A life changed forever: Nat West Markets January - August 1994

After leaving Midland in the spring of 1993, I turned freelance as a business systems consultant. I trained as an IT auditor during my notice period, and then had a couple of early successes - an IT strategy for Woolwich Equitable Building Society, and a quality assurance report for Girobank. But something else reared its head. I had a meeting with a recruitment consultant I had talked to previously when I was considering leaving Midland after the GALM 1 disaster. He dug out his notes from our previous meeting and read them to me: "Needs to decide whether she wants to be in banking and IT or whether she really wants to be a singer".

It brought me up short. My first love had always been music, and in particular singing: I had fallen into banking because of the ruin I had made of my voice due to stress and poor technique, but that was some years ago and I knew I could now sing again. My husband was working as an executive officer in the Civil Service, we had no children, and although we had a house we had no other ties. I discussed it with him and we agreed that I would try to return to the Royal College of Music to study opera.

In November 1993, I got in touch with the Royal College and arranged an audition for February 1994. I knew this was my last chance to go into the opera school: I was already older than most other students, and if I left it any longer they would not even consider me because of my age. But there were other things in the back of my mind too.....I had made a life plan towards the end of my time at OSS, in which I said I would like to have one child within 5 years. I didn't realise it, but that was the real plan.

In December 1993 my former boss from GALM rang me. He was now at Nat West Finance. Nat West Markets had got itself into a bit of a mess with over-the-counter currency options, losing a fair amount of money and sparking complaints to senior management that compliance and risk management were not all they should be. He wanted me to come in to design a financial control system for currency options that would track the underlying FX positions, enabling traders to price the options better and reducing the incidence of in-the-money option exercise at poor strike prices. And just to make it more complicated, he wanted the system designed in such a way that it could be used for other OTC derivative products. The system was to be PC-based, small and very flexible - clearly he had in mind something like the GALM PC system I had designed at Midland.

I duly turned up at Nat West Markets, worked out a high-level design, then in partnership with a Visual Basic contractor, designed and developed what we unimaginatively called the Currency Options Accounting System (COAS). Early on in my time at Nat West Markets I discovered I was pregnant, which effectively killed any ideas of being employed permanently by Nat West. I remained a contractor, with a firm departure date of the end of July. My pregnancy also forced me to cancel my Royal College of Music audition. I had not only wrecked my only chance of studying opera, I had also - though I didn't realise it then - ended whatever hope there had ever been of a professional singing career.

I'm not going to talk much about my time at Nat West, except to say that I enjoyed it. It was hard work, and towards the end I became very tired - especially as I actually left two weeks later than planned, leaving me only two weeks of rest before my due date. But we delivered a working prototype of the system, designed a second phase for interest rate options, and finally handed the system over to IT for porting to their preferred technology. COAS ran successfully for the next 8 years and was finally decommissioned by RBS as part of the systems migration after the takeover of Nat West.

But my life was never the same again.