Can you tell me about your journey into the securities finance industry?
I came into securities finance from outside the usual routes. I started my career in Vietnam as a derivatives market analyst, then came to the UK for an MSc in Finance and Investment, intending to build a career in international markets.
What I did not have was a graduate scheme or a network. The door that opened for me at Mirae Asset Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï was a business support role covering the firm’s finance and operations functions, and I took it. Redesigning one of the firm’s manual processes into a digital one, which nobody had asked me to do, got noticed and led into fixed income settlement. I took over from a colleague with 20 years of fixed income settlement experience who had been in the seat at Mirae for only three months, then I ran the function end-to-end and trained the team members who joined it after me.
When Mirae launched its securities finance and delta one business, I moved onto the desk, and that is where the real story starts. Very early on I was put into a position that went well beyond what my experience covered, at a point when resources were limited. What started as a crisis is now part of the desk’s normal routine — built out with the colleagues who have joined as the business has grown, and with the senior support that got us there. It is still developing, and that is part of what keeps it interesting.
Being on a desk at that stage also meant contributing well beyond daily responsibilities — new products, a widening client base, processes built rather than inherited — and learning far faster than I would have inside an established structure.
As a young professional, what aspects of your role or the industry do you find most exciting?
Everywhere else in the finance world, a trade ends once it is booked and settled. In securities finance it begins there. That single difference is what makes operations both important and genuinely interesting in this market.
With securities finance as the foundation, our desk builds different revenue models on top of it — extending the strategy into delta one through futures or price return swaps, for example — and the trade cycle becomes a sophisticated machine, one with its own complexity, and its own kind of beauty, in execution and monitoring.
Sitting across lending, repo, and delta one on a single desk means I see how those pieces connect rather than one slice of the picture, which is rare this early in a career.
Operations in this market is also where assumptions get tested. Whatever was planned, the process tells you daily whether it actually works. I enjoy being the person who understands that, and who takes the wheel on execution.
The other thing I find exciting is how quickly technology and automation are arriving in exactly this part of the market, largely because there is still so much left to build. Being close to the manual work is what lets you judge which parts are genuinely worth automating. And automation does not remove the people closest to the work: you can only automate, and safely run an automated process for, something you understand deeply.
Many companies offer various training and development opportunities for their employees. How has your company supported your growth?
Mirae has been a meritocracy in the way that matters most early in a career: responsibility came ahead of tenure. I joined in a business support role and became a senior associate on the securities finance and delta one desk within three years, and each of those steps followed work I had already done rather than arriving on a scheduled review cycle.
What has mattered just as much is how seriously the firm takes reinventing itself. We come from one of the largest Korean financial services companies, but the ambition here is to run with a startup’s appetite for growth. When I put an idea forward, I am given the trust and the space to turn it into a real plan and a working process, rather than watching it sit in a queue. That is not something I take for granted, and it is the main reason I have been able to build as much as I have.
The clearest example is the securities finance and delta one business itself. When it launched, I was trusted with operational ownership of a live and growing book rather than a supervised part of one. That is a significant amount of trust to place in someone at my level, and it is the reason I have the breadth of experience I do.
A team this size has also meant direct interaction from very early on — with our chief operating officer and our head of finance, and most importantly with the traders on my own team and the co-heads of the securities finance and delta one business. I learned how the business actually works by sitting close to the people making those decisions.
The firm has supported formal development too, including my CISI UK Financial Regulation certification. But the most valuable thing is being given real scope, and being backed while I grew into it.
What misconceptions about working in the financial industry have you encountered, and how do you address these challenges?
The first is that operations is administration — that post-trade work is process-following, and the judgement and the interesting parts happen elsewhere.
The reality is different. Designing a reconciliation across a multi-product book is an intuitive and intriguing problem to solve. Turning a trade idea into something that actually happens is an orchestration job, closer to directing from a script the desk hands you. Operations does not stand at the front line, but it gets the full picture — from the original idea through to realised P&L — and the privilege of watching a design you planned come into play.
The second is the perception that finance in London is closed to you unless you arrive through a particular route: the right university, the right graduate scheme, the right network, or having grown up here.
I came from Vietnam with none of that and started small. I am genuinely grateful for the opportunities I was given, and I know good timing played its part. But what mattered just as much was curiosity about what could be done differently, and anticipating what would be needed before it was asked for. Being the least experienced person in the room is only awkward at the start, and it is also the fastest position to learn from — the discomfort is short, and what you take from it lasts. The industry is more open than it looks from the outside, but you do have to ask the right questions and put the work in.
What advice do you have for other young professionals aspiring to pursue a career in your industry?
Learn the whole trade lifecycle, not just your slice of it. The knowledge of what happens either side of your desk compounds much faster than depth in a single task. Take the unglamorous job if it is in the right building. Proximity beats title early on.
And the moment you notice something being done manually and repetitively, learn enough to automate part of it. Nobody will ask you to, and it is the fastest way to be seen.
Looking ahead, where do you see yourself in the next five years in terms of your career goals and aspirations?
I want to go deeper in securities finance and delta one operations, and in the chain between operations, the desk, and risk.
Over time I would like to move from running operating models to designing them, especially for businesses growing faster than their infrastructure. That is a common position in this market and one I have lived through. It is a hard experience to acquire deliberately, and I would like to put it to use somewhere it counts.
I also want to keep building automation capability, and take it from tools I build myself to processes an entire team can run. The value is not the tool — it is making a process survive without the person who designed it.
Beyond the specifics, I would like to still be in securities finance in five years. It is a market that rewards people who understand how the pieces fit together, and I am nowhere near done learning how they do.
Thanh Nguyen
Thanh Nguyen is a senior associate in securities finance and delta one operations at Mirae Asset Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï (UK) in London, where she works on end-to-end reconciliation and supports daily operations across securities lending, repo, and delta one. She began her career in Vietnam across credit analysis, brokerage, and derivatives market analysis, before moving to the UK for an MSc in Finance and Investment at Loughborough University.
She also holds a BSc in Corporate Finance and the CISI UK Financial Regulation certificate. Outside of work, Nguyen cares about health and fitness, and plays badminton every week — she says the matches between the firm’s operations team and the desk are always good fun, and one of the best ways they bond as a team.
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Image: Thanh Nguyen 