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Career conversations: Helping clients achieve their investment goals

Sandra
Published 6 Feb 2024

Over her career, Sandra Cafazzo, CFA, has enjoyed roles in banking, portfolio management and sales. What hasn’t changed is the importance she attaches to her CFA® charter and the knowledge it has given her. Watch Sandra’s career story. 

    For me, the CFA® Program is really about knowledge - knowledge around the investment management industry, knowledge around ethics. It is globally recognized gold standard that really empowers you to pursue careers internationally, but also really pivots towards the areas that interest you the most.  

    My name is Sandra Cafazzo, I'm Head of Institutional Business at Zurich Invest. And at the same time, I'm also President of the Board at the CFA® Society Switzerland, where I really interact with the CFA® community.

    So in my case, very early on, I was fascinated by financial markets, by share prices going up and down. It was still in the days where you would look in the newspapers once a day to find the closing price, so, a very different world.

    But I knew early on, macroeconomics was also something that interested me, and hence I felt that investment management, back then, for me, was working at a bank, that would really cater to my interests.

    So my career evolved over time. When I started out, I went into investment management, portfolio management and really enjoyed that for many, many years. But over time, I realized that I wanted to be closer to the client, really advising the client, also having that interaction with the client. And so, after around six or seven years, I really started moving more towards the client-advising part and sales part.

    My first exposure to the CFA Program was really through CFA® charterholders. I worked with quite a lot of CFA® charterholders, and I was always really impressed by the expertise and knowledge that they had, and really strived for that kind of expertise myself.

    So there are different elements that really attracted me towards the CFA® certification. One is definitely the global recognition and the very clear standard. It's the breadth and the depth of the knowledge that you gain. And, in hindsight, I didn't realize that back then. It goes beyond just the three letters and doing the exams. It's really about the community that you engage up on afterwards, the network that you have access to, the continued learning because it's a learning process throughout your career that CFA(Program) and the CFA® Societies really support and empower you to do.

    Nowadays that I'm in sales, it really helps me to understand the client better, to be a trusted advisor, really a sparring partner that understands their challenges, helps them to translate their goals into real investments. How can they go about maybe their ESG values? How can they decarbonize their portfolio? What are the different options, advantages and disadvantages? So it really empowers me to much better service our clients.

    It is really a significant investment time-wise, but it is really worth it. That global community that you tap into with your CFA® charter is really of immense value, and it’s also what I really enjoy as part of the community. Exactly this diversity of the community that it goes beyond borders, that it is something you identify with globally, wherever you go, wherever your career journey may take you, whether it's Asia, it's US, it's London, but it is really everywhere that community and you can engage with it.