Ricardo Almeida
The career of Ricardo Almeida, chief executive of Bradesco Asset Management (Bram) since March, has followed a twisting path. But perhaps the most important turn caused him to leave an MBA course at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
“I’m a drop-out – like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates,” he jokes, in a meeting room of the building that was once called the HSBC Tower – Bram’s headquarters since Bradesco’s acquisition of the local HSBC business in 2016.
Employees of the hands-on chief executive say that Almeida is a strong advocate for people taking personal responsibility for their own careers. Perhaps this is because Almeida has taken different tracks in his own career. The decision to drop out of MIT is one example.
Almeida had moved to the US to do an MBA before pursuing a career in management consulting. His career choices have repeatedly coincided with important historical moments. He started the course nine days before the attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, something that radically altered the dynamics of the US recruitment market. Almeida therefore spread his net wider than planned pitches to consulting groups for summer jobs and got an offer from Cargill to develop a business plan for the launch of a hedge fund focussed on Latin American equities trading.
