Tiger’s Anastasia Zaburunova Recognized in SFNet’s ‘Women in Secured Finance’

Anastasia Zaburunova joined Tiger Group in 2013 as a financial analyst for the Appraisal Division. After developing and refining her skills within the team, she transitioned to Retail Restructuring, Advisory and Disposition Services. Working alongside executive management, Anastasia supports Tiger’s restructuring and consulting expertise within consumer retail verticals by conducting comprehensive analyses of clients’ current positions and developing decisive strategic and operational plans based on client needs. As a part of Tiger’s Advisory practice, she participates in helping healthy companies implement financial and operational improvement solutions that unlock value and produce long-term-oriented, quantifiable results.

Under Anastasia’s direct leadership, Tiger is building upon decades of industry experience and advancing current and prospective client knowledge of the ABL landscape by leveraging the newest Business Intelligence technology, which delivers more granular insights faster than ever before and helps investigate new opportunities within the field based on shifting industry trends.

Prior to joining Tiger, Anastasia was a Mutual Fund Pricing Specialist at State Street Bank in Boston where she was responsible for the execution and reporting of net asset values for her clients’ portfolios while ensuring compliance during internal and external audits. She also served as a bilingual (Russian) Due Diligence Research Assistant at Wilson Perumal and Company in London, UK. A CFA charter holder, Zaburunova earned a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, summa cum laude.

What advice would you offer to women just starting out in the industry?

Turn being new into an advantage: ask clarifying questions about the field; talk to various members of the team to get a broader perspective of the job; get to know cross-functional teams you’d be collaborating with. Aim to understand the process, key players, and their motives, and the expertise in details will come. Most importantly, find your style and embrace it – there is never such a thing as an ideal opportunity or setting, so make the opportunity fi t for you by working with what you have and building from what’s given using the tools and skills that are available. To quote Susan Cain: “The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, and insight — to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply.”

Studies have shown women are reluctant to tout their accomplishments in the workplace. What advice would you give to help women be more comfortable with speaking up?

Very often, the best ideas are held back because they are innovative, creative and perhaps controversial. Building the confidence to share those ideas comes with experience; however, no one knows you better than yourself. Learn to embrace your style: for example, a quiet type might use extra time to prepare in order to feel more confident, while someone more outgoing by nature could use a longer Q&A session at the end of the meeting. Knowing your audience and learning how to tell good stories (descriptive, including practical examples) to accompany the ideas are also very important when it comes to being more comfortable with sharing a concept or an accomplishment. During a performance review, it’s often challenging to speak of personal victories. Approach it by distinguishing a team effort from a personal contribution and by giving credit to your colleagues where it’s due while building a story of a personal impact on a given task. Inevitably, there will be people who disagree with you – take the criticism as an opportunity to improve the product you’ve been working on. Shift your focus from “I’m not ready to speak up” to “I want to share my ideas, and I’ll learn by doing it.”

What do you know now that you wish you knew in the beginning of your career?

Expertise doesn’t come with doing the same tasks repeatedly. It develops during challenging times, when your skills get pressure tested. Challenges are opportunities to excel. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. In a data-driven environment of secured lending, you will never have all the data points you need to make a decision, and you will rarely have enough time. Use sound assumptions, learn how to back them up with the facts available at the time, give a range of values if an accurate value is not attainable at the time, and offer scenarios when an exact construct of the problem will not be provided. Sometimes getting to the answer is less important than the process itself, and the questions that arise during the process of learning.