I'm Antonina Kayitesi. I'm a Head of Financial Management in the development finance world, currently sitting in one of our regional offices and the trade and development bank in Nairobi, Kenya.

You know the world is moving fast in the finance world, particularly emerging markets in Africa, so in the struggle to figure out how to do what I'm supposed to be doing best, when I saw the Global Banking Program, it just kind of answered this questions and gave me an opportunity to think through all these elements outside my normal course of business and sit back and see if I could answer some of these questions and find a solution that probably integrates opportunities from different parts of the world through that network and know what's going on in the developed world and see what can be contextualized and optimized in our market.

The networking was amazing from a sectoral perspective, different guys from different fields; lawyers, insurers, bankers. This is the common factor. There's a lot we are learning and the opportunities that we have in different markets just summarizes the fact that there are some opportunities in the developed world. There's some in emerging markets and somebody needs to speak to [inaudible 00:01:23] there and there's a lot of intermediation that can be used and this network just gave me that opportunity to try and see the best global perspective.

I take it as an investment to have access to that. Faculty are very knowledgeable professors, just not academicians, but also have been in the field, they've been in the practice, so it comes out with a contextual kind of program where it's not just academics but it's context on what they've done on ground and putting that perspective of different markets over and beyond the leading US market and also emerging market, absolutely knowledgeable, complimenting all these elements together.

The Global Banking Program has been an eye opening adventure. It's at least a lot of potential that I think I have in me and most importantly it's given me another perspective of how my thought process in my banking career, in my finance world, has been packaged. I now think through from an end to end as opposed to in a very typical banking, structured well thought process, from the front to the back office, to the relationship management. The typical banking world it's just given me questions to try and think through opportunities and just see how best can we optimize what we do to serve clients better, to maximize opportunity, create that opportunity and revenues and try and meet different needs, demands and supply from all funding, to lending, to all the structures that are out there that can be contextualized in my world. A lot of that I wouldn't have imagined before the program.

Antonina Kayitesi