Claire Carson

What do you do and where do you go when you’ve earned most of the proverbial T-shirts in life? If you are driven, curious and fearless, you could give up your high-flying career in the UK and return to your roots in Africa. Why? Because Africa is the continent of endless opportunities, where the need for infrastructure, banking, education, transportation and energy is at an all-time high. This is exactly what Claire Carson did. An advocate of what she calls Brave Capital, she is the latest recruit to join the elite RMB Class Of Programme, and she has big plans to move and shake things up here.

Marketing meets banking

Several degrees and many accolades in hand, Claire more than fits the profile of a typical RMB Class Of. What makes Claire’s profile even more ‘apt’ is the fact that she has no background in corporate and investment banking. This is exactly what the founder of the prestigious RMB Class Of Programme, Paul Harris, had in mind when he founded the Programme 26 years ago. The very philosophy he founded the Programme on was to bring street-smart, lateral thinkers with no background in banking into the bank. In fact, the more unusual their work experience and degrees are, the better. Enters Claire.

After leaving Stellenbosch with an undergrad in Management Sciences, Claire kicked off her career at the Red & Yellow Advertising School of Logic & Magic, graduating second in her class.  She spent almost seven years in London at leading global organisations where she focused on digital marketing and played an integral role in implementing next generation technology projects. She then moved back to SA to pursue an MBA. It was during this time that she started to see the art of the possible and proved just how quickly she could move up the learning curve.

Why the radical career change then? Claire points out that “we are at the intersection of one of the most exciting, seismic shifts that the finance world and the world in general has experienced. The accelerating rate of technological change, the digitisation of markets and immense disruption affecting age-old industries is going to punish the complacent and reward the courageous, the positive deviants.” Claire wants to be at the heart of it.  

After returning from an MBA semester at Duke University in the USA, she worked with a fintech start-up focused on building financial resilience in South Africa. During this experience, her need to find opportunities to bring finance, technology and people together to make a difference, became even stronger.  

Opportunities for Africa

While First World countries benefit from ‘big capital’ chasing big ideas, as Claire puts it, they serve a competitive universe of opportunities driven by wants. “Africa in turn has the opposite scenario where the number of opportunities, driven by needs, seemingly outweigh the capital to make it happen, despite having the ideas and the passionate people behind them. Africa needs a more established ecosystem which facilitates the flow of more ‘brave’ capital to build infrastructure, schools, roads etc. and to connect capital with ideas that matter. This is where big corporate and investment banks can play a big part,” says Claire.

A series of fortuitous and seemingly unconnected events led Claire to the RMB Class Of Programme. Looking back at her career journey to date, she can see how her alma mater’s motto has been brought to life: where the worlds of tech, finance and marketing have collided to bring together logic and magic.

Claire’s first stop as an RMB Class Of is in the bank’s Global Markets Electronic Execution division where she is currently learning how the bank’s trading desks in Johannesburg, Africa and India function.

The future of banking

So, what can corporate and investment banks do better to market themselves – especially given the huge influx of fintech start-ups that are entering the market that banks used to monopolise? Claire believes that now, more than ever, banks need to gain a much deeper understanding of their client DNAs, have the ability to pre-empt business needs, and the agility to adapt their offerings with rapidly changing customer needs.

Claire says there is no reason why investment banks cannot adopt similar models to those being used by the Amazons, Alibabas and Airbnbs of the world. “While their customers differ, the same principles of delivering exceptional, personalised experiences and customer-driven value propositions, should dictate how banks reinvent themselves. Finance and technology are going to become even greater partners as enablers of business,” adds Claire.

Courageous step

While it’s only been three weeks since Claire joined the Programme, she knows that she has made the right decision. The Programme opened the door for her to join a corporate and investment bank – an opportunity that she believes would’ve been otherwise difficult to achieve given the fact that she has no background in finance. She loves the bank’s people-centric culture, the entrepreneurial spirit and the fact that the company promotes a culture of forward thinking.

Claire has met many diverse people on her travels and throughout her international career, but it is the people closest to her whose opinions she values most. She recalls wise words of wisdom that a close friend gave her just before she was about to make an important career choice: “If you don’t have clarity, at least have courage.” Claire had both clarity and courage when she joined the RMB Class Of Programme.