turns out that my internship at CIBC Hong Kong was the perfect blend of opportunities as I had the chance to work with both the Global Markets (Interest Rate S&T) department as well as the Investment Banking (diversified industrials M&A) department; both of which were sell-side roles but dealt with deal types of completely different time horizons.

I began my first week at the Interest Rates S&T desk, and must admit that I was slightly dazed in awe and excitement to be able to work alongside professionals on multi-billion dollar deals – I’ve never seen that many zeros in my life! Fortunately, the Executive Director was really kind to me and took me under his wing for the duration of the internship. Colleagues from the department became great mentors and eventually lunch buddies, and in general people in the office were very welcoming, easy to talk to, and willing to help once they had some free time.

My role as an intern varied from project to project, but often revolved around PowerPoint and Excel. In Global Markets, my role was predominantly modelling-based as I have some knowledge of VBA and was able to improve a few of their existing pricing and hedging models. A highlight that I am proud of was being able to upgrade the interest rate swaps hedging calculator; which according to one trader, increased efficiencies by over ~90% – or decreased iterations from 40+ inputs to just 4-6. This was achieved through integrating possible leg combinations into a database where additional bond information would be pulled from Bloomberg, as well as adding drop-down options that adapts to inputs. Additionally, I was also delighted to learn the Asia IRD report I worked on made its way up to Toronto Headquarters for review, and they decided that looking ahead, it would be used as the template for quarterly updates. On the other end, the work at the rotation in Investment Banking was a lot heavier on research and creating pitch books. Given the nature of the job, I had the chance to deepen my understanding of a few of the industries we worked closely with and am also a lot more in-tune with the markets.

I am really grateful to have worked within smaller teams as I was given a lot of responsibility and trust. Overall, I really loved the nature of work I was exposed to across both departments, and look forward to engaging myself in similar work upon graduation.

Looking back, I realized that I learned just as much outside the office as inside the office just through conversations over coffee, dinners, and cocktails. Interestingly, it was also through a conversation that my rotation to the Investment Banking department became possible, to which I am very thankful to the MDs who made it possible and all my mentors and colleagues who made my journey a seamless experience. Altogether, I had a great time in Hong Kong. It’s a dynamic city with low tax-rate, great food, and incredible nightlife (if you finish work on time)!

Florian Wong's colleagues communicating details of a trade.

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