Alumni Profiles

Richard Podpiera is Director for Data, Processing Operations and Purchase at Československá obchodní banka (ČSOB) in Prague. He earned his Masters degree in Finance from Masaryk University in Brno. In 1994 he began working at Atlantik Financial Markets (then a leading Czech equity brokerage) as an Analyst, and had become its Chief Economist by the time he left in 2001. In 1997, while still at Atlantik, he entered the PhD program at CERGE-EI. He defended his PhD thesis "Essays on the Functioning of Financial Markets" in the  summer of 2001, and immediately accepted a position as Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington DC, where he worked until 2007. He returned to the Czech Republic in 2007, working at McKinsey & Company as a Manager, then shifted to the banking sector in early 2011, when he joined ČSOB as Director of Strategy and Development and later became Executive Director for Asset and Liabilities Management. Richard Podpiera has been teaching on the CERGE-EI  Master of Arts in Applied Economics program since 2012.