Associate, Client Service

Company Description

Third Bridge is a market-leading investment research firm. We provide integrated solutions for the world’s top investors and business leaders to help them make smarter and faster decisions. No other company in the world provides the same holistic investment offering: our superpower is the combination of human insights and unique investor-led content with a global expert network. We serve over 1,000 investment firms, offering clients 24/7 coverage through our team of 1,300+ employees located across nine offices.

Job Description

This role is part of our Client Services Team. Could either be covering Credit and Public Equity, Private Equity and Consulting Clients. Please refer to the company website for reference.

As an Associate, you’ll be the person driving relationships by enabling our clients to connect to the industry experts that will help them. During your initial training period, you’ll hone your skills targeting, sourcing and screening relevant industry specialists, including C-Level executives at Fortune 500 companies. After this period, you’ll advance to directly managing your own book of business composed of major Public Equity and Credit investment funds. You’ll spend much of your time on the phone, both with your clients, to unpack what they need from an expert, and with industry specialists, to find the perfect match. Ultimately, it’s about uncovering what our clients need, digging deep to help them solve their most pressing problems, and connecting them to key thought leaders from every corner of the market.

Responsibilities

• Understand client needs and the most relevant experts that could help them.
• Deliver excellent client service by being a fast, responsive, thoughtful and proactive research partner.
• Engage with industry experts for our clients by reaching out over the phone and through professional correspondences, to understand whether they are the right fit
• This would also involve regularly cold-calling potential experts who uniquely match the project requirements
• A substantial portion of your daily activities would involve engaging in telephone conversations with specialists who possess distinctive relevance to your clients’ projects, frequently amidst stringent time constraints
• Negotiate and persuade experts to connect with our clients at short notice, scheduling calls as soon as possible, whilst operating within our industry leading compliance framework. 
• After 4-5 months you’ll be driving the long-term performance of your book of business, by understanding the clients’ research needs and monitoring how our content can best help them on a continual basis. 

Development

We are committed to helping everyone at Third Bridge grow and develop, this starts from day 1 and continues throughout your career. Our comprehensive onboarding program includes both classroom-based and on-the-job learning that will teach you the fundamentals of our business, how our clients think, how to sell our value proposition to secure experts and how to explore a multitude of industry sectors in order to provide an excellent service to our clients.

You will also learn how to identify industry experts as well as developing your communication skills to engage with industry specialists/senior professionals over the phone.

Typically, but not exclusively, after 4 to 6 months in your Third Bridge journey you will have mastered Specialist Management, you will then progress to our Client Engagement Learning Programme to take on client relationship building and project management responsibilities. You’ll learn how to engage with investor and management consulting clients, drive business results and lead project delivery teams.

The next step in your Third Bridge career could be:

Your promotion to a Senior Associate is based on achievement against performance goals. At this point, you will have the opportunity to choose your career track: either;

Manager Track, where you start our Emerging Leaders program to develop your leadership skills and have the opportunity to apply for a Connections Manager role.

Client Development Track, where you will continue to hone your client engagement skills and unlock greater bonus earning potential.

In your first year, you will sharpen your skills in...

• Relationship Building: increase your network and build relationships with clients and industry experts by delivering a high-end customer experience throughout.
• Account Growth: Understanding the Public Equity & Credit client workflow and their long-term investment strategies, enabling you to be proactive and grow overall account performance. 
• Commercial Acumen: understand and navigate corporate structures, sector value chains, and key stakeholders. Learn to identify key drivers and dynamics to understand your client’s knowledge gaps and engage with industry experts. Gain an introduction to the world of investment and how decision makers in this field think.
• Sales effectiveness to develop your Persuasion and Negotiation: learn how to effectively pitch to senior industry executives, persuade them to engage with clients and negotiate terms. You’ll also learn how to persuade your clients to speak with the experts you know would be a great fit to support their research.
• Time Management: execute on multiple projects at a given time, manage competing priorities and changing client requests. Prioritisation and context switching are key in order to handle the fast-paced environment we operate in.
• Stakeholder Management: sharpen your interpersonal skills as you collaborate with others to share knowledge and develop sourcing strategies when executing on client requests.

Your attitude is to roll up your sleeves and you enjoy being in the thick of the action. It matters a great deal to you to understand how your performance ranks against your own potential and against others, so you continuously seek feedback to make sure you can be at the top of your game. One of your clients preferring a competitor over you is not an acceptable state of affairs for you - you’re relentless in getting the data points you need to adjust your approach until you are their number one. With the soft skills gained on the job (hard skills are getting displaced by machines), you aspire to a future as a high EQ business leader.

Additional Information

What our people love about being Associates:

• Being surrounded by people they not only enjoy working with, but who also challenge and support them
• Owning individual responsibilities to grow our business, while also being in a team-oriented environment and working closely with their peers.
• Consultants truly lean on Third Bridge for their research, whether for strategy consulting or diligence work. Our clients are appreciative of and value our support and partnership.
• Getting to dip their toes into every imaginable industry under the sun, and getting exposed to a variety of individuals with unique perspectives and backgrounds.
• Building strong relationships both internally and externally create significant opportunities for professional development.
• We win together as a team.

Qualifications

What we look for:

The work is fast-paced – you will be working on multiple requests each day, with tight timelines and high standards so you’ll need to organize your time well, have great attention to detail and adhere to our compliance framework.

You’ll be responsible for building relationships with our Public Equity clients as well as a wide variety of industry experts across different industries and seniority levels, so you need to have great communications skills (both written and verbal) and be able to adapt your communication style effectively.

Your projects will span a wide variety of industries and geographies which you will need to understand at a high level. It’s important that you enjoy learning, are able to quickly understand key information and use this to find the right experts for each project.

An interest in financial markets and the environment that our Public Equity & Credit clients operate in. Keeping up with their direction of research, which may require continual and frequent projects. 

Our services are in high demand and we all work to targets so we need people who are excited by a hands-on, high performing and results-oriented role and who are driven to exceed expectations for our clients.

Teamwork is essential - you’ll be collaborating with colleagues locally and internationally when executing on projects.

With a culture centered around feedback and open communication, we look for people who are open to continuous professional development.

A degree, with strong academic credentials and/or extensive experience in a client-facing role.

Additional information

Thrive at Third Bridge

The starting Associate pay places you in the top 30% of graduate salaries across industries, and it is complemented with an uncapped bonus commensurate with target achievement. You can expect clear performance goals and to be recognised for your contributions. After ~2 years of strong results you could transition from being an individual contributor to managing your own team and P&L - a huge career milestone. Depending on your aspirations, you could also progress to a role in Sales, Product, or opportunities across our organisation.
We ensure every team member is able to bring their best self to work as well as in their lives outside - take a look at our benefits:

Salary: competitive base salary of HKD 300,000 plus an uncapped bonus

Vacation: 15 days (which increases to 20 days after 2 years of service) 

Learning: personal development allowance of HKD 8,250 per year, which can be used for any learning programmes you feel would be beneficial for you

Health and wellbeing: private medical insurance, Modern Health to focus on mental health. Pension scheme.

Future and family: pension scheme and vitality private medical insurance

Flexibility: work from anywhere for one month per year, 2 annual volunteer days, 2 personal days when life throws you a curveball and 'Summer Fridays'

Rewards: get points through our colleague-to-colleague recognition programme to spend on hotels, gift cards, donations to charity and more 

Social: weekly optional social gatherings, daily breakfast and snacks, social events