Product Development Associate
Symbiotics, Switzerland

Symbiotics is the leading market access platform for impact investing in emerging and frontier markets, offering market research, investment advisory and asset management services. We are regulated by FINMA, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority and our daughter company Symbiotics (UK) Ltd has an investment firm license from the FCA in the UK. Symbiotics currently employs 160 people and is headquartered in Geneva, with further offices in Zurich, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Mexico City, Singapore and Cape Town. Since 2004, we have invested over USD 5bn in more than 400 microfinance institutions across around 80 emerging and frontier markets, working with more than 30 investment funds and many institutional investors.

We are a fast-growing, market-leading company, offering a dynamic work environment in the growing impact investment space. Our people are our biggest competitive advantage.

We believe that in order to recruit the best professionals all applications must be reviewed equally. For this reason, we will not require personal data such as photos, date of birth or gender to be included on CV applications.

You are a Product Development Associate who will support the Head of Product Development Unit (PDU) with all the work related to client onboarding. This starts with support to the pre-sales development (including Due Diligence Questionnaires (DDQ) and Request for Proposals (RFP)) as well as the full onboarding of new mandates (mainly sub-funds) and third party AIFMs. You will also support the sales and client relations team of the Clients Division with different tasks related to the smooth functioning of the team and with ad hoc requests from other units of the Clients Division.

The position is based in our Head office in Geneva, with reporting line to the Head of the Clients division.

Product development to sales and support to in-house products:

• Assist the Project Manager to answer to DDQs and RFPs in coordination with the relationship manager in charge of the client
  
• Assist PDU to reply or redirect questions asked by clients relative to the onboarding process
• Assist PDU in project management: articulate the process involving all internal (our own divisions) and external stakeholders (Client’s various divisions and possible consultants)
• Organize on-site visits for prospects (including due diligence), coordinate agenda and documents together with internal and external stakeholders
• Participate to the update of Symbiotics DDQ, including the track record of our mandates
• Report and ensure proper delivery of material by ad hoc units and consistency across units, with the help of the sales person responsible for the client relationship
• Analyse credit and ESG data providers for fixed income instruments in Emerging and Frontier markets
• Participate in pipeline simulations and portfolio optimization under constraints for our future mandates
• Support the ManCo/AIFM onboarding
• Manage the registration of sub-funds under EU AIFM/Non-EU AIFM regulatory framework
• Manage Mifid II/SFDR regulatory reporting frameworks
• Apply systematically all formatting methodologies for all internal and external documents

Requirements

We are looking for a dynamic and well-organized person who is eager to learn, autonomous, and able to work in a dynamic and challenging environment.

More specifically, you have the following requirements:

• Bachelor or Master degree in Finance, Wealth Management or equivalent qualification
• Prior experience preferably in the finance industry (Private banking, Institutional asset management, etc.)
• You enjoy collaborating with others to reach common goals
• You are comfortable to work in an international and multi-cultural workplace
• You pride yourself in providing a great client experience
• You easily build trust with others by being down to earth, realistic and being open to other perspectives and ideas
• You are adept and agile to perform in a fast-paced environment, and managing competing demands and priorities
• You have a high level of integrity and confidentiality
• You have a good command of Word, Power Point, Excel, R and Python. You also have a good learning ability for other portfolio optimization software and Bloomberg
• You have an interest in impact investing, and you desire to build knowledge of our business and markets
• You are able to work comfortably in both English and French. Other languages such as German would be a plus
• Swiss/EU National or valid Swiss Work Permit is required

Benefits

• The chance to contribute to improving the lives of people in emerging and fr

Job Rewards and Benefits