Ms. Schmidt is a Senior Analyst and Managing Director at Autonomous Research in charge of the equity research coverage of Spanish and Italian banks. She is a founding member of Autonomous, a financial specialist research franchise launched in 2009 and now part of Bernstein. Ms. Schmidt has over 20 years of experience in financials with coverage including German, Austrian, Benelux and CEE banks at Merrill Lynch and Fox-Pitt, Kelton. She started her career in Citigroup’s Financial Institutions Group dealing primarily with insurance M&A. Ms. Schmidt received a BA (Hons) in European Business from Portsmouth Business School and a Diplom-Betriebswirt degree from Fachhochschule Münster in Germany.