Rakhi Taylor, EMEA and Asia Pacific Head of Talent Acquisition and Development at BGC Partners, won the ‘Instinet Positive Impact Award for Diversity’ at this year’s European Markets Choice Awards for European Women in Finance.
Rakhi and her team were recognised for being instrumental in cultivating a positive, diverse, and inclusive culture within BGC Partners, leading to many successful initiatives across early careers, experienced hiring, and talent development.
What is your day-to day-role at BGC?
I oversee talent acquisition and development for EMEA and Asia Pacific which has a team of 9 employees, I also have input globally through partnering with our team in New York.
The role encompasses everything from early careers and internships, graduate programmes through to executive hiring, constructing talent development programmes for our existing employees, performance management and facilitating executive coaching.
BGC’s business model across trade execution, brokerage, clearing, trade compression and post-trade means the role is really exciting. My team delivers a vast number of programmes that are scalable across these different business verticals globally, while meeting their unique individual requirements. It keeps you on your toes and there is never a dull day.
How has the volatile market conditions affected your role?
During volatile markets I ensure the team remain actively engaged with employees, managers, business managers and stakeholders. We spend time with the business to understand their priorities and requirements. We have to remain agile to respond to the business as hiring numbers will change, and you may need to slow down or accelerate certain programmes. There is also an opportunity to re-prioritise, focus on training and development and keeping the brand name active.
What skill sets are required today, and have they changed over the past couple of years?
People have definitely become more resilient, but also more adaptable over the last couple of years. There is more emphasis around culture and keeping that alive within your team, your department, and your firm. It is important that we are all culture carriers and have collective responsibility.
We have to be proactive in reaching out to candidates, partnering with the business and advocating around financial services to remove barriers and preconceptions. People need to believe that an opportunity in financial services is for everybody and that you don’t have to come from a certain school, education path or background. Today, there are so many different opportunities and career paths in our industry.
How did you get started in financial services and is this the career you envisioned? If not, what was the plan?
When I was young, I wanted to be an air hostess but started working in The City because my mum and aunt both worked there. So, from quite early on, I had strong female role models.
During my holidays from school and university I held different jobs with a temping agency and gained exposure to financial services. At Lehman Brothers and then Bloomberg, I focused on the human resources components and found my calling. I had a passion to help and develop people. I started my HR career at Morgan Stanley, then Nomura and now BGC, which is unique as I oversee early careers, experienced hiring, talent development and retention.
What progress do you think women have made in financial services? What needs to be done to move the needle further?
There are more female role models in senior positions but there is still more work to be done. I believe the key is being able to retain women at different points in their career.
The other important element is at the grassroots level where there are so many more career choices for both males and females. We need to advocate for financial services at that level. There are a whole host of opportunities in financial services including legal, accounting, technology, as well as the more traditional routes.
How does BGC support women and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in general? How are you involved?
In September 2021, BGC signed up to the Women in Finance Charter, an HM Treasury initiative which backs the UK Government’s aspiration to create gender balance across the financial services industry. Our target is to reach 25% of females in senior roles in the UK by 2027. We are making progress and I have already noticed a shift in mindset as there is more openness around the goal and an honest dialogue.
Our Network of Women (NOW) committee was established before I joined in 2018 and has a huge number of initiatives including speaker events, workshops to support women’s career development, discussions on the latest trends in financial markets, networking events, and health and wellbeing.
In our training and development curriculum we have specific workshops on DEI. When we deliver internship schemes, we ask managers to undertake refreshers training on unconscious bias and DEI as a reminder that people can have different perspectives.
We partner with local schools with a wide social demographic to offer work experience and a variety of internship programmes. BGC was also an early adopter in signing up to the 10,000 Black Interns initiative.
We laid the foundations for many of these programmes in 2020. My team and IÂ did a lot of the heavy lifting, we share the workload, and I am proactively involved.
There is a plethora of awards for women in the financial sector? How long do you think it will be before we won’t need a special category?
I appreciate we are in 2022 and many would view that awards like these are not needed. However, if we look at it more holistically, there are legacy challenges, and it is going to take time to resolve. Once there is more equality in the workforce fewer awards will be needed in the future, but right now it is good to demonstrate and highlight successes.
