AmplfyME was founded 15 years ago by CEO Will de Lucy who wanted to attract more diverse candidates to financial services and felt recruitment in this area needed some huge improvement.
He devised simulators for students and employers to use so the former could work out if a role in finance was for them, and for employers to secure appropriate candidates without bias.
Here, de Lucy answers PA Future‘s questions about the company’s journey so far, how the simulators avoid unconscious biases against marginalised groups and getting around why men tend to perform better in the first round.
What was the main purpose of setting up AmplifyME?
I’ve always struggled a bit as a student, I had dyslexia and couldn’t sit still. Quite quickly I was put into the lower echelons of expectations in terms of everyone around me.
Later on I was fortunate enough to land a role as a fixed income trader. I was given an opportunity and I loved it. It was such an important part of my life, I did well, I was a very good trader. I was using maths all the time, whereas at school there were four sets for maths and they made an extra set for me, but now I was using it and enjoying it.
What I found was the recruitment process is perhaps not very effective. Just because someone was an effective student it might not mean they are effective in their career or workplace. A big driver was to try and build ‘flight’ simulations to help younger students engage and see what area of finance suits them. And help the employer side too; you’d get these wonderful candidates and CVs where everything said they’d be superstars. But actually, a lot of someone’s performance was down to who they were as a person, not necessarily where they studied, or what they studied. So it came down to how can an employer find those candidates who are driven, and really keen to make an impact.
So the idea behind AmplifyME was to use simulation technology to demystify those roles and open them up to more people.
Where are you now with AmplifyME?
That was 15 years ago, it’s been a hell of a journey. We now partner with over 400 universities and business schools around the world where we deliver these simulations to widen the net and attract a higher diversity of students to explore finance, and then to allow the students to experience what it’s like to work in markets, or banking, wealth management or technology, and find out for themselves what type of career they might want to follow, rather than just follow everyone else who is applying to Goldman Sachs’ investment banking arm because that’s all they know.
Because we train 50,000 plus students a year through the simulations, we help connect some of the best students we’ve identified to employers. So 40% of Morgan Stanley’s market hires come from our pathways, UBS sponsors all of our banking side, and we partner with a number of different firms on the recruitment side as well.
The other way that we partner with institutions is we build simulations for them as part of their spring week internship and graduate programmes.
How do the scores work? How does someone score highly?
It depends on what type of simulation. Let’s say we’re doing a market simulation at outreach – the student operates as an asset manager that needs to deploy funds in order to get a return on investment. But then they also operate as the investment bank, where they need to have good relationship and client management skills, and also good market-making skills. As they go through the simulation, they’re learning about the different objectives of different types of companies, and the different objectives of the roles within those companies.
On the asset management side, the technical ability for someone to do well in the simulation can be right at the very simple level. Let’s say one of the products they’re trading is Amazon and some news comes out Amazon severely missed its earnings. We measure how the student responds to that flag; do they feel like they can change investment?
A version of that game is ESG investment management, where there are certain ESG remits they have to adhere to, as well as meeting their return on investment. We measure how well do they balance those sometimes conflicting objectives.
After the simulation they receive feedback on where they were strong, and where they can improve. We measure do they click on the areas where they can improve? Do they follow content that helps them learn how to improve in that particular area? In the next simulations do they implement the feedback in that area?
How do you ensure there aren’t biases against marginalised groups?
This is something we are working very hard on. We have a member of our team who comes from a performance psychologist background so she is giving us a lot of advice on that. Even I’m surprised how biases are there, when that’s our whole mission to move away from that. She’s there, through the whole journey, to point out and ask ‘well, why that? Why would you select that?’.
We’re obviously trying to attract as many women as we can to finance and from the performance of our very first simulation, there was a bias. More young men have wanted to work in finance for longer, and therefore, when it comes to that first simulation blast, they tended to perform better as a group, because they’ve been involved for longer. We’ve really tried to give as much pre-learning as possible, and make it as equitable as possible, but there was still a bias there.
So we started to say it doesn’t matter how you did in that simulation or not, there’s also an on-demand pathway which shows us whether you have tried to learn or tried to find out more. If you hit that metric you go into the next stage.
Once they are hired, does your relationship end or do you continue to mentor?
We focus on ages 16 to 26 and we continued to offer early career support for those in that decade. We could be involved in their intern or grad development, which is great because the company can see a long story of how someone’s progressed through these simulations over time.
With Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), we run their women’s Trading Academy, where individuals partner with a mentor of RBC, and then we also coach, train and review them. With Bank of America (BoA), we offer a ‘keep-warm’ service, where anyone about to start the internship can go through a simulation with us, so if they’re not used to the terminology or the concept it can help them feel more confident before they start. This is the first year we’re doing it, but BoA believe they’ll see a much higher intern-to-offer rate from the diversity candidates as a result.
What’s next for the business?
We’ve been around for 15 years, but I think we’re really only four years old because for the first 11, we were delivering everything in person in very small groups of people, and were trying to create a name for ourselves as a very high quality provider. We probably would have continued doing that forever had Covid not happened. When that happened we moved all the simulations online, and realised suddenly if you’re doing a simulation on a computer screen as part of a live event, online or remote, it’s incredibly similar. That really changed our company.
We’ve got some big partners, which is great and I think we really are democratising the opportunity in finance for them and we’re helping them get to universities they wouldn’t normally go to. We also want to help the small employers? There are thousands of them out there that might be looking for a great grad that we have trained, assessed and developed, and is on our books. I think there’s a really big opportunity – the more we place, the more we help the student and we help the employer, and the more we do that, the more universities will want us to deliver our session for them and improve employability outcomes.
