Earlier in his career, Mr. Persaud was a hedge fund manager at GAM, and a senior executive in fixed-income departments at UBS, JP Morgan, and State Street. For a decade, he was ranked by institutional investors worldwide in the top three of foreign exchange/fixed-income analysts. He is noted for developing the risk appetite index, being an early critic of the risk models used by banks, and an early proponent of bank stress tests. 

After the Global Financial Crisis Persaud was asked to help in a regulatory capacity. He was one of the leading proponents of macro-prudential regulation and more maturity-sensitive measures of bank risk. He was appointed Chair of the Warwick Commission and the Regulatory sub-committee of the UN Commission on Financial Reform. He was a member of the UK Government's Risk and Audit Committee, the French Presidential Commission on Financial Reform, Visiting Researcher at the ECB, and co-author of one of the leading reports on the crisis and its aftermath: The Fundamental Principles of Financial Regulation.

Professor Persaud has extensive experience in emerging markets. He was a senior member of the team that negotiated the Barbados sovereign debt restructuring and issued natural-disaster and pandemic-linked government bonds. He is a noted proponent of state-dependent sovereign securities such as GDP and oil-linked bonds. He was Visiting Scholar at the IMF and was appointed Chairman of the Commission on the Economy by the CARICOM Heads of Government (2019-2021), and Special Envoy to the Prime Minister of Barbados on banking and finance (2020-2021).

He has been an expert witness in a dozen court and arbitration cases. These have primarily involved the role of regulatory bodies, including matters relating to the Greek and Cypriot bank resolutions and the part nationalization of Lloyds Bank, and the valuation of financial instruments, including valuation matters relating to Lehman Brother's resolution, the FX-fixing scandal, and in large market transactions.