Voice of Experience: Cynthia Meyn, SVP and Senior Operations Manager,PIMCO

by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Cynthia Meyn, the Senior Operations Manager at PIMCO’s New York Office, spent her childhood on the move, living in three states and a European country, all before the tender age of twelve. And while some might have viewed this as a negative experience, Meyn actually sees it as one that had a wholly positive impact on her. “I think it helped me be at ease meeting new people,” she explained, “and helped me be comfortable trying new things,” a skill which has allowed her to fearlessly take on new challenges in her life and career.

When it came time for college, Meyn moved again, this time from Ohio back to Massachusetts to study math, computer science and philosophy at Smith College. While her senior level research fieldwork was in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, she decided not to pursue it as a career once she realized that artificial intelligence “was just too academic.” Instead, she chose to pursue finance and business, an area she became interested in via a sophomore year internship with Smith College’s Summer Women in Business Mini MBA program, an executive education seminar for women. Meyn said, “My role was to set up, monitor, and staff the computer center. I also got to take the classes with the executive women because I had to help them do the LOTUS spreadsheets. That summer was formative because I met executive women from places like General Motors and AT&T, and they encouraged me to pursue a career in business. They also told me about some internship and training programs that I would be able to get into if I tried. So, because of them, I sought out an internship at Morgan Stanley.”

Climbing the Career Ladder in Derivatives and Tech

She worked with Morgan Stanley in the summer of 1985 and, upon graduation, was offered a job in the IT department programming derivatives risk algorithms for the trading desk. Over the next seven years, Meyn was exposed to what she calls “a nice variety of angles surrounding derivatives,” working in operations,valuations, risk management on the trading floor and as a controller.

Meyn left the firm when she was asked to become the vice president in charge of derivatives IT at Lehman Brothers. After a 1-year stint there, Meyn was again headhunted, this time to be Chief Risk Officer at Japanese-owned Fuji Capital Markets. It was an opportunity she just couldn’t pass up.

“As a senior person representing the derivatives subsidiary of Fuji Bank (which, at the time, was the largest bank in the world), I got the chance to travel all around Asia, helping the Bank cohesively organize its derivative footprint. In that time, we grew our company from one of just 30 people to one that was the largest derivatives dealer in the world. We also expanded our offices from New York into London, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and worked the Bank’s network to establish internal trading partners in cities around the world.” She added, “It was one of the greatest times of my career.”

Again, she credits her experience moving around as a child for the ease with which she assimilated into the Japanese culture that permeated the bank. “It goes back to when I was living in Germany (where I attended third grade), which required me to speak a new language and fit in. Because of that experience, I love learning new cultures.”

She added, “Every culture at any corporation has tools that you want to put in your tool belt and some that you don’t. At Fuji, there was a lot of loyalty; it was highly organized; and the decisions were made very inclusively. I learned a lot of valuable things from my time there.”

When the head of IT left a few years into Meyn’s tenure with the bank subsidiary, Meyn was tapped for the position of Chief Tech Officer. She happily accepted. “Being the risk manager was great, but I’m much better at setting up the systems and calculating the numbers for risk than judging the size of the position and calculating whether the risk is too high or too low. I’m really good at making sure the numbers and systems are accurate and the risk is reported in real time. I am just better at IT.”

In the late 1990s, as the large Japanese banks began to consolidate in the face of rapidly declining credit ratings, Meyn opted to move to Cantor Fitzgerald to be their managing director of Fixed Income Tech, where she and her colleagues spearheaded many groundbreaking projects, including the creation of eSpeed, an electronic version of stock exchange for bonds, as well as the first-ever online futures exchange called Cantor Exchange (CX). “It was all very exciting,” she added.

At the same time, she was tackling another huge project, this one personal: her first child. “My husband thought I was nuts as I was pulling all-nighters until the very end of the pregnancy. But I’m a pretty sturdy person and luckily I didn’t have a difficult pregnancy.” She took just three weeks of maternity leave when her first daughter was born and then went back to work. The CX launched in November 1999.

When she became pregnant with her second child—right before the tech nightmare that was Y2K—she began to consider leaving Cantor. She said, “It just got very busy there, and as I was contemplating it, a great opportunity with Bernstein came along.”

Wanting to be closer to her Midtown Manhattan home and looking for the chance to use her skills on the “buy-side,” Meyn decided to join Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., which was a privately-held financial research firm at the time, as a vice president dealing with IT for municipals. “It was located near my home, enabling me to raise my children. They hired me when I was 6½ months pregnant so my second child was born two months after I joined.”

And just two months after that, a total of four months after Meyn joined the company, Bernstein was acquired by Alliance Capital, giving Meyn some additional advancement opportunities. She ultimately rose to become co-head of fixed income IT there. “It was great to be able to stay in the flow while having a third child. I was able to work up to a senior level again in tandem with my children’s growth,” she explained.

Then, in July 2006, her mentor Eileen Murray, the global operations and technology head of Morgan Stanley at that time, asked Meyn to join the firm as managing director of U.S. operations for investment management. Meyn decided to make the jump. She explained, “[Morgan Stanley] was sort of like my hometown, my roots. And it was a better opportunity than the one I had at AllianceBernstein at the time. Plus, it enabled me to branch out into operations.”

The Aftermath of Layoffs

One-and-a-half years in, however, the economy took a turn for the worse, leading to massive layoffs at the financial giant. Meyn was among the many that were “downsized.” Of the experience, she said, “I’m the kind of person who builds out. I’d gone there to help the firm grow and it didn’t end up that way. Then the firm started shrinking. I thought the whole situation was disheartening; a firm with a lengthy and proud heritage was basically struggling.”

Skeptical about employment prospects for senior executives in the very “nichey” area of derivatives IT, Meyn decided to “diversify her knowledge base” by getting an MBA. “So I placed a call to Duke University because they have a great cross-continental executive MBA program. I applied and got admitted into the July 2008 class.”

To her surprise, about a week later, a recruiter called her with an amazing job opportunity: the chance to be a senior vice president of U.S. Operations at PIMCO. Said Meyn, “I’d wanted to work at PIMCO for 10 years but there hadn’t been tons of opportunities in New York for a junior executive in the process of having children. But, now, with my three children a little bit older, the timing was perfect. And it was a senior position for which I wouldn’t have to relocate. It worked out great.”

Meyn decided to take the job and pursue the MBA. Now, a year later and with only six months left until she completes the program, she is very happy she chose to do that. “Everything I am learning is brand new to me. All the different tools I’m adding to my tool kit… I feel sharper.”

No Barriers to Women in Finance and Technology

When asked what, at the beginning of her career, she found most surprising about the industry, Meyn said that it was how few women there were in finance and computer science. “You have to remember that I was coming from a women’s college. I was surprised at how few women there were because I didn’t think my classmates and I were the only women studying it,” she laughed. She pointed to her analyst class at Morgan Stanley, where there were nine men and three women. “The fact that there are so few women hasn’t really changed. There were only two female partners at Cantor Fitzgerald. In my realm (IT and derivatives), there aren’t that many women either, although the numbers are growing.”

But despite the limited numbers, Meyn sees the barriers as personal rather than institutional. “I don’t think there are exhaustive barriers outside of a woman’s control. I think many of the barriers are self-imposed. In computer science and math, at first, you are working on your own and very independently; those fields don’t afford people the opportunity to talk to others until you get to a leadership role. It seems the barriers are coming from the women themselves as some women prefer to be stay-at-home mothers or choose fields that afford more communication with people. To counterbalance these choices, firms need to do more work on retention. But there aren’t really industry-wide barriers.”

Lessons Learned: Add Arrows to Your Quiver

Meyn believes that the ability to really listen is the most important business skill to have. “The times I’ve made mistakes have usually come down to not being in touch with my stakeholders–not touching base to hear what’s going on in their minds about whether I’m fulfilling my role. I spend a lot more time now trying to listen and understand. Also, when decisions are being made, sometimes people react emotionally rather than rationally. You have to work to get behind the emotional position to see what is really going on. That’s definitely a ‘take away’ from almost any misstep I’ve made: if I had listened a little more closely, it probably could have been avoided.”

She also stressed the importance of learning new things, like what she did when she returned to school for an MBA. “It is really important to continuously put more arrows in your quiver so that you have them to pull out later when you need them. Everything is changing year after year, so if you are already advanced in your career, you definitely have to take steps not to become stale.”

“Join a trade association, take a class, learn a language, take a course on something you feel is happening out there,” advises Meyn. “Definitely learn something new and become proficient because the more diverse your arrows, the better the advancement opportunities you will have.”