Ryan Reisert / McGill Tribune

On March 1, McGill University held the inauguration ceremony for the Alphonse-Desjardins trading room on the second floor of the Bronfman Building. The event drew McGill students, McGill alumni who work for Desjardins, senior McGill administrators, and Desjardins employees who were either directly involved with the project or attending in support of the longstanding relationship between the Desautels faculty of management and the association of credit unions.

The focal point of the innovative Alphonse-Desjardins trading room is student access to expensive and esteemed Bloomberg software.

This new trading room will serve as a classroom during the day and a computer lab by night. Finance professor Sebastian Betermier and his students will be the ones primarily working and learning in this new space. Betermier said he looks forward to working with this useful learning tool.

“[The trading room] enhances opportunities … to visualize something. We can go on Bloomberg and see real data,” Betermier said. “All machines [are] equipped with a fake portfolio manager [and students will be] given fake money that they have to invest.”

Kyra Azzopardi, Management Undergraduate Society VP Academic, raved about the new software and how convenient the trading room makes it.

“Bloomberg is a program that gives market news. You can look up a company on its ticker and see its market value,” Azzopardi said. “It’s a really expensive, valuable software program … and now if I’m doing a group project I can just go in there and use it.”

In the last year, the Bronfman second floor underwent a dramatic change from being a traditional business library to the new “Business Intelligence Centre” and student hub.

Desjardins Group, Canada’s leading co-operative financial group, donated 11 group study rooms, new computers, study space, and a state-of-the-art trading room and software. The organization has also pledged to donate $1 million over the next five years for the trading room, coupled with securities trading and technology to support the facility. 

This donation by Desjardins will help McGill’s finance students gain a competitive edge, Azzopardi pointed out.

“A student is only as good as the resources that student has assessable to them,” she said. “Now, as a student, I get to use Bloomberg every day, and that’s going to prepare me better for the job I get. It builds our prestige … builds better resources for our students, and makes them more competitive for the job market.”

The relationship with Desjardins over the years has opened doors for students for internships and full time employment. Desjardins offered $13 million in scholarship money in 2011 alone, the most university scholarships money that any other company gave a university in Quebec that year. Louis Daniel Gauvin, Desjardin Senior Vice President and general manager, and a McGill management graduate, agrees that the relationship with the faculty of management has been mutually beneficial.

“[Desjardins] strongly    believe[s] that education is key to our sustainsable prosperity in a global competitive world,” Gauvin said. “Desjardins has a great story to tell, not well known, but having more people thinking of Desjardins, and attracting the talent in our group, we will benefit greatly from it. And there’s definitely very good talent here at McGill.”