What does Vienna and filmmaking have in common? Aside from being a location often sought after by film crews, Vienna and film are also what connect the guests on the new episode of the Women Leaders Beyond Borders podcast series - Kamila Makhmudova, Chief Financial Officer and Member of the Management Board at Raiffeisen Bank, Czech Republic and Alexia Alexiou, Chief Risk Officer at VIG Re.
You can watch the episode on YOUTUBE or listen to the episode on SPOTIFY and APPLE PODCAST.
Greek-born Alexia Alexiou studied risk management at the University of Piraeus. However, she also spent part of her Erasmus studies in the Danube metropolis and now works for the reinsurance company VIG Re, a member of the Vienna Insurance Group. Kamila Makhmudova is originally from Uzbekistan but became a globetrotter during her studies. After several stints working in different parts of the world, she longed to settle down and has been a member of the team at Raiffeisen Bank Austria since 2007. She worked in Vienna until December 2021, when she became CFO of the Czech division.
That successful female executives have spent part of their lives in a major European metropolis may not be so surprising. What is less common, however, is that they have also both encountered the filmmaking profession, although their focus is in a completely different direction. „My partner is a filmmaker, among other things, for the past ten or 11 years. Nevertheless, I'm still completely out of my comfort zone in front of camera,“ Alexia says. She admits that the artistic creativity associated with the film genre can act as a kind of valve or counterbalancing element against the stress of the responsibility of risk assessment, but she herself feels better in nature while releasing pressure.
She does not complain about the lack of creativity or opportunities to exercise her own creativity in her profession. „I´m lucky that my work is not repetitive in a way that always the same thing needs to be recycled and done again and again,“ she says adding that there are enough opportunities because VIG Re is entering a process of transformation, where the area of risk assessment will require a great deal of creativity.
Kamila Makhmudova is even closer to film, as both her parents are involved in this profession. „My father is a film director, my mom is a scriptwriter and in addition, they work together. The work never ended with their office. They came home, and I still remember sometimes they had a professional argument. It was like, Kamila, sit here and you have to decide who is right. And I said, oh, no! It's like asking, who do you love, mom or dad? It was a big part of my childhood and still is, because they're still filming, but I have very little to do with it today. Former, my mom was taking me to some film sets, and when they needed a girl for something, they were putting me in, which I hated.
Like Alexia, she doesn't think she suffers from a lack of creativity in her high managerial position. In her opinion, everyone is the creator not only of their own happiness, but also of how their work looks. „I think you can make your world creative yourself. You can make it very kind of formal and very structured, very dry, or you can make it creative. You can always look at the things in a different way. You can always challenge yourself and say, how can I do it differently? What do I not see? How do I try to tackle find the solutions differently? I think it's creativity, of course, somehow defined by what you do, but it also defined how you want to approach it. I always try to exercise it,“ she concluded.
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