With an impressive career and accomplishments, Aly-Khan Satchu, the CEO of Rich Management is a true epitome of success.
In an interview on Capital FM's The Scoop with Salim Amin, the financial markets specialist intimated a time he made his employer billions while earning significantly less.
At the age of 13, he was enrolled in a boarding school in the UK by his parents. In his family, studying law was some sort of tradition but his father was against him going down that path. Satchu did not heed to the advice and went ahead to join law school, but decided against pursuing
Despite studying law at the University of Durham, Satchu realised he had a passion for numbers and the money markets.
“From a young age, I knew I wanted to be a trader. The day I stepped into a trading floor, I realized this is what I want to be,” Aly-Khan conceded.
Aly-Khan debuted into the financial world as the lowest ranking officer at Credit Suisse. When he joined the institution, there were 965 employees and his role was to print off all the trades executed.
He was made to work a photocopy machine that he barely knew how to operate, while colleagues hurled insults at him.
The Rich Management CEO noted that resilience and patience were a key factor in his rise.
"I worked harder, I learnt it from the bottom up. After about twelve months I remember complaining to my mother that this was not what I wanted to do," Aly-Kahn recalled.
One day he walked into the bank vice chairman's office and asked for an opportunity to be a trader. He was called in the following day and was given a letter to present to five banks, asking them to give him a chance.
Four of the interviews were unsuccessful but the fifth proved to be his lucky strike.
"The fifth interview was with this guy called Bob, a really nice person. So I told him I want to a trader," Aly-Khan recounted.
He made his prospective boss an offer he could not turn down, especially after learning that Bob paid portfolio managers up to a million dollars.
“I am going to work for you for four pounds an hour. If I don’t perform, fire me…and that’s how I got my first job on the trading floor” Aly-Khan narrated.
At the age of 27 and now a trader at the Credit Suisse, his annual target that year was set at Ksh100 million dollars ($1 million). At the dusk of that year, he made Ksh1.5 billion ($15 million) for the bank.
He was put in charge of emerging markets, especially South America, and in 1994, he successfully lived through a financial crisis in Latin America. By that time, he had invested over Ksh200 billion into that market.
In 1995, he, along with nine other traders, joined Sumitomo Bank as a managing director, only second to the bank's chairperson, Konishi San. At the apex, his portfolio of assets under management was in excess of Ksh 1.7 trillion ($17 billion).
He served at the bank till the year 1998, when he joined ANZ Investment Bank as a treasurer and director of all collateralised lending, a position he held till 1999.
His final stint as an employee was as an executive director at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. He was in charge of emerging market financing and short term interest rates.
Since 2003, he has traded his own funds, spreading his portfolio across commodities (primarily, oil), currency futures and options, equity indices and single stocks.
From 2011, Aly Kahn has been an active player in the Nairobi Stock Exchange, the Uganda Stock Exchange among several other African financial markets as the CEO of Rich Management.
