Stephen Norman spent 20 years at the forefront of investment banking IT, facing industry turbulence, from the rise and fall of the dotcoms, the destruction of 911 and the banking collapse of 2008. He has worked in financial centres across the world – from London and New York, to Hong Kong and Tokyo – and has fulfilled a range of high powered roles including Chief Technology Officer at Merrill Lynch and an unusually long 7 year stint as CIO of RBS Global Markets. In 2012, he left the world of finance to focus on his writing.Trading Down is Stephen’s first novel.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing journey?
I’m a scientist, really. I’ve always been interested in how things work. I was good at maths and physics at school, and hopeless at languages. Except for English. For as long as I can remember, I have been reading and writing. When I was a child, I wrote terrible adventure stories. At college it was essays. In my 20s I started a software company and I did the design, the manuals, the business plans and all the marketing literature and advertising. I’ve written technical books. In my second career, doing IT in banks, I have started a whole string of novels based on my experiences. Trading Down is the first one to be published.
If you had to give an elevator pitch for Trading Down, what would it be?
It’s a book about a bank which is under attack from a cyber-terrorist. Our protagonist, Chris Peters, figures that out, but no-one else believes him. Intertwined with his personal struggles (at work and at home), is a tragedy that happened years before, in Yemen. At the climax of the book, as the bank is a few minutes away from destruction, the two stories and the two protagonists come together.
