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ann Couellan’s day starts early. He sets off from
his home in a village near Versailles to the south
of Paris at around 6.30 am, arriving between 7
and 7.30 at the headquarters of BNP Paribas Asset
Management, on rue Bergère, near the Grands
Boulevards metro station.
His office sits inside a 19th Century building that
boasts a stunning facade and an imposing recep-
tion hall. Designed by Edouard Jules Corroyer
and completed in 1881, it served as the headquarters of Comptoir National
d’Escompte de Paris, one of the forerunners of BNP Paribas.
14 rue Bergère, which was entirely restored between 2007 and 2009,
houses more than 1,700 BNP Paribas Asset Management employees today.
The first thing the firm’s head of FICC trading does is to check market
information for an overview of global movements, the US close and Asia
overnight. His traders are responsi-
ble for looking after the liquidity of
fund manager clients, to secure the
best execution possible for them.
“We are their eyes and ears” in the
market, Couellan explains.
A native Parisian, Couellan
started his financial career in
1992 when he joined the French
broker Maison Roussin. He spent
three years as a broker at Cantor
Fitzgerald, followed by four years
at IXIS Asset Management as a
fixed income trader. Couellan
joined AXA Investment Manage-
ment in 2004 as a senior trader of
fixed income and OTC derivatives,
rising to become head of Fixed
Income, Money Market & Repo
Trading France. He is still new
enough to BNP Paribas to bring a
fresh perspective, having joined the
business in October last year.
Couellan used to trade himself,
but is now a manager of 16 traders,
with responsibility for internal
controls. He enjoys using analytics
to come up with new ideas, and
challenging trader perceptions of
the market to improve their trades.
20 // TheTrade // Autumn 2018
“It is crucial to under-
stand where the liquidity
is going,” he says, point-
ing out that unknowable
market inflows ensure
that every day is differ-
ent and unpredictable.
“Traders need to be curi-
ous, proactive. We need
to explore every day.”
During his time at AXA
IM, Couellan was responsible for
fixed income execution for all of
the firm’s fund managers and over-
saw activity on the fixed income
and over-the-counter derivatives
trading desks. From 2016 he was
involved in the development of
a suite of trading tools for fixed
income: two years later, AXA
launched its market data axis tool
for internal use by traders and fund
managers, which addressed liquidi-
ty and price discovery challenges.
The application enabled traders to
identify banks with a firm interest
on a specific bond to reduce market
impact - finding the other side for a
given order.
New challenge
Having spent more than a decade
at AXA, Couellan joined BNP
Paribas because of the greater
opportunities to trade in new and
different ways, the chance to meet
new people – in short, because of
his curiosity for a new challenge:
BNP Paribas Asset Management
offered a strategy and the resourc-
es to grow.