This is an edited transcript of our podcast episode with Christian Hille, the General Manager and Head of Wealth Management at Fürstlich-Castell’sche Bank (FCB) in Germany. We discussed the dramatic changes in investment efficient frontiers, the bet way to think about risk management, how to access private equity, and much more. While we have tried to make the transcript as accurate as possible, if you do notice any errors, let me know by email.

Christian’s Background & Career Path

Bilal Hafeez (00:02:16):

So welcome Christian to the podcast show, it's great to have you on.

Christian Hille (00:02:21):

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Bilal. I'm very pleased to be here and great opportunity to exchange ideas and provide my view as well.

Bilal Hafeez (00:02:27):

Great. And Christian normally before I start the more meaty part of a conversation I do like to ask my guests something about their background. So obviously now you're the general manager of a prestigious private bank in Germany, but you've had a windy route to where you are now. So maybe you could tell us a bit about how you got to where you are? Maybe you could start with what you did at university and then what happened afterwards?

Christian Hille (00:02:50):

Yeah, I did actually start in physics. I come from natural science, and that has some probably relation to what we're going to talk about in a minute, about COVID crisis. I studied physics and almost accidentally came into finance. I wanted to do a PhD but somebody told me about the famous auction house book. I read it, was interested in auctions, and I did one application to a consultancy at the time. It was Arthur Andersen, and they were looking for quantitative people and so I thought okay, might I send in an application? And it was to my surprise, actually taken, and then I spent four years at Arthur Andersen basically, together with a couple of other people, setting up their financial markets practice. We were doing auction pricing, implementing risk systems and risk models and so forth.