BNP Paribas has the fastest growing cash equities business on the street and an unlikely candidate is leading it.
Lindsay Levine, 36 years old, a classical studies major and history buff, wasn't that good at math in school, she recalled. Now she's the managing director and co-head of cross channel sales trading for the Paris-based multinational bank.
How did she get here? A summer internship at Goldman Sachs where she fell in love with the trading floor energy.
"I did well because I wasn't the typical finance major. I thought about things differently. I was thinking about the psychology of trading and other areas outside of math and economics," Levine told American Banker. "And that got some attention as a refreshingly different take on the industry."
From those humble roots, she then led the creation of a new global equities trading business within BNP Paribas after the shutdown and transfer of Deutsche Bank's cash equities business in 2019.
"We had the opportunity to build it from scratch," Levine said. "The question was: How do you create a cash equities business for the future, for the next 10 years, instead of having to work on a system that was built for the last 20 years."
In that transition, Levine and her team did a lot of talking with clients about how they want to be banked going forward, and were able to change systems and processes that were outdated. "It was one of the most exciting and rewarding points of my career," Levine said. "You never have the opportunity to be at a startup when you're at a big bank, but we were at a well-funded startup basically."
Levine used the metaphor of a grocery store: Instead of clients coming in and choosing from the items already stocked, BNP Paribas asked clients what they wanted and then custom-made the inventory. "Our dynamic and responsive mentality to the client's needs and their shifting mentality around trading and liquidity has been a game-changer for us," Levine said.
Levine's team is the largest revenue producer in the cash equities line of business, according to Brian Fagen, head of Cash Equities at BNP Paribas.
"Lindsay was instrumental in the successful transition of the Deutsche Bank platform to BNP Paribas, guiding the rebuild of the trading platform and engaging with clients to facilitate the transition," said Fagen. "Over the past five years, Lindsay has grown into a prominent leader at BNP Paribas, impacting both Global Equities and the larger Global Markets Americas business,"
Watching the growth of the team, the business' revenue and its reach in the market has been truly validating for Levine. But it's not just about the money for her. She's equally as proud of her initiatives to strengthen diversity in BNP Paribas' trading division but also in trading broadly.
Levine co-heads the Women in Trading group at BNP Paribas; is a strong advocate within the Caregivers Employee Resource Group; and is a member of the Women in ETFs industry group. With the firm's newest hire since the business launched three years ago, BNP Paribas has reached parity with its male and female traders.
"I've loved to be not the standard archetype of what you would expect of a traditional trader, and have the metrics to prove myself and produce at this level," she said. "It's important to have a role model; to see is to believe it, to know you can be that too."
