When Kay McAdoo joined Davy in April 1989, it was a different world.

Today she is an associate director of Davy but back then she had just finished a work placement with the company, as part of a commercial course undertaken straight from school.

For a start, Davy was much smaller, with just 140 staff, compared with the more than 900 people it employs today. McAdoo worked in equity settlements, joining a team of 13, mostly, like her, young women.

What she remembers most is the “endless paperwork”. Her job involved processing share certificates as they were delivered to the firm and filling out ownership transfer forms.

Back then such settlements took around 10 days to execute, compared with just two today.

All were undertaken to a background whir of telexes and fax machines generating endless paper printouts.

The firm had only recently introduced computers, from Honeywell. “They were still very new and people were just getting to grips with them,” she recalls.

At that stage, technology wasn’t about generating data-driven insights, nor even automating processes. “They were just keeping track of the paperwork,” she says.

Her team’s work was added to by the prolific and often enormous hard copy reports generated by the Dublin Stock Exchange. “We had ‘runners’ back then, who’d go down a couple of times a day to the Exchange, and also bring back various pieces of paperwork that we’d get from London too,” she explains.

Within a number of years McAdoo had progressed to the firm’s capital markets division, the area in which she specialises today.

“Email didn’t exist back then so there was constantly someone sitting at a fax machine or a telex machine, making sure all the trade confirmations were going out, putting trades together for your domestic clients and your clients abroad, and dealing with queries,” she recalls.

It was a time when Davy international client base was growing rapidly, particularly across Europe and the US. “You’d start at 8.30am and there were nights when it would be midnight before you’d be leaving, depending on what was going on,” she says.

Looking back, she doesn’t know how they did it. “It would look like insanity today, now that we are doing thousands of trades a day. It was crazy then and we did it for years – because it had to be done.”

She remembers in particular coming back to work after her honeymoon only to have a colleague look aghast at her timing. “It was the Ryanair placing,” she explains, meaning a particularly long night lay ahead as the airline made its IPO on the Dublin Stock Exchange.

As the company’s IT infrastructure was built out however, automation finally began to ease the manual burden.

Other things changed too. Back then, for example, women in Davy were expected to wear a uniform, a fate their male colleagues avoided.

In its gendering it feels remarkably old-fashioned now but at the time she found it handy.

“I was proud to wear it,” she says. “There was a summer one and a winter one and you’d get them every two years, which effectively meant a new one every year.”

It helped that the designers were typically top notch, including Henry White, she recalls. “Some were trendy, some not so trendy, and they came in every colour, with lovely scarves. The banks were all into their scarves back then.”

What wasn’t quite so handy was the fact that women wearing trousers was still pretty much verboten. “It was just a given that you weren’t allowed wear them and that if you did, you were in trouble. I remember one girl who started wore them and her boss told her at the end of her first day not to,” says McAdoo.

Thankfully, as the number of women within the organisation grew, increasingly at senior levels, that changed.

The growing number of women at senior level made it easier for those that followed them, and reflected the fact that women were becoming a growing part of Davy customer base too.

For all the hard work and long hours involved, she looks back on those early years with enormous fondness.

“We all came in at a similar age, grew up together and made lifelong friends as a result,” she says, happy to report that the graduate students Davy takes in every year continue to bond in a similar fashion. “They all go out together on Thursdays and Fridays, just as we did,” she says.