Grace Baylis

Professional Experience

Intro

Although I’m not actively looking, I’m starting to think about my next role. I have two primary areas of focus.

Firstly, I am passionate about sport. I am particularly interested in the player relations or investment side of professional and college sports. I am especially excited about women’s sports and believe we are still at the beginning of significant progress in this area.

Secondly, part of what I love about my role now is the capital formation / fundraising side. I’d like to continue this piece in my next role.

Please see resume as of May 2024.

Fractal Agriculture

Chief of Staff & Capital Markets Lead: August 2024 – Present

Fractal Agriculture is a regenerative row crop farmland investment fund based in San Francisco. I joined as one of the earliest team members and have built the capital markets and investor relations function from the ground up.

My work spans two main areas. Firstly on the capital markets side, I lead all fundraising for the FARM Fund (our inaugural fund). That means managing the full LP lifecycle: sourcing, nurturing, due diligence, DDQ responses, side letter negotiation, onboarding, and ongoing investor communications. Raising for a first-time fund, a first-time product, and a first-time founder requires a particular kind of persistence and creativity, and it’s been some of the most rewarding work I’ve done.

On the Chief of Staff side, I serve as the right hand man to the CEO – providing as much leverage as possible. Tactically this means – overseeing fund and company operations and compliance, coordinate across our service providers (fund admin, legal, audit, tax, compliance), and running special projects that don’t fit neatly anywhere else.

Royal Bank of Canada

Senior Associate: March 2022 – Feb 2024

As the third employee on the US Strategy team, I helped grow the team to over eight members under the leadership of Debraj Ghosh.

I worked on a variety of projects, including US Board Strategy (twice), Risk Strategy, Commercial Banking Strategy and Loan Reallocation, and Private Banking. See the detailed project library below.

I also led the DEI and Culture team, defining a bottom-up culture through peer interviews, establishing the ‘DEI Hub’ and diversity metrics dashboard, and publishing the LGBTQ+ series.

Project Library

US Annual Board Strategy

  • Partnered with executive stakeholders to create and drive the strategy and annual planning of the 2022 & 2023 Enterprise Strategy
  • Created Enterprise wide scorecard for OKRs and client metrics

Commercial Banking Strategy

  • Created loan reallocation model for the Commerical buiness line. Objective to maxmize revenue and ROE with minimal loan book growth
  • Presented findings to executive leadership, reallocation suggestions were accepted and implemented
  • Worked with sub-business leads to pivot straregy and OKRs as necessary

Risk Strategy

  • Led a data-driven analysis of inefficiencies for Risk team
  • Prioritised suggestions based on forecasted impact; execution resulting in reduced response times, the elimination of multiple steps within the review process, and the mitigation of select risks to regulators

Private Banking Strategy

  • Conducted a detailed peer review and market research on the private banking space
  • Created a customer segmentation analysis; hosted a senior leadership workshop to share insights and ideas and align on three target client profiles

M&A Considerations

  • Created detailed M&A synergies model for target acqusitions. Model considered total revenue and cost synergies over 10 years
  • Conducted expert insight interviews surrounding potential target

US Growth Opportunities Analysis

  • Evaluated enterprise wide growth opportunties to drive substantial revenue impact
  • Modelled revenue impact and shared prioritized list of potential oporutnities
  • Segmented opportunities based on ability to execute, right to win, and forecasted revenue

BNP Paribas

Senior Analyst: July 2020 – March 2022

Joined BNP Paribas in 2020, worked as part of the small strategy consulting team with Bank of the West

Worked across the Bank on a variety of topics and business lines, including a Bank-wide IT Strategy, Commercial Banking Underwriting resource review, and 5-year Strategy refresh