What’s it like to work on the trading floor as dealer or software engineer? FFP interns share their insights

Bonds, Banter & the Beautiful Game 

By Akseli Kajander

As a Fixed Income Sales intern at Nordea Markets Finland, I’ve spent the past weeks learning how to speak fluent Bloomberg, price bonds and derivatives, and engage with our highly professional clients. As a new member of the team, each day presents an exciting challenge to generate valuable ideas and deliver strong client experiences.

If I should pick one, of many highlights of my internship, so far, it would without a doubt be a football match against one of our clients — even if we stood no chance, and ended with a 7-2 loss. While my daily work at the Fixed Income Sales desk has been really fascinating, the match offered a unique opportunity to bond with the clients beyond phone calls and Bloomberg chats. We may not have secured the win on the field, but I think we definitely scored on the relationship front.

Forex, Functions & Frameworks

By Juho-Matti Kilpeläinen

The first few months of the FFP programme have been enjoyable. The highlight of working as a software engineer in Markets FX has been getting the chance to learn how to build large-scale systems that must run without errors. 

I've learned a lot about data pipelines and deploying complex applications into production. It has been interesting to see how much data such a large organisation as Nordea gathers, and what kind of challenges arise when turning these piles of data into useful information.

There have been a lot of interesting challenges and issues to solve and that is exactly what I enjoy. I'm looking forward to what's next. 

Challenges, coding and collars

By Jesse Heikinheimo

For these past weeks, I’ve gotten to work on various tasks as a Software Engineer in the Market Analytics & Execution team. After getting my mandatory license to work, I started finalising an existing feature on a loan portfolio tool, which taught me a lot about onboarding in large software projects. As that task is now almost done, I’ve been focusing on two new rate related tools.

While I have not done any coding regarding those two tools, yet, working on them has developed my skills in software architecture and software development lifecycle management. It has been great to work on these tasks and I’m eager to see what other exciting challenges the internship will offer.

In addition to the learnings, the best things about being a FFP here at Markets have been our recreational events such as the trading floor summer party, and hanging out with the other FFPs like by the Giant Green Wall, which is a great place for relaxation.