Cracking the securities code

Cracking the securities code

A providential approach to fund management and institutional investment laid the groundwork for Jiralawan Tangitvet's stellar success at KS, though a few dreams were relegated to the back burner along the way.

If Jiralawan Tangitvet hadn't stuck around for three days doing a job she thought she had no stomach for, Kasikorn Securities would have missed the chance to welcome a top female executive into its fold.

Indeed, it should have been easy deciding between swallowing the misery working as a fund manager at Phatra Securities and quitting the job. The watershed moment came when her boss sat her down and convinced her that there could be a silver lining ahead if she was patient enough to try and discover it.

She soldiered on, a decision which was to launch her career, and subsequently her meteoric rise to success, in the capital market.

Mrs Jiralawan, 47, managing director for institutional business and research at Kasikorn Securities (KS), told the Bangkok Post it was ultimately her patience and perseverance that ruled the day.

She started her career as a fund manager at Phatra Securities (before the company split its asset management business and sold it to Kasikorn Asset Management). Afterwards, Mrs Jiralawan moved on to work in institutional sales at CLSA.

Jiralawan Tangitvet, Kasikorn Securities managing director

Mrs Jiralawan was instrumental in driving the company to prominence as a leading foreign broker among institutional Thai customers and creating a sound reputation for Thai institutional investors in Singapore.

But her success was secondary to a sense of apprehension at the very beginning of her career.

Few people know that Mrs Jiralawan harboured a dislike for what she feels is a common character trait of many people in the stock trading business: a propensity to speak in code to communicate information vital to one's work. The code talk was something she encountered first-hand, and with uneasiness, upon seeing her sister recite the periodic table.

But that was the very aspect of stock trading which Mrs Jiralawan found herself having to deal with at Phatra Securities. Needless to say, three days on the job started to feel like an eternity.

"It seemed like everyone there was talking to each other in code, a strange language I totally didn't understand," she says. "My dream was to be an investment banker, but the company placed me in a fund management position."

The despair of doing what Mrs Jiralawan had dreaded made her contemplate throwing in the towel. But her boss gave her advice that would change everything.

He asked her why she planned on giving up on an industry she knew very little about and why she would not hang in there and give it a try.

The questions were soon followed by a new assignment requiring her to delve into customers' portfolios. Starting from the basics, Mrs Jiralawan learned about stock abbreviations, registered capital and outstanding shares, as well as the financial statements that were not altogether foreign to her, given her educational background in accounting.

She visited customers and investment companies to obtain the information needed to do projected financial statements. Her efforts gradually paid dividends as she managed to reconcile the negative perception she originally had of the job.

Mrs Jiralawan says boxing is an exercise that keeps her active and healthy, WISIT THAMNGERN

"I am not the fussy type, but a person committed to delivering on promises," Mrs Jiralawan says.

In 1996, after two years at Phatra Securities, Mrs Jiralawan, who was then 26, found the work a perfect fit for her as she was surrounded by good colleagues in the midst of favourable stock market sentiment -- the Stock Exchange of Thailand was bullish and the property sector was booming. The country's economy was robust, recording years of two-digit annual growth.

But that was not to last. In 1997 the economy collapsed, sending stocks and the financial market to its knees. The Tom Yum Kung financial crisis had begun.

"I can't really describe if it was good or bad starting my career when the SET index was close to a peak, hovering between 1,400 and 1,500 points," Mrs Jiralawan says. "I went through the ups and downs and learned from experiences that were more diverse than today's fund managers have the opportunity to grapple with."

Fund managers in the past handled investments in the money market, bonds and equity, which enabled Mrs Jiralawan to see the whole picture of money and capital markets and the flow of funds between them.

She witnessed interest rate quotes among institutional investors at 17-18%. The giant funds sometimes saw multi-billion-baht movements in a single day in the never-ending quest for higher returns.

Mrs Jiralawan

"Fund managers did that without realising the effects [from the huge money flows]," she says. "We know our duty is to seek returns. We had never seen bankruptcy caused by a lack of liquidity until the crisis hit. It was evident to us that giant companies can fall from a lack of liquidity even if the company's fundamentals are still strong."

The crisis was a painful ethics lesson for fund managers to learn.

As the effects of the financial crisis trickled down, she felt guilty seeing provident funds' net asset value (NAV) take a beating from the equity market crash.

The SET index had dipped below 300 points, which had a devastating effect on many people's savings stashed away in provident funds, though the funds' exposure in stocks had largely been reduced.

Just as Mrs Jiralawan was setting out to raise two sons full-time, fate would see her swing right back to work with a new role at a new company: Kasikorn Securities.

In particular, the meltdown had bitten deep into the provident fund for employees of the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly -- workers who had close to non-existent financial literacy and scant knowledge of equity.

Mrs Jiralawan made certain to answer members' inquiries in layman's terms, slowly and clearly.

She told herself she would not resign from the firm until the provident fund had recouped all the gains that had been wiped out in the crisis.

"We bonded like family, with a sense of responsibility getting me going," she says. "Provident funds don't hold the money of the rich, but of average people who saved it for retirement or for when they lost their jobs."

Mrs Jiralawan resigned as fund manager in 2004, when the SET index had bounced back to 750 points.

"Tobacco customers said I may not have been the fund manager who delivered the highest returns on their investment, but at least I was sincere," she says. "They felt my sincerity and openness and knew that what I did would not harm them [financially]."

Her eyes teared up and her voice trembled when she was reminded of the day she said goodbye to her customers.

Mrs Jiralawan had planned to leave her job to start a family, but her dream of being a full-time housewife was cut short when CLSA Securities, the US broker, approached her to help build its sales team and institutional customer base. She accepted the job in institutional sales.

But institutional sales is worlds apart from fund management. "We had to deal with fund managers who used to be our competitors," Mrs Jiralawan says.

The ex-fund manager's strength was her awareness of customers' needs and the ability to talk with them in breadth and depth about marketing strategy, rather than reciting everything from paper. The customer base for Thai institutional clients grew fast.

Jiralawan Tangitvet WISIT THAMNGERN

"The key secret for a fund manager and sales manager is the need to look at the real market and decide whether the situation is favourable to invest or whether it is too risky," Mrs Jiralawan says. "What sets fund and sales managers apart is their power over the decision to invest. With sales, I provided consultation but had no responsibility over the money being invested. I had to convince customers to trust me and buy the product."

After 10 years of work, a question popped up in her mind about whether Mrs Jiralawan should stay the course and devote herself to her career, or if she should devote more of her time to her personal life and family.

She decided to step back from work to spend time on herself. She signed up for a yoga class and took up boxing, which kept her active and healthy. At the same time, she managed her own investment portfolios for seven months, which was her longest break from office life.

Just as Mrs Jiralawan was setting out to raise her two sons full-time, fate would see her swing right back to work, this time with a Thai company.

In 2014, KS courted her, offering a managing director position. In the end, she stepped up to the plate.

"I want to see good Thai brokers go institutional because I grew from an institutional background," she says. "Since foreign brokers had grown through working with Thai employees, why couldn't Thai brokers do the same?"

The challenges faced by a KS managing director involved catering to institutional customers and capitalising on the company's research to play an aggressive role in that regard.

KS is strong in retail banking, as well as research for the segment. But research for institutional customers was not as well-known, as the bank had already terminated its research partnership with Macquarie Securities two years back.

"Our mission is to bring in specialists," Mrs Jiralawan says. "Kasikorn is one of Thailand's largest banks. We need to know Thailand well. The foreigners who want to ask about [financial issues] in Thailand must come to KS, the same way people wanting to know about [finance in] Japan must approach Nomura Securities, and those wanting information in Switzerland need to contact UBS."

She says creating the brand "made in Thailand" is significant for the future, as market demand for specialists is constantly on the rise.

KS just signed a contract with Jefferies, an American global investment bank and institutional securities firm, to provide KS with research for the company's customers. Jefferies, in turn, will share revenue on research use with KS.

Mrs Jiralawan is also bound by a personal quest to groom a young generation of staff loyal to the organisation. That goal is intended to support and sustain the company's growth over the next four to five years in an industry rife with headhunters.

"Human resources are at the heart of securities and fund management," she says. "Without good staff, the business will only have its exterior. This profession is stressful, facing changes every day. We need to build a corporate culture where people love what they do and feel like a family."

Mrs Jiralawan says creating quality human resources is the best way to pay back the industry -- and one of the factors that pulled her back into the securities business.

She says there's no telling when she will retire and finally be able to live her dream of being a full-time mother and wife.

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