Institute of Economic Studies
Faculty of Social Sciences
Charles University

Tomáš Hochmeister is from Prague and graduated from the IES with PhDr. in 2006. He also holds a Bachelor's degree from the Institute of International Studies at Faculty of Social Science.

Currently, Tomáš works as a director in Cross Asset Solutions at Société Générale Investment Banking in London. His first work experience, while still being a student at the IES, was at Philip Morris, later he helped in the so called Bezděk Commission, that dealt with the pension reform in 2010. After graduating from the Master's program in Prague, he started a postgraduate management program in Paris and later joined Société Générale Corporate and Investment Banking. Firstly, as Institutional Sales Equity Derivatives, then Tomáš moved to London to Global Markets Cross Asset Solutions, where he was in charge of financial institutions for Central and Eastern Europe. Tomáš gained his first foreign experience at high school, studying at the Lycee in Dijon, France. Thanks to the Erasmus program, Tomáš also passed a semester in Portugal, at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa during his studies at the IES.

Tomáš spends his free time mainly with his family, he likes sport, especially jogging, or cycling, or he devotes himself to the music. In the past, he worked in Radio 1, where for almost eight years he has featured broadcasting of French Connection and Estereo focused on electronic and jazzfusion scene.

What was the most important thing that the IES gave you, except of your wife :-)?

As you mentioned, the biggest benefits of IES for me were not really academic.
I met my wife at IES and thanks to that I have now amazing family and likeminded partner that accompanies me in my life.
On the professional level, passing classes of mathematic analysis and econometrics (that I sincerely hated) gave me a great boost of confidence in challenges of the corporate world later in my career. Back then I also never imagined that Monte Carlo simulations and other stochastic processes would be part of my job on a daily basis.
I met many smart and interesting people at IES, both between students and teachers, and some of them became close friends. I believe IES is great platform for networking and talent searching. I'm convinced that Alumni will have growing importance in the years to come.

You studied in France at high school, and after IES studies you went back there to the postgraduate management program. Can you asses the teaching system in France, should we learn somehow, is there anything that you missed in Czech schools?

French high school boarding system and education was a cultural shock for me as teenager from the Czech Republic in the late nineties. Everything seemed stricter and more authoritarian. The biggest difference is, in my opinion, great emphasis on rigour, structured argumentation and almost obsession with methodology, the famous French "methode". It took me some time to adapt as Czech system is more oriented on memorizing of exact facts. French high school system is favouring development of presentation skills and value structure of the arguments as high as arguments themselves. I don’t necessarily agree with this interpretation, but in real life and work, where you have in most cases between 30 seconds and 5 minutes to present your opinion, these skills come very handy.
As for university education, the quality of IES curriculum is in my opinion very high and comparable to most of the great universities in Western Europe. During my studies at IES I missed more concrete examples and would appreciate more motivation showing why we are learning some subjects and what is their use in corporate world. I believe this has changed over last several years as many people with international experience came back to IES to teach

You work as sales and Director in Cross Asset Solutions at Société Générale. Could you introduce us closer this area of investment banking?

Cross Asset Solutions is part of Global Markets department at Société Générale Corporate and Investment banking. I work in Emerging Markets sales team in London. My job consists of selling investment products to institutional clients. When I started in 2007, the organisation and clients coverage was very fragmented between different business lines based on asset class or product category. Several years ago, we wanted to rethink our approach and the idea was to create one entry point for all our clients requests. That is how „Cross Asset Solutions“ team was created. In our opinion, this approach simplifies the life of our clients and helps the bank to monitor and allocate the appropriate scarce resources by taking into account the global relationship with our clients. For us as sales it is very interesting as well because we see a very wide range of requests and topics that need to be covered.

You lived in France, shortly in Portugal, now in the UK, which country is the closest to your heart and why?

France has very special place in my heart, it is a country that gave me the first opportunity to go abroad to study and later work as well. I always liked their culture and „savoir vivre“. Portugal was perfect place to go for Erasmus and I will not hide that the seaside and the weather were my main selection criteria to go.
London is very international place and thanks to this quite easy for a foreigner to live in. There are only few cities in the world that have similar level of energy and buzz as London and it is what is attracting people from around the world to come. I truly hope for London that Brexit and the latest developments will not put all this in question.
We always keep very strong links to the Czech Republic where we have our families and relatives and this is even more true since we have children.

What do you do in your free time? Do you have a dream that you would like to realize?

I try to spend most of free time with my family. I like any kind of sport mainly running and cycling.