Will de Lucy and the trouble with a perfect CV

Will de Lucy got a 2:2 from the University of Leeds. On a trading desk, he found himself working alongside a mechanical-engineering graduate from Imperial who had a first. Their styles were different. His profit and loss, he recalled, was no worse. The market had apparently neglected to ask for their transcripts.

It is a small story with a long afterlife. De Lucy would go on to co-found AmplifyME, a company that lets students step into simulated finance roles and lets employers examine how they perform. The essential question running through his career is wonderfully awkward for anyone with a filing cabinet full of applications: how much ability gets missed when the paperwork comes first?

He has approached that question as a trader, a teacher and a chief executive. Each role offers a different vantage point. A trader sees a decision meet its consequences. A teacher watches someone learn to make a better one. An employer has to decide whom to trust with the opportunity to begin.

A 2:2 meets the trading desk

De Lucy dates the start of his trading career to 2002. He worked in fixed income before building the company with Piers Curran in 2009. The contrast between his university result and his subsequent trading performance became part of his argument about talent. Academic accomplishment was one kind of evidence; practical judgement could supply another.

His recollection of the Imperial graduate is useful precisely because it allows both people to be capable. There is no need to downgrade the colleague’s first to make room for de Lucy’s 2:2. Two routes, two approaches, and a performance measure that could accommodate both. Recruitment becomes more interesting when it has room for that possibility.

By 2015, Amplify was offering trader-training programmes that moved from concepts into application and review. De Lucy also described sitting down with promising participants to discuss where they wanted to work and how to present their experience. The practical task and the career conversation were already close neighbours.

Returning to Leeds with a different kind of exam

There is a pleasing circularity to de Lucy returning to Leeds to lead finance training. The former student was back with a platform described as a flight simulator for financial roles. Students could try asset management, investment banking, market-making and trading, then receive feedback on their strengths and weaknesses.

The bootcamp lasted five days and formed part of a module concerned with practical skills. That gave the exercises a place within the students’ education, rather than leaving career preparation as something to squeeze around it. De Lucy was bringing the work into the curriculum of his own university.

One participant, Daniel Stringer, won the ReTrader simulation, which allowed students to engage with recent Financial Times news. It is a useful detail: a newspaper article becomes material for a decision. The distance between knowing what happened and deciding what to do about it suddenly gets much shorter.

The attraction for a student extends beyond winning. Trying several roles offers a way to compare their demands. An impressive job title is rather less informative than an afternoon spent discovering what the job asks of you. A simulation can give a career choice some texture before an application makes it sound inevitable.

“Markets don’t follow textbook rules.”

Will de Lucy

His connection to higher education also runs through City, where his studies concerned Environmental Technology and Energy Economics. In 2020, the university reported a £67,200 donation from him to help broaden access to practical finance training. Amplify was also sponsoring places for 20 City students on its summer internship training programme that year.

These were concrete ways to act on a familiar complaint about opportunity. People who have never encountered the work need a chance to encounter it. De Lucy’s contribution placed practical experience within reach of students before their applications had been sorted into promising and unpromising piles.

The candidate behind the interview

By 2022, the recruitment use of simulations had a clear institutional expression. Morgan Stanley and AmplifyME were extending a programme that put students into the roles of investment banks and hedge funds. Participants had different objectives, traded with one another and encountered market shocks. Their choices generated performance data.

Successful participants could progress to more training and a faster route towards Summer Analyst opportunities. De Lucy’s observation was that a candidate’s ability to perform could exceed their ability to convey it in an interview. A nervous answer and a capable decision could belong to the same person.

This is where his own university story acquires a second life. A recruitment process needs to decide which evidence deserves attention. De Lucy had experienced a gap between a credential and a result. His company was giving employers another opportunity to examine that gap in applicants.

There is also a question of sequence. Students get an experience of the work; employers get evidence from that experience. Each side learns something before making a larger commitment. The student can reconsider the role, and the employer can reconsider the student. For a process that often begins with guesswork dressed in formal clothes, that is an appealing exchange.

The next trade is a new decision

To understand the teacher inside the chief executive, it helps to look at de Lucy’s writing about trading. In 2019, he examined what happens to execution after a significant loss. Does the next decision remain disciplined, or does the previous result start doing the thinking?

He described measuring how execution changes before and after a shock, and emphasised reviewing experience so that the next trade benefits from it. A losing trade could contain something worth learning. The review mattered because the market would offer another decision, whether or not the trader had finished arguing with the last one.

That interest makes the simulator more than a final leaderboard. A sequence of choices gives a teacher something to examine with a participant. Where did the approach change? What information was available? What might be attempted differently? A result becomes an opening for a conversation about the work.

In an October 2025 article, de Lucy described assessment measures including response to news, adherence to risk limits, adaptation to changing conditions and management of open positions. The specificity matters. “Potential” can be a conveniently vague word. These measures attach it to decisions that someone actually made.

Potential keeps moving

De Lucy has also offered a revealing example from his own team. Software engineer Sophie Clark, discovered by AmplifyME while studying computer science at Nottingham Trent University in 2019, was initially reluctant to present. Later, he watched her deliver a quantitative trading simulation for Citadel and Citadel Securities interns.

What caught his attention was her development. He described seeing colleagues grow as one of the satisfactions of being a co-founder. The observation complicates any tidy notion that potential can be captured once, filed away and consulted forever. Someone who hesitates today may be leading the room after practice.

It is an instructive concern for a company built around assessment. The assessment happens at a moment in time; the person continues. Training, experience and the chance to take on a challenge all remain part of the story. De Lucy’s public celebration of Clark places that continuing development alongside the initial search for ability.

A new investor, an old question

In March 2026, Northcote Equity announced its investment in AmplifyME. The company had grown to a reported community of more than 300,000 students across over 100 countries, with a portfolio of more than 250 simulations. The investment was intended to support international expansion, institutional partnerships and further development of the technology.

Seventeen years is a substantial interval to spend working on a question. The setting has changed during that time. De Lucy now discusses the difficulty employers face when AI-generated applications make it harder to judge a candidate’s actual ability. The application can become more fluent while the underlying hiring decision remains unresolved.

His response has a familiar shape: put people into role-specific work and examine what they do. In his public account of a recruitment workshop, he argued that live simulations could give employers verified performance evidence at scale. The original concern about polished paperwork has acquired a new technological setting.

There is a restraint worth keeping in view. A simulation gives a person an opportunity to demonstrate something in a particular environment. The employer still has a decision to make, and the candidate still has a career to build. De Lucy’s own path suggests how much can happen after the first piece of evidence has been collected.

The Leeds graduate with a 2:2 became a trader, then returned to the classroom carrying a different way to show ability. Today he runs a company that asks students to make decisions before employers have finished making theirs. Somewhere in that sequence, a person who looks ordinary on paper gets the chance to become more interesting.