The SEO Story

Opening Doors to Success

Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) London is a not-for-profit organisation that every year provides hundreds of outstanding undergraduate students from under-represented ethnic minority backgrounds the unique opportunity to gain summer internships at some of the most prestigious investment banks, professional service firms and corporate law firms in the UK.

SEO London also provides students with extensive training, mentoring and networking, linking students not only to the firms that they work with, but to opportunities and experienced professionals throughout the entire financial services industry. By doing so, SEO London equally serves the diversity recruitment policies of its sponsor firms, as well as trains a future generation of business and community leaders.

In summer 2010 SEO is supporting more than 300 BME students to complete placements at more than 25 of the City’s leading professional service firms. At least 150 BME students are completing internships with investment banks such as Barclays Capital, BAML, Citi, Goldman Sachs, HSBC IB, JP Morgan, Macquarie, Morgan Stanley, and UBS. A further 150+ BME students have been placed with partner professional service firms (Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC) and many leading magic circle and silver circle law firms (including Ashurst, Herbert Smith and Linklaters).

How We Started

SEO was originally founded in 1963 as one of New York’s first mentoring programmes for high school students. Its aim was to provide personal and educational development for students from minority ethnic groups by means of sustained support and coaching.

In 1980, SEO New York established a Career Programme on Wall Street to provide summer internship opportunities to university students in investment banking. Subsequent internship programmes have been developed in management consulting, corporate law, accounting and technology.

SEO has also expanded geographically to San Francisco, Chicago, Hong Kong and London.

SEO London was founded in February 2000 by alumni of the US programme working for investment banks in the City of London. In the last ten years the programme has grown hugely -more than 1000 students have interned through SEO London, with over 80% of SEO interns converting their summer internship experience into a full-time position with a sponsor firm.