Pricing Partners, the independent valuation expert and a world leader in cutting edge mathematical models for OTC derivatives and structured products, today, announced that it successfully renewed its leading experience in training its flagship software Price-it® with its Grandes Ecoles partners for its third consecutive year.
Training sessions take place during the mathematical finance courses of the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, the University of Marne la Vallée, the ENSAE ParisTech, the Toulouse Business School and the Supaéro (ISAE). The idea is to offer students a course given by professionals from the financial market. This course puts students in a real situation of a trading floor. During the training program, Pricing Partners provides students its flagship software so that they could value derivatives and structured products as they were in a real trading floor. The examples showed during the training program correspond to real cases, like derivatives traded by Deutsch Bank, Morgan Stanly or JP Morgan. This course completes the more theoretical ones given in the Masters of Quantitative Finance, as this course illustrates the operation, challenge and conditions for the pricing of structured products in a concrete way.
Eric Benhamou, ceo of Pricing Partners, former Goldman Sachs quant comments The idea of these practical classes, with the same tools as the ones of front office, came out from two motivations: Teachers that wished to offer to their student more exposure to the professional practices Pricing Partners that wished to approach our future decision makers and educate them to its software.
We have therefore proposed to 3 finance professors, Mr. Bernard Lapeyre professor of the Ecole des Ponts Paris Tech, the head of Mathematical Finance Course at the ENSAE ParisTech, and Mr. Jean Claude Gabillon, professor of the Toulouse ESC Business school to give classes on our flagship software Price-it®. During the entire period of classes, we provide students an evaluation license and show them concrete cases on how mathematical models are implemented in an investment bank. The feedback from most of the professors and students is very positive. Moreover, we have expanded the partnership with more concerned schools and Pricing Partners trainers.
Bernard Lapeyre, professor at the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech adds This opportunity to discover the world of a trading floor with a trading floor software is a good complementary to our M2 mathematical finance class. Pricing Partners is a major actor in the financial modeling software field. So we feel very happy to be able to collaborate with them.
The head of the financial Markets Course from the ENSAE ParisTech
comments: The Pricing Partners classes are very unique and lots of ours students like it just because it is very practical and concrete.
We are very pleased with this collaboration with Pricing Partners who is a major industrial player in the financial products pricing field and provides as well as a pragmatic vision of the use of mathematical finance models. This year, the involvement of Pricing Partners on credit derivatives which was at the heart of the crisis has been followed with a great interest.
Jean-Claude Gabillon from Toulouse Business School completes For a third consecutive year, Mr Kodjo Klouvi from Pricing Partners let our students discover the world of a trading floor. It is an especially interesting training program for our Master Students, because most of them come from an Engineering School and they have not done any internship in a bank yet. Theoretical courses on models are not enough to fully understand how models are used in practice. They learn all the calibration procedures through the software Price-it. They can as well figure out the importanceof modeling assumption.
