Bernard Kuc is a vice-president in the London office of Barclays Capital working in the equity derivatives team of the quantitative analytics group, where he has been for the past four years. His day-to-day responsibilities involve Monte Carlo pricing of exotic equity derivatives, and maintaining and improving the group’s set of risk analytics. The primary attraction of his current job is the ability to work with some of the brightest minds in the world.

Prior employers include Application Networks (2004-2005), a provider of financial valuation and risk solutions, and Flextronics (2000-2004), where he worked on numerous telecom projects with a strong focus on fixed-line signalling infrastructure equipment. As part of his job, he was able to work with many partner companies and had the opportunity to take part in the first international interoperability tests of two of the Sigtran protocols. Finally, at Eagle Technology (1998-1999), he was responsible for Windows NT device driver development for data acquisition cards.

Bernard graduated with an MSc in Control Engineering (1999) and a BSc in Electrical Engineering (1997), both from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His academic highlights include coming in at the top of his class in all of his MSc courses and spending two terms of office on both the Students’ Representative Council and the Students’ Engineering Council.

Bernard is a CFA charterholder and enjoys working with money. Having always had an interest in finance, keenly following oil prices as a student engineer while risking his bursary money on the markets, Bernard took the first step over to finance by studying for his CFA charter during the turmoil years that ravaged telecom employment prospects following the dot-com meltdown. Being a reviewer for Computing Reviews provides him with the opportunity to read outside his current specializations and keep in touch with progress being made in topics and technologies he has worked with before.