Alumnus Working for a Chinese Multinational Banking Company

Prior to business school, Patrick Liu (MBA’17) worked for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), a job that took him from Beijing to Dubai and Milan. Shortly after completing his MBA at Georgetown McDonough, he was promoted to lead the ICBC’s trade finance team in New York. 

In his new role, Liu covers the Brazilian market. During the Global Business Experience (GBE), he worked to develop a market entry strategy for a Brazilian investment firm specializing in non-performing loans. He recently shared his experiences Business Because.

On Choosing Georgetown McDonough

Several Chinese companies are going overseas. The ICBC supports them a lot, but there’s still a gap between them and the local business environments. To help them, they need someone who understands not only local environments but also Chinese companies.

So, I thought I should get an MBA at Georgetown to become ‘global-ready.’ The school has a great reputation in China, and the GBE is a shining example of the MBA program as a whole. Not every MBA program offers that kind of opportunity.

On the Global Business Experience

At the end of the project, we had a presentation that was only supposed to last for 45 minutes. It lasted over three hours! They had so many questions for us.

We worked on the project for almost four months, meeting two or three times a week. We put in a lot of effort, but as a student, I was afraid that they wouldn’t take us seriously. In the end, we found they were very serious about our recommendations and they loved our ideas. It made the whole thing so meaningful to me.

During our week in São Paulo, we also visited Natura, the biggest cosmetics company in Brazil, and the airplane manufacturer Embraer, the third largest in the world, which were both impressive!

On His Post-MBA career

Before business school, I had worked in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. The first time I had worked in Latin America was with the GBE. I learned a lot from the GBE experience about the Brazilian market and people that help me in my work now.

This also was my first real experience of consulting. Now, I understand what being a consultant is really like. If, in five years’ time, I decide to go back to China, I might start to think about consulting as a career option to help Chinese banks go overseas. The GBE will definitely help me in job interviews.

Read the full article on Business Because.