My professional experience as a marketing assistant at Auris Gestion

In this article, Ines ILLES MEJIAS (ESSEC Business School, Global BBA, 2020-2024) shares her experience as a marketing assistant at Auris Gestion (France).

About the company

Auris gestion is an asset management company created in 2004 which currently manages 3 billion euros. At the beginning, Auris Gestion focused on assisting only private clients with a worldwide offer by providing tailor-made solutions to their investment needs and demands. However, it decided to merge along with Salamandre AM in June 2020 to improve its positioning with financial advisor and Family Office partners. As a result, Auris Gestion makes its expertise and institutional management approaches available to a larger clientele, including individual consumers, asset management advisers, and institutions.

Logo of Auris Gestion.

Source: Auris Gestion.

One of Auris Gestion main strengths is their close relationship with their clients and the fact that it places a high importance on developing this one by providing excellent tailored management, advising, and reporting solutions. To accomplish this successfully, they have decided to dive their team into two independent business divisions: the Private Banking and the Corporate Banking.

My internship

My internship lasted a total of three months and took place in Paris.

What I enjoyed the most about my internship is that I could work in different areas of business and not only finance, which I was quite scared of considering that jobs in finance are known to be very intense and I didn’t consider myself having a wide financial knowledge after my first year at ESSEC. However, I really enjoyed being able to do some marketing. This helped me to get to know inside out. Additionally, it really helped me to improve my finance vocabulary and knowledge in French.

My missions

I was in charge of creating customer master records and separating them into the two different clients and divisions which Auris works for: Private Banking/management and Institutional/Corporate finance.

In addition, I also worked as an assistant in the Marketing department. In this one, some of my tasks included:

• Editing and writing up content for the new Auris and Salamander websites that they were working on to update their information and highlight their partnership with Salamander. Also, their aim was to create a more visually attractive website for customers to understand better the information and improve Auris’ positioning in terms of modern in technology and marketing.
• Also, I was in charge of adjusting the website’s vocabulary according the two client divisions: Private Banking (simpler financial language) and Institutional/Corporate finance (advanced financial language and more precise information regarding the services offered).
• Finally, within the marketing department, I had to create information documents and “poster style” documents about ESG. These documents had as a purpose informing and inciting clients to invest in this growing and important, although dangerous sector (greenwashing) funds. Also, to highlight Auris’ implications and contribution in green finance.

Using excel was one of my competences, which is why they also charged me to create and complete fund factsheets and reports. For successful completion, I had to search in Websites such as Morning Star, or the main company/fund websites, information about the funds which then I needed to update or fill in the Due Diligence factsheet template.

Another of my many jobs, which I found interesting and in which I got to learn loads was by attending and representing Auris during fund presentation and pitches. Here, I got to meet different company representatives and got to see how people pitched a fund. One of my other roles after these meetings, was not only making notes about what I learnt, but also summarizing pros and cons from the funds pitched and presented.

Required skills and knowledge

During my internship some of the skills which I most made use of and I believe were required to do my job were teamwork, adaptability, creativity, critical thinking, communication skills and Analytical skills, considering I worked for the financial department which is very quantitative, and the marketing department which is a bit more qualitative and visual.

Also, autonomy was very important, especially since the manager asked me what would be something that I’ve seen in the company that I’m interested in working on, and then I would go ahead and work on that and do research on my own.

Then, I would say one of the most important required skills is being an advanced user of the Pack Office. This is because I was required to use daily either Microsoft teams, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

To continue, some finance and asset management knowledge and vocabulary are obviously essential. However, if you are pursuing a business degree you should have a good base of knowledge already. The same goes for marketing and strategic marketing knowledge.

Finally, knowledge and skills on how to use of marketing tools for the creation of digital content such as Canvas and Adobe Photoshop/Photopea were needed.

What I learned

During my internship I was lucky to learn and expand my knowledge in few areas.
First, I learned how to elaborate and fill Due Diligence factsheets to evaluate different funds from different companies. For this, I had to become familiar with the company websites, Morning Star, understand fund rating, etc.

Then, I got to further improve my knowledge on finance thanks to personal research that I did as well as to some of the employees which were eager in teaching me new financial terms and concepts. Some examples of new things I learnt are structured products, ESG, greenwashing, different bond ratings, etc. One of the workers was very kind and once every few days he would sit with me and explain me concepts which I came across that I didn’t understand or was struggling with.

Moreover, the weekly “Rendez-vous de Lundi”, which is a concept set up by the company which consisted of weekly newsletters sent to workers and published publicly, helped me stay informed about the main the weekly performance of markets through the overview of the markets with charts showing their risk, inflation, and summaries regarding their importance and other news, etc.

Finally, the “Point macro”, which was done every two weeks by the company with the aim of keeping up to date all the workers with the main macroeconomic factors affecting today’s investing world. This really got me to improve my macroeconomics knowledge as well as got me to learn a lot about the diversity and importance of this one in the asset management and investing world.

Key financial concepts related to your work

During my internship, I came across the following key financial concepts: structured products, ESG funds, and bond rating.

Structured Products

Structured products are investments that normally include assets linked to interest plus one or more derivatives. These are sometimes attached to an index or group of assets and create extremely specific risk-return objectives. The package is known to be composed of: a bond, some underlying assets, and the derivatives strategy.

ESG Funds

ESG Funds are bands which carry Environmental, Societal and Governance principles investments. This means that the bonds have gone through a test which determines how sustainable the company or government is in terms of the ESG criteria. This index has pushed a lot of companies to become more responsible. Also, they’re important today due to the importance sustainability, and they’re becoming more popular as investors want to be seen as contributors of stopping global warming and contributing to human development without impacting their returns.

Bond Ratings

Bond ratings are letters which define and judge the quality and creditworthiness of a bond. Normally starts with triple letter A (“AAA” for Standard & Poor’s, and “Aaa” for Moody’s), and starting from BB bonds are known as “Junk bonds” due to their low ratings. What we must remember is that the higher a bond’s rating, the lower the interest rate it will carry, and the lower the risk, etc.

Why should I be interested in this post?

This post might interest you if you plan on working in a future in an asset management company or in this sector as a marketing or asset management assistant. You will be able to see what tasks you might be asked to do, the skills that you must have to perform successfully during your internship, as well as terms you might come across that you will need to learn about.

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Useful resources

Auris Gestion

Standard & Poor’s

Moody’s

About the author

The article was written in December 2022 by Ines ILLES MEJIAS (ESSEC Business School, ESSEC Business School, Global BBA, 2020-2024).