Guillaume brings over 10 years of investment industry experience to his role as wealth manager and advisor to a select clientele of affluent Canadian families. Guillaume is a CFA charterholder and a seasoned financial engineer with extensive institutional and private client investment expertise. He works with clients to help them formulate their unique goals and objectives, and with the world-class resources at RBC, finds solutions to even the most complex financial challenges.
Recognizing many years ago that financial markets were rapidly evolving and becoming more complex, Guillaume made the decision to focus his academic studies in the field of advanced financial mathematics. Having earned a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and economics at the University of Montreal, he then went on to earn a Master of Science in Financial Engineering at HEC Montreal. His academic studies were focused in the areas of statistical methods, Monte Carlo simulation, and stochastic calculus and culminated in his thesis proposing a novel approach to valuing multivariate financial derivatives using dynamic copulas under GARCH processes. Over the course of his studies, Guillaume received numerous scholarships and awards for academic excellence. He graduated with great distinction, and received the Fernand Amesse Award for having earned the highest GPA across the entire graduate class cohort.
Guillaume began his professional career in capital markets at a leading European investment bank. He was one of about thirty people across North-America, and the only one from Canada, to be admitted into their prestigious graduate training program on Wall Street. After completing the program, Guillaume came back to Montreal to the firm’s Fixed Income, Currencies, and Commodities desk where he worked with a range of large asset management and corporate clients who sought his expertise in working with complex financial derivatives. The role was intensely rewarding as Guillaume had the opportunity to apply his financial engineering background in order to find creative solutions to a variety of real world problems in a fast paced and high pressure environment. In this role, every day was different and exciting; one day he could be structuring a $250 million option on a credit default swap index for an asset manager and the next day he could be designing a currency hedging facility for a multi-billion dollar corporation.
In 2010, Guillaume decided to further broaden his experience and move to the “buy side” of the industry. He joined PSP Investments, one of the largest pension funds in Canada, in order to help them build out their derivative modelling and valuation systems. He then accepted a position as an Analyst at Quebec’s most prestigious investment institution, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. At the Caisse, he was part of an elite group that invested across the world using sophisticated strategies such as relative value trades, merger and corporate structure arbitrage, event driven and special situations, balance sheet arbitrage, hedging, and volatility trading. Spending his days scouring financial markets, researching industries and analyzing companies from across the world in search of overlooked profit opportunities, his time at the Caisse allowed him to deepen his understanding of investing on a global scale, across asset classes, and how to construct world-class investment portfolios.
Having worked on the institutional side of the business for many years, Guillaume became aware of the demand for his unique skillset in the area of private wealth management. In 2015, he joined RBC Dominion Securities where he established his practice working with a limited number of affluent families and helping them to steward their wealth across generations. With a deep expertise in risk management, Guillaume provides clients with peace of mind knowing that their portfolio is prudently invested.
Guillaume lives in Montreal and enjoys spending his free time with his wife Mala and their children William and Elizabeth. He is a member of the Montreal CFA Society and the CFA Institute.