The general manager of First Citizens Asset Management strides into the room, crisp, engaging and looking awfully familiar.

Settling into his office in Port of Spain, he looks like someone you might have met somewhere before but you just can't put your finger on it.

He introduces himself and because of the familiarity of his face and name the inevitable question comes, "Are you related to Ken Valley?"

"He's my father,'' he says, matter-of-factly.

As if he has answered that question many times before and expects it.

Kurt Valley is the last son of Kenneth Valley (from his first marriage), the former deputy political leader of the PNM who died last year of cancer.

And while the younger Valley describes himself as a political junkie, devouring news on his iPad and from a legion of magazines, he says his interest in politics stops there.

His father, he says, paid too high a toll.

"It is not a very thankful job. In politics, no one really cares, you do the job, you do it as hard as you can, you help the country. My father was very dedicated to the government of Trinidad and Tobago, he made a huge sacrifice," he said.

Although they were close, the younger Valley did not grow up with his father.

The 40-year-old Valley was raised in Canada and was educated at the Schulich School of Business at York University, Toronto where he obtained a degree in business administration, before returning to Trinidad and Tobago.

Valley settled here quickly, beginning his professional career at Citibank.

While there, he enjoyed a birdseye view of how business is conducted in the real world and his four-year corporate climb, from a management associate to assistant vice president, ended with his return to Canada and second stint at Schulich where he earned his MBA.

Upon his return to Trinidad in 2002, Valley secured a job as a manager in the merchant bank at First Citizens.

As he advanced in his career, he was promoted to the bank's corporate planning unit where he focused on strategic initiatives, mergers and acquisitions, as well as developing a market risk management framework for the group.

When the position of general manager of First Citizens Asset Management became vacant, Valley was ready.

He was one of several candidates applying for the job.

At the end of the search and interview process, the position was his; the only condition being that he meet specific financial and strategic targets.

In what was a very dismal economy, Valley surpassed them all. Has he been lucky?

"Extraordinarily," says the father of two.

But it is clear it didn't happen without hard work, tenacity and maybe even some planetary alignment.

"At First Citizens Asset Management I understood the people, I understood the business, I understood how to contain market risk, so it is as if all of my training came together to do this job. I knew I could do this job."

Under his watch, First Citizens Asset Management doubled profits in his first year and recently celebrated its $10 billion mark in assets under management.

Like most executives in the financial services sector, Valley is preoccupied with the return of the market.

As the news of international financial instability continues, Valley maintains that the fundamentals of investing remain the same.

"Risk and return are still two sides of the same coin, but just as important there is also the risk of not planning even in these challenging times. Investors need to develop their portfolios not only locally but globally."

With regard to collapsed insurance giant CLICO and the proposed solution that seeks to strike a balance between the needs of CLICO investors and the taxpayers, Valley maintains that the silver lining is that investors will have access to high credit quality zero coupon securities that will now come to market.

"This provides an efficient reference point for the market and once these securities are actively traded on the bond exchange everyone will be able to see how the yield curve is changing over time." Valley maintains that the ability to reference an external price that everyone agrees upon as being the value of a security, allows for the creation of financial products that reference these rates.

"In real terms what that means is that if I want to reduce the interest rate risk of one of my portfolios, I can now approach any local bank to price an interest rate swap using these reference rates. Just by having these zeros, we can create a number of derivative securities that will allow us to manage portfolio risk more efficiently," he said.

Seems simple enough if only because it is what Valley does day-in and day-out; look for opportunities that strike a balance between portfolio return optimisation and risk.