Nicolas B.

Nicolas is a Chartered Accountant and has more than 15 years’ experience in finance in various industries including manufacturing, retailing, textile, hotel and leisure, oil and energy, and investment banking. He specialises in training key finance skills such as financial and management accounting, valuation, financial modelling and analysis. Nicolas studied accountancy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and qualified as a Chartered Accountant after completing his auditing articles with Arthur Andersen in 2000. During his studies, he was involved in tutoring managerial accounting and finance, and whilst working for Arthur Andersen, he also planned and provided internal technical training courses. Nicolas started his professional career as an external auditor at Arthur Andersen in South Africa, where he was involved in the audit of various manufacturing, retail and textile corporations, including the Seardel group listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, as well as some hotel and leisure and precision engineering corporations. In 2001, Nicolas moved to London, where he initially worked as a finance and management consultant at Shell International, assisting internal clients on capital investment decisions and facilitating financial analysis. During this period, he was also a technical consultant on financial modelling. He later moved on to Shell Europe Oil Products, where he was in charge of financial analysis and coordinating financial planning. In 2004, Nicolas made the move to the investment banking industry, working for a number of large corporations such as UBS, ABN AMRO and Commerzbank. He was working as a product controller in the middle office and was responsible for reporting to the front office, as well as advising on risks, provisions, pricing and valuation. Nicolas worked with a number of divisions and had exposure to various products including credit fixed income, FX, asset-backed securities, credit derivatives and structured products. Since 2013, Nicolas has been focusing on providing training services to corporate and banking clients in Europe, Asia, Africa and the middle east. These have been a mixture of ad hoc training courses and graduate programmes. He has also taught financial accounting at Université Paris Dauphine in French and English.