Standard Chartered is paying a lot for its senior back and middle-office employees in Singapore, whose earnings can eclipse those of counterparts at rival firms by up to $150k (US$112k). But the bank’s generosity, in particular its targeted bonus programme, is now helping new CEO Bill Winters ward off a potential exodus of risk, compliance, audit and operations staff.

Recruiters tell us that enquires from Standard Chartered’s back and middle-office employees in Singapore have been rising during a traumatic past six months, which have seen the bank announce a major restructuring plan – including the closure of its equities business – in a bid to combat tumbling profits.

But when these same job seekers find out the compensation on offer elsewhere many decide to stay put. “SCB overpays, which makes leaving difficult as it’s very hard to get a similar-paid role at Citi, HSBC or anywhere else,” says one of the recruiters who spoke to in Singapore, all of whom asked not to be named because of client confidentiality.

Unlike all its major competitors in Singapore, Stan Chart gives guaranteed “targeted bonuses” to most back and middle-office employees from VP level and above. If they reach a minimum of level three on a five-level performance scale (ie they hit their annual target), they get the bonus previously agreed, or more. “I know someone senior in operations at SCB in Singapore whose salary is S$250k [US$186k] and whose target bonus is S$150k [US$112k], so really his basic compensation is S$400k [US$298k] because like most people there he at least meets his minimum target and always gets his bonus,” says the recruiter.

He adds that most senior back and middle-office managers would need to take a compensation cut of S$50k (US$36k) to S$150k (US$112k) when joining a new bank – mid-ranking staff would need to sacrifice at least S$25k ($US18k). “No other bank in Singapore is paying over S$400k [US$298k] for senior managers – it’s ridiculous money,” he says.

Stan Chart’s lavish pay policies were first introduced around 10 years ago to enable it to recruit employees in the face of stiff competition from larger rivals such as Citi, Barclays and HSBC who were also expanding their support centres in Singapore at the time, says another Singapore-based headhunter. “They weren’t as big a brand then – to grow their support headcount they had to pay more than the others did, at all levels.”

In the past year, however, the bank’s compensation advantage has helped it retain support staff who might otherwise have been spooked by layoffs in other departments and enabled it to hire in compliance, a competitive sector where salary rises are reaching 30%. “I also think the good comp has been needed for retention to counter the more ‘political’ culture there that has developed recently and which Mr Winters will look to change,” says a third recruiter in Singapore. “When I began recruiting for the bank it was known as a very friendly, non-ego based, inclusive place to work.”

Charged with reducing costs, it remains to be seen whether CEO Winters will take the axe to targeted bonuses. Doing so in the short term seems unlikely because it may trigger an exodus of senior staff from vital risk and compliance functions. “I’ve already been approach by people – up to MD level – about leaving Stand Chart. Singaporean banks like DBS would be circling if the pay gap narrowed too soon,” says the third recruiter we spoke with. “But longer term, the days of throwing excessive cash at people will be over.”

“Stan Chart’s now on equal footing with the likes of Citi and HSBC in Singapore. It’s huge here and very committed to the country, so in the longer run once its business picks up it should be able to bring pay in line with the market and keep people on board,” adds the second headhunter.

Standard Chartered in Singapore has not yet responded to a request for comment.

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Has Deutsche Bank gone too far? We’re just asking, because following our revelation that the German bank finally increased junior salaries by up to 35% two months ago, a new pay snapshot suggests the German bank is now the most remunerative of the lot.

The figures in the chart below come from Emolument.com, the real time pay data provider. If Emolument’s right, Deutsche’s analysts are now earning $114k (£72k) all-in (salary and bonus). This compares to $110k (£70k) at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and just $81k (£51k) at Santander.

Recruiters consistently tell us that Morgan Stanley is by far the best payer when it comes to salaries alone.  Emolument’s figures suggest Deutsche is pretty generous in terms of salary and bonus combined. However, celebrations at DB may be premature – the German bank hasn’t actually paid any bonuses since hiking its salaries and it will almost certainly reduce variable pay to reflect the salary increase in the next bonus round. Before rushing to Deutsche, it’s also worth bearing in mind that the bank operates a punitive clawback policy, has high bonus deferrals and is on the verge of appointing a new CEO who is expected to be less friendly to the investment bank and is known for his miserliness.   

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If you’ve just started an internship in the investment banking division (IBD) of a large bank, you’re one step closer to securing a full-time job in arguably the most competitive areas of the business. Don’t expect an easy ride – interns in IBD work longer hours than anyone, despite recent moves to make life a little easier, and securing a full-time job is a matter of impressing consistently over the course of ten weeks.

How can you succeed? Current analysts, formerly successful IBD interns and career consultants offer this advice.

1. Remember what it is you’re being tested on

IBD internships attract elite students used to over-achieving, often meaning an over-inflated opinion of their abilities and a misinterpretation of what the bank expects. They don’t want you to be the finished article. In fact, they’re essentially a “constant assessment” of whether you have the right skills for the full-time job, according to one second year IBD analyst.

Your superiors are testing you on four things, he says.

• Your ability to manage data – understand it, summarise it and draw the correct conclusions
• Whether you can use the right tools – Excel, Powerpoint etc. These make you more efficient and are therefore incredibly important. If you don’t have these skills, you need to demonstrate an ability to learn.
• Your endless enthusiasm: Can you make yourself available 24/7? Can you demonstrate ‘passion’. If not, you’re probably not well suited for the job.
• Do you have the right interpersonal skills to get on with your team over a prolonged period of time?

2. Embrace the boring, and you will be rewarded 

Here’s a newsflash for you – interns in investment banking do not advise CEOs, nor do they really get much of an opportunity to meet clients. In fact, a lot of the work is tedious. Show the right attitude.

“Some of the tasks can be boring and repetitive: infopacks, company profiles, comparables analysis and the like,” says the analyst. “If you do well you might well end up working on an important meeting aimed at a FTSE 100 CEO, maybe pushing for a cross-border acquisition, or exploring the different financing routes across equity and debt capital markets.”

3. Stay awake, stay focused

There was a old ritual imposed on IBD interns, which in the new world of reducing working hours would never be tolerated. The ‘magic roundabout’ involves an intern getting a taxi back to his lodgings after an all nighter, having it wait for him to shower and change a shirt and then return straight back to the office again. Most banks have clamped down on this, but Goldman Sachs’ move to keep interns out of the office from midnight-7am shows that long hours are still expected.

In such circumstances, it’s difficult to bring your A-game, but it’s essential to do so. “The way you’ll impress is by consistently producing accurate work in the timeframe you are given,” says Marc Hatz, an ex-Goldman Sachs and Perella Weinberg associate who now offers advice on preparing for investment banking interviews.

4. Show knowledge when you can

As we mentioned, investment banks are not expecting the finished article, but an interest an understanding of the product area you’re working in is essential – particularly if you’re on a rotational internship.

“Being alert on what’s going on in the market always offers a chance to highlight a piece of news that other people might not have picked up on yet,” says a recent IBD intern. “A good understanding of the basics of the product also helps you demonstrate that you are not just a dumb task machine, so suggest understanding the basics of the product you cover very well as there will certainly be chances to prove it.”

5. Get the basics right 

You may be asked to fetch coffee for the team, but even here you can add value. Elsewhere, you just need to bear in mind perceptions. “Never come into the office late, no matter what time you left,” says one analyst. “And if the analysts are going to be working until 2am, don’t think it’s OK to leave at 7pm.”

6. Become an expert juggler 

Your workload will be heavy, but the bank will also expect you to complete a longer-term project at the end of your internship which tests what you have learned as well as the all-important team-working and communication skills. A key skill is being able to prioritise your work.

“When the workload becomes too heavy, speak with your team or staffer about it, and prioritize between projects. This skill is key,” says Hatz.

“I suggest not losing ground on your end of internship project, thinking it’s far away, as the working pattern can always change and a busier schedule down the road might result in a poor delivery of the end of internship project,” says the analyst. “So try to make good progress constantly, but never turn away day to day tasks because of the project, as people might think you are not able to manage workload with clearly different deadlines.”

7. Ask tough questions 

There are no stupid questions. Unless the answer could easily be found on Google. Your colleagues will expect you to ask questions on the tasks they assign you, understand them and then complete the task efficiently. Going back to them asking the same questions that could easily be answered by a quick internet search will not impress anyone.

Want to earn a giant salary in compliance? Work for an investment bank in a ‘compliance advisory’ unit. Want to earn giant pay in compliance? Go for a hedge fund that’s offering a percentage deal – and will (hopefully) follow through on it.

Working at the coal face for what has long bee one of the hottest areas of investment banking recruitment, compliance recruiters say little has changed: banks, hedge funds, asset managers are still eager to hear from compliance staff. And they’re still paying the most to the ‘advisory’ specialists who can sit down with sales and trading professionals in the front office and advise salespeople and traders how to work with products that conform to local regulations.

“You’re going to get the highest pay in compliance if you’re in product advisory,” says James Findlay, global head of compliance and risk recruitment at Selby Jennings. “That applies as much in the City of London as on Wall Street.”

While compliance advisory professionals earn more than their other compliance counterparts, they’re not so well rewarded compared to the salespeople and traders they’re helping out. A vice president (VP) level trader with around seven experience can expect a salary of £150k ($236k), plus a bonus of up to 200% (in London and at European banks globally). By comparison, Findlay says VP level compliance advisory professionals in London and on Wall Street are more likely to get £120k ($190k) all in. “You’re never going to be paid on a par with the front office.”

More promisingly, at director level, compliance recruitment firm Laurence Simons, puts average compliance advisory salaries at around £130k – considerably higher than salaries for directors in know your client (KYC) or anti-money laundering (AML), at £105k and £120k respectively.

Marnie Woolf of compliance recruitment firm Woolf & Co, says hedge funds are the best places for compliance professionals for whom pay is a priority. “There are some hedge funds that will offer compliance staff a percentage of their profits if they exceed a certain threshold,” she tells us. Those hedge funds don’t always pay out, however. Woolf recounts the sad story of one compliance professional who left his banking role for a job paying <£100k in salary at a hedge fund on the promise that he’d earn 2% of profits above a certain level. When that level was hit, the unfortunate compliance professional was let go…

More assuredly, recruiters say there’s strong demand for contract compliance staff in senior reporting roles. Duncan Jeffrey at recruitment firm Compliance Professionals says senior compliance staff who have experience of CF10A reporting (reporting on client assets) can make up to £800 a day in London. “Every financial institution requires at least one expert in these roles – from a one man band all the way to the big players,” says Jeffrey, “And there’s a limited supply of these professionals in the market.”

Boutique investment banks continue to eat larger firms’ lunch. In the first half of 2015, they accounted for 29% of all M&A deals – and this is down to size of the deals they’re working on, not the volume.

In a world where, according to a new report from EY, large investment banks are likely to turn towards advisory functions as they pull back from capital intensive trading functions, this could be considered a worry. But it’s also an opportunity – these boutique firms have been hiring.

As we pointed to previously, both Centerview Partners – the highest ranked boutique in ninth place according to new information from Dealogic – and Robey Warshaw have been bulking up their junior ranks as the amount of work they’ve taken on has increased. Robey Warshaw has continued this, taking on Chris Daly, a former associate in UBS’s TMT team earlier this month.

Centerview has advised both Johnson Controls on a potentially $20bn spinout of its car parts unit and Time Warner Cable on its $55bn acquisition by Cable Communications, a deal that LionTree Advisors was also part of.

For juniors, boutiques are arguably a better place to work. Marc Hatz, a former associate at both Goldman Sachs and Moelis & Co, says: “Your responsibilities will be wider in boutiques where they can expect to have increased interactions with senior colleagues and clients.”

In the past 12 months, if we go by the Dealogic rankings, boutique investment banks have gone from relative obscurity to being prevalent in the top 20. These are the best six firms to work for now, it suggests.

Interviewing at a hedge fund can be an unpleasant experience. Known for testing candidates’ resilience under pressure, hedge funds hire comparatively few people. Therefore, they’re either looking for raw potential, or for someone with a track record that speaks for itself.

However, according to hedge fund professionals and specialist recruiters, there are several types of interview questions that are practically guaranteed to come up every time. Here’s how to ensure you’re prepared.

1. Walk me through an idea you’d invest in

If you’re applying for an analyst or portfolio manager role with a hedge fund, you’ll need ideas. How can you develop ideas? Well, Bridgewater Associates lays out its theory of forming investment opinions in its 123-page principles document.

Hedge funds won’t want you to come up with boring ideas: it’s no good pitching AAPL, for example.

“What they don’t want to hear is why a huge commonly followed stock is your choice (unless you’re going against the consensus),” says Anthony Keizner, managing director at headhunters Glocap. “They want to hear good business logic and why the stock is over or under-valued, what the market is missing and what the catalyst is for the stock to hit your price target.”

The chances are that you’ll be asked to quantify the case for investing in a company or industry as well as trying to explain why the market is wrong about a particular stock. Before you step in, make sure you know everything there is to know about three different investment ideas and strategies. Tailor your ideas to the fund you’re applying to (it’s no good pitching emerging market stocks to a bond fund). Try to have one idea which involves going long and and another that involves going short. And be prepared to justify your ideas to the nth degree.

2. Why are you interested in a career in investing?

This is more aimed at junior recruits and suggests that it’s another opportunity to show what a great trader or portfolio manager you could become. In reality, it’s more of a ‘cultural fit’ question, a chance to prove that a career in a hedge fund is for you and that you’re in investing for the long-haul.

“You need to be succinct and demonstrate a passion for investing. You might have started trading on your personal account, or gained work experience from an early age,” says Barry Seath, managing director of hedge fund focused recruiters Mirage Recruitment.

3. Tell me about yourself / Walk me through your resume

Yes, this is an obvious question generic to any job interview, but it’s also a chance to sell yourself to the hedge fund. They want you to prove, by going through your skills and experience, that you can evaluate businesses, easily navigate your way through financial statements and analyst reports and, most importantly, have enough ability to be trusted with a large amount of money to put behind your trading ideas.

This should be a short pitch – MBAs, known for creating a process for every aspect of their job search, suggest 90 seconds for the concise version and three minutes when there’s potential for expansion.

4. How many golf balls are there in China?

The days of brain-teasers, designed to test candidates’ mathematical reasoning skills, are slowly coming to an end in hedge funds. “It’s been a while since clients have asked candidates how many glasses of water it takes to fill the Atlantic ocean,” says Seath. “What they want to see is logical and punchy answers, often with a mathematical reasoning, throughout.”

Essentially what this means is that if you linger too long on a point, or go off on a tangent that is likely to present a complex argument, the interviewer will pick up on this. Expect to be interrupted, have your thought processes questioned and argument torn apart. This, you’ve probably guessed, is less about the answer and more how you handle a stressful situation. The secret is to remain cool.

These types of questions come in a few guises, with one hedge fund CEO asking a candidate ‘How much money do I have in my pocket?’  After weighing up the pros and cons of answering based on assumptions and ethics, he instead went with ‘$500 +/- $500 ($0-1,000)’, which was the correct answer to a seemingly impossible question. The secret, say hedge fund professionals, is to always fall back on maths if a question seems a little leftfield.

5. Quantitative questions and programming-related questions

Finally, you need to be prepared for quant-related questions – especially (and self-evidently) if you’re applying to a fund with a quantitative focus. You might be asked, for example, to create a declarative algorithm from a recursive algorithm. You might be asked to reverse a string. You might be asked to estimate the square root of 5, to write a function that determines whether a number is prime or not, and to describe the logic you’d use if you were creating a chess game in Java.

Brush up on your programming languages before the interview. Especially if you’re a major in computer science.

6. Why this fund?

Finally, you’ll need to know everything that’s humanly possible about the fund you’re interviewing with. Hedge funds can be very secretive, but you can usually find information on sites like Hedge Fund Intelligence or Opalesque.

At the very least, you should have an idea of the hedge fund’s assets under management, sector focus and strategy. It will help if you also know the names of its top trader(s) and the nature of its investor base. Try talking to some other employees (or past employees) before the interview. Ask them what made it a good place to work.   

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Is Goldman Sachs consolidating its position and hiring in ‘top talent’ from rivals? We’re just asking because it’s hired a lot of people over the past month, almost all of whom have come from other banks and some of whom have accepted a demotion for the privilege of moving.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Register belies Goldman’s hiring appetite in London. In the past month, the firm has registered around 16 new people in the front office, almost all of them hired from outside.

Goldman’s new staff suggest a focus on the markets business. They include: David Barnett, a rates trader from UBS who joins as an associate; Andrew Moyons, an pan equity salesman who was previously a VP at Morgan Stanley; Simon Creeger, a quantitative trading specialist who previously spent seven years at J.P. Morgan; Conor Daly, a former assistant vice president (AVP) in FX sales at Barclays Capital; Tobias Stern, a former vice president in structured sales at Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Ben Coward Talbot, a former executive director in electronic equities trading at Morgan Stanley; Chloi Karyda, a former analyst in index strategies at Barclays and Samad Javadi, a rates structurer from Barclays.

While some of these new recruits achieved promotions in their Goldman moves (Karyda went from analyst to associate, Stein went from VP to ED), others took a step back. After four years at Barclays, Daly was an AVP. At Goldman, he joins as an associate.

There are a handful of junior investment banking professionals among Goldman’s recent additions. For example, Bradley Jacobs, a former manager at Anglo American Thermal Coal, joined as an associate after completing an MBA at INSEAD. Ed Stephenson joined as a natural resources analyst after spending two years at Nomura.

Goldman didn’t comment on its new London recruits. Since January, registered headcount at the firm in the UK has fallen from 2,121 to 2,086 people.

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Investment banks are at a crossroads. The culture remains geared towards bonuses, despite regulatory and political pressure to curb this, reputational issues abound and shareholders continue to complain about return on equity that refuses to budge upwards.

Something has to change. Many have pointed this out, and in a wide-ranging report on the future of investment banking, EY has come up with a list of suggestions on how the industry needs to develop. Needless to say, this has implications for employment prospects and pay packets.

1. Competition is on all sides

Investment banks are competing with hedge funds for both traders and trading revenues, they’re facing competition from private equity firms for talent and boutique investment banks for advisory work. Needless to say, this has led a number of investment banks to review their business models and pull back from certain trading functions – what EY dubs “protect and survive” mode. This means fewer trading jobs, particularly in fixed income, currencies and commodities, but potentially more jobs in advisory functions.

2. Expect more banks to follow Deutsche Bank’s front office nearshoring model

Not surprisingly, EY has called for banks to assess which tasks need to be performed internally, and which can be either pooled, decentralised or outsourced entirely. Both back and front office roles can be moved out of expensive financial centres and into lower-destinations, a trend that is likely to “accelerate” in the coming years.

EY suggests that 80% of investment banking profits come from just 20% of clients and raises an interesting point about nearshoring more front office functions. Currently, banks focus on ‘high-touch’ services to a select group of clients, while shifting attention to ‘mid-tier’ clients could actually bolster revenues.

Deutsche Bank’s operation in Birmingham in the UK houses so-called ‘low touch’ traders, booking trades for over 500 smaller clients but giving them closer attention by employing cheaper staff in lower cost destinations. This has been successful so far, so expect more banks to follow this model.

3. Investment banks need to start attracting a different type of person

J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs have both reacted to rhetoric over investment banking compensation by saying they will continue to pay for performance. In spite of the fact that pay incentives have been linked to recent scandals in the investment banking sector, few banks are shifting compensation towards ‘softer’ performance factors.

EY says this needs to change from the outset. Don’t throw more money at juniors to convince them that investment banking is a good place to launch their career. Instead “institutions should explore other incentives, including internal recognition programs, mobility, secondments, education and training, as well as the time and opportunities to develop innovative ideas or work on cross-functional teams.” Good luck with that.

4. Investment banks will differentiate themselves through technology, not people

Finance is all about human capital, or so the conventional wisdom goes. Get the right people on board and they’ll bring in the business for you. This message is changing – investment in technology is the way forward.

“In a more commoditized risk-averse future, the capacity of staff to innovate to drive revenues will be limited. Instead, cost-to-serve, speed of execution and quality of service will distinguish the leading investment banks,” says EY.

Given that investment banks are increasingly shifting tech roles to lower cost destinations, or turning to off the shelf solutions to keep costs down, this isn’t great news. Three quarters of tech costs are spent on maintenance of existing systems: “the scale of the challenge for investment banks is so great that they will continue to be forced to do more with less,” says EY.

Brevan Howard is hiring graduates. So says Bloomberg, which claims the hedge fund has set up something that sounds a lot like a graduate training program in the interest of ‘grooming managers in house’ rather than poaching the best traders from investment banks.

So far so exciting. Brevan Howard is one of the world’s top hedge funds. With offices in Jersey, Geneva, London, New York and Hong Kong, around $27bn in assets under management and a reputation for paying very generously indeed, it’s one of the more aspirational places to work. If you can get in from the bottom, so much the better.

Actually, though, Brevan Howard’s ‘new’ graduate program doesn’t seem that new after all. Brevan Howard didn’t respond to a request to comment for this article, but there are all sorts of people working there already who claim to be on a graduate program, most of whom started in 2012 and 2013.

If you’re not dissuaded by the lack of newness, these people do at least offer an indication of who Brevan Howard hires at graduate level. Bloomberg simply reports that it’s after, ’employees in computer-based strategies and trading assistants.’

Here’s who we think Brevan Howard likes:

1. People with internship experience at other funds and first class degrees 

Take Tom Stevens, who joined Brevan Howard as a graduate trainee in November 2013. When he arrived at Brevan, Tom had already interned at Odey Asset Management and Moor Park Capital Partners (as well as HSBC and Moelis & Co and Octopus Investments). He also came equipped with a first class degree in economics from the University of Manchester.

2. People with PhDs from Imperial and obscure modelling experience

We’ve remarked upon Brevan Howard’s eagerness to hire from London’s Imperial College before. This doesn’t seem to have dimmed. Another current graduate trainee and quantitative analyst is James Solano. Solano completed a PhD on, ‘Numerical Modelling of Melt Segregation in and around Sill Intrusions’ at Imperial in 2011. He spent seven months working for NASA (‘developing models of asteriod development and evolution’) and Galson Sciences (‘developing models of radionuclide transport and nuclear criticality during geological disposal’) before joining Brevan.

3. People educated at Oxford and Cambridge with PhDs in quantum entanglement 

Another contemporary Brevan trainee is Stuart Broadfoot. Broadfoot joined the fund in August 2013. He has a PhD in quantum entanglement from Oxford. He has a masters degree in mathematics from Cambridge. He has authored a paper on the, ‘Optical excitation of zigzag carbon nanotubes with photons guided in nanofibres.’

4. People with PhDs in elementary particle physics and first class degrees 

There’s a pattern here… If you want to get in on Brevan’s graduate program, it’s going to help if you’ve got a theoretical physics-based PhD and a top maths qualification. Take Benjamin Watt, he too joined in 2013. He too has both.

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The recent bull-run of China’s stock market has prompted many banks in China to bolster their trading functions, but this has had the knock on effect of increasing demand for technology professionals in the financial sector.

“Because of the increase in front office staff, banks need more technology staff to be able to actually support their business,” says Kavi Kumar, Hong Kong-based head of technology and contracts at the recruiter Selby Jennings. “These Chinese businesses are actually quite attractive to our candidates.”

Hedge funds, investment banks and retail banks are all competing for fintech staff in China currently, says Kumar. What’s more, while bulge bracket investment banks are spending 75% of their huge tech budgets on maintenance, investment banks in China are building out trading platforms.

Stephen He, a Shanghai-based partner of the recruiting firm Falcon Talent, says: “They need people in high-frequency trading in areas like foreign exchanges or interest rates, especially those who are able to develop trading systems,” He says.

Given that a lot of banks and securities firms are building up this type of innovation platform almost from scratch, they’re often trying to hire a whole teams if possible. “A team like this usually consists of around 10 people, ” explains He, “They would hire half of them from the market and fill the rest half with internal transfers.”

China is viewed as a perfect hub for global banks to outsource their back office operations, given its low cost base and vast supply of IT talent. But this is starting to change. Lacklustre business in the past year or so has seen global banks cutting back workforce across the Asia Pacific region, whereas Chinese banks and securities firms have taken a bigger market share. Unlike their global peers, Chinese firms prefer to keep the back office operations close at home for now. “It’s their core technology, so they don’t want to outsource,” says He. “They just locate them in cities like Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen,” he adds.

Banks and financial institutions are also facing fierce competition from large Chinese internet companies like Alibaba or Tencent. Banks have a reputation for paying their technology staff well, but these internet giants are able to also hand out fat pay cheques to aspiring technology talent.

“We compete with internet companies which are booming in China now, so a suitable pool of IT talent for us is much more limited,” says one China-based senior HR manager at the technology department of a global bank, who asked not to be named.

A popular salary survey from the end of 2014 put most of the major positions at these internet companies anywhere between 15K to 30K RMB (US$2.4k to US$4.8k) per month. That’s already on par with most of the banks, not to mention the lucrative stock options available that can easily turn young talents into millionaires in a few years’ time.

As well as the internet giants, big vendor companies such as Accenture are also on the scene. With years of experience in dealing with global banks’ operations across the world, they are able to attract a good number of Fintech talent as well. “There’s a lot of competition from vendor companies,” says Kumar of Selby Jennings.

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We understand that things aren’t as bad for the J.P. Morgan people who are moving out of London to Bournemouth as they might have been. Recruiters claim they’ve been told that they won’t get a pay cut. At least not to begin with.

As we pointed out earlier this week after J.P. Morgan’s Bournemouth transfer was first reported by Financial News, the bank pays its staff in the seaside town a lot less than its staff in London. The differential can be as much as 29%.

Fortunately, therefore, the 350 people who are reportedly being asked to move to Dorset or forego their employment won’t also have to swallow a big pay cut. They could therefore do quite well from the deal – you can get a ‘huge two bedroom flat’ near the sea for just £895 a month.

Insiders say J.P. isn’t moving its front office technology teams to Bournemouth. Infrastructure technology and support staff are the only ones migrating. Staff at the bank’s Wood Street and Victoria Embankment offices, which house operations, technology and asset administration roles, are thought to be next in line for the move.

J.P. Morgan didn’t respond to a request to comment.

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In banking terms, Lloyd Blankfein is laid back and thoughtful. He likes to lie on the couch at weekends. Under his tenure, Goldman Sachs is a flexible, non-goal orientated place to work. He likes to tell jokes. He advises students to set about becoming interesting and ‘complete’ people whilst letting providence take care of the rest.

Gary Cohn is very different. While Lloyd is out there preaching self discovery, Cohn is all about work ethic. In a new podcast posted on Goldman Sachs‘ website, Cohn says hard work is the differentiating factor. “The one thing you realize if you’re going to be successful—no matter where you grew up, no matter what your educational level is, A.) You can succeed, but B.) The only way you’re going to succeed is by outworking everyone else,” says Cohn.

This is the advice he reportedly imparts to his three daughters. Blankfein, by contrast, has said that he encourages his two sons and one daughter to become complete people and take one step at a time. If Cohn replaces Blankfein as CEO of Goldman Sachs, the culture at the firm could change a lot.

The Future of Investment Banking (eFinancialCareers)

Investment banks will be hiring nicer people not motivated by money, but eventually replacing them with computers anyway.

The Lure of Goldman Sachs (eFinancialCareers)

Goldman Sachs has been building its markets business and poaching from its competitors.

If I Could Work Longer, I Would (Financial Times)

The new drug among young analysts is ‘Vyvanse’, which allows you to be “hyper-focused” on your work. There are side-effects.

Breaking The Bond (Bloomberg)

J.P. Morgan is suing six former employees who moved to Morgan Stanley for misappropriating trade secrets and breaching their duty of loyalty. 

Winters is Coming (Business Times)

One of the first moves of new Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters will be to shift the power to regional hubs like Singapore.

More Power to the Boutiques (WSJ)

M&A activity is on the up, and boutiques are benefiting.

We’ll Give You a Discount (Reuters)

Hedge fund parties aren’t what they were. And hedge fund fees have declined; they are now 1.54 percent of total asset value plus 17.73 percent of returns, compared with the “2+20″ typical before the crisis

The Pursuit of Happiness (Wharton)

Happy people in their 20s feel very different from happy people in their 40s.

Veterans in the UK (CityAM)

A partner and former head of research at Odey Asset Management has left the hedge fund after seven years.

Jamie Wood, who worked for numerous bank-owned asset management firms before switching into a hedge fund in 2007, officially left the firm earlier this month, according to filings on both Companies House and the Financial Conduct Authority.

Wood was latterly partner and senior analyst at Odey, but had formerly been co-head of research. He joined from Newman Ragazzi Partners with a team of other analysts from the firm and founder Michele Ragazzi. Before this, he worked for Bank of Ireland Asset Management.

Odey Asset Management said that April was a “bloody” month, after a fifth was wiped off its flagship fund due to bets on small UK companies and a bad currency trade hit.

Despite this, Odey has increased headcount in its UK operation over the past three months – albeit by less than 2%, according to the FCA register. Recent recruits include Adam Gordon from Cheyne Capital Management, Oliver Kelton from Waverton Investment Management and Stephanie Saville.

However, as well as Wood, Nicholas Gaisman, a research analyst at Odey, left for a strategic planning role at laundry firm Lavanda.

Odey didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Banking leaders are not known for their goodness. In the public imagination, Ken Costa, the ex-UBS and Lazard M&A banker and Christian philanthropist, tends to be eclipsed by the likes of a grinning Fred Goodwin and a sneering Dick Fuld. Contrary to public perception, however, bankers aren’t that bad. On average, finance professionals are actually more moral than staff in other industries.

“The narrative that bankers are bad people is peddled by politicians and the media,” says Roger Steare, a ‘corporate ethicist’ who’s spent years working with banks and other organizations. “The reality is that the percentage of sociopaths in banks is actually lower than in society at large.”

Steare has spent years gathering information on ‘moral DNA’ and has put 130,000 people through a detailed psychometric test examining their decision making process. The average outcomes for banking leaders are shown below, with the 50th centile representing the average score.  So, financial services leaders are more honest, more courageous, fairer, more trustworthy, wiser, more self-controlled, and more interested in excellence than the rest. On the other hand, they’re not especially hopeful. And they’re a lot less humble and loving…

On the whole, Steare’s results show that finance professionals are more moral than people who work in government, the print media and politics. They are less moral than healthcare professionals – and less moral than the most moral people of the lot – ‘homemakers’ who don’t work at all.

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Most banks are paring bank their fixed income currencies and commodities businesses. Deutsche Bank is expected to make cuts under John Cryan. Credit Suisse is expected to make cuts under Tidjane Thiam. One bank, however, is swimming against the tide. That bank is..Mizuho.

“The intention is to add a derivatives platform,” says Christian Heiberg, the new head of fixed income trading at Mizuho International. “We are just about to launch phase one with regards to our derivatives platform. “Phase one includes simple swaps, either cleared or with high quality CSA documentation. The natural extension to that will be the addition of a short term interest rate trading desk and some OTC products like cross currency swaps.”

Heiberg joined Mizuho from Nordea in May. He held a similar role at the Norwegian bank.

Heiberg says Mizuho is well-placed to push into derivatives trading. “Mizuho is very committed to pursuing growth outside Asia in Europe. The bank already has a large global lending business and a strong European credit and government bond franchise, and it makes sense for and our customers us to expand our product suite by adding derivatives.”

The uncertainty in FICC divisions at European banks is already working in Mizuho’s favour, says Heiberg: “I’m getting CVs every day – there’s a lot of interest from people working at the established players.”

Nonetheless, anyone hoping to get in at Mizuho should know that the bank’s hiring plans aren’t exactly frothy. Heiberg says the plan is to grow “organically”, which is tantamount to ‘slowly.’ He says: “We’ve already hired one very senior trader for our derivatives trading desk and in the short term we probably need at least one more. We may hire five or six more in the next one or two years, but that exact number is not certain right now.”

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Back in 2013 and early 2014, there was money to be made in Greece. Greek bonds went from 12 to 60 cents on the dollar and the emboldened hedge fund fund managers who bought them up became rich indeed.

“People made their careers on that trade,” George Linatsas, founding partner of Axia Ventures, an investment bank that specializes in Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and Italy, told the New York Times. 

Eighteen months later, and the career trade has turned sour. The NYT says the swanky ‘Hotel Grand Bretagne’ in Athens is filling up with panicked hedge fund investors in their 30s who’ve made a bad mistake.

Until last weekend, their efforts were reportedly focused on trying to work out exactly what the Greek government was up to. Some were ‘listening to Greek radio’. Others had hired specialists to study the body language of Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis. Now that Tsipras’ and Varoufakis’ intentions are clear, the young hedge fund managers can at least save that expense. Unfortunately, it may be too late to redeem their careers.

Recalibrating Your Morals (eFinancialCareers)

Forget the idea that banking bosses have loose morals. An extensive survey suggests that they’re more ethical than most.

Making the Summer Count (eFinancialCareers)

Investment banks tell us exactly how interns can impress them and secure a full-time job offer.

The Personal Touch (Financial News)

So-called ‘private fundraising teams’ are becoming a thing. Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan have reportedly recently set them up, while Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse have expanded existing teams.

A Big Loss on Greece (CNBC) 

These are some of the hedge funds that were betting on a Greek recovery. 

Fixed Income Expansion (Press Release)

Cantor Fitzgerald is taking the opportunity to poach some senior fixed income bankers.

A Slow Move Away from London (Financial Times)

Credit Suisse is looking at moving some of its back office operations from London to Dublin.

Equities is a Good Place to Be (Financial News) 

It’s been a good few months for equity traders: The value of European equities trading will rise by more than 27% in the second quarter of 2015 from a year ago.

No Central Bank Bailout (Telegraph) 

Central banks have no ammunition left in the event of another financial crisis.

This time last year, bankers with Greek clients were busy. “It was booming,” says one senior Greek M&A banker and private equity professional in London, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Now all my colleagues who work in M&A have fallen into a depression.”

Measured in terms of deal volume, M&A was up 50% in Greece in 2014. This year, the Greek M&A teams – or what’s left of them, are twiddling their Souvlaki sticks. “Most banks just have a managing director and an associate covering Greece,” says the banker. “By the end of this year, it will just be an MD and the rest will be covered by industry teams.”

The eFinancialCareers CV database contains 2,300 CVs belonging to native Greek speakers, of whom nearly 2,200 are in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and 850 are in London. Just 33 are in New York City. Greek bankers like to stay close to home.

“The Greek middle classes have a long history of sending their children overseas to be educated,” says the senior banker. “A lot of them have studied either a Bachelors or a Masters degree in London.”

This is evident in the educational history of London’s most senior Greek financiers. Nicholas Exarchos, head of capital markets and treasury solutions for Greece at Cyprus at Deutsche Bank, was educated at London’s Imperial College. Stefanos Papapanagiotou, the former senior Credit Suisse M&A banker who joined UBS last year was educated at Warwick Business School and Queen Mary and Westfield College London. Aristides Vourakis, a managing director and head of investment banking for Greece at J.P. Morgan, studied at Masters in accounting and finance at the London School of Economics. Citi’s Linnos Lekkas studied an MPhil in finance at Cambridge…

Greeks in finance aren’t restricted to IBD. Our own stats suggest that around 25% of the Greek finance professionals in London are in sales, trading and research, with another 7% in risk and 3% in quant jobs. “There are quite a few Greeks in quant roles,” says James Kennedy, head of the quant and trading desk at NJF Search in London. “There’s a massive brain drain – the best and brightest start out in Greece and then leave to study a Masters in London or the US.”

Senior Greeks on the trading floor include Athanasios Vamvakidis, a former deputy division chief at the IMF who’s has a PhD from Harvard and is now head of G10 FX strategy for Europe at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. There’s also Dimitrios Nikolakopoulos, an MD in equity derivatives trading at Goldman Sachs (with a Masters from the London School of Economics).

On Wall Street, there’s Takis Georgakopoulos, a former McKinsey Partner who works for J.P. Morgan. In 2014, Georgakopoulos was promoted to chief of staff at J.P. Morgan’s corporate and investment bank. Despite having a PhD at the National Technical University of Athens – Greece’s top University, he subsequently studied a Masters in the mathematics of finance at Columbia. There’s also Emmanuel Petrakis, a senior banker at Moelis & Co. in NYC who studied a finance MBA at NYU Stern.

The senior banker we spoke to said most Greek finance professionals are resigned to never going back home. “I live in Mayfair and work in Mayfair,” he told us. “Most of the international Greek finance community associate themselves with the previous government of Samaras,” he added. “If the Germans knew what they were doing they would have cut a deal with that pro-European government last year.”

Now, he thinks Greece should leave the euro: “Let’s get it over with. Look at Cyprus, six months later, everything’s been forgotten and they’re raising capital again.” But it won’t be easy. “I believe there will be a war in Greece in the next month,” he concludes. “Riots in the streets. The people who want to stay in the euro aren’t going to accept a decision to leave, and the people who want to leave aren’t going to accept a decision to stay.”

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Moving from a back office role into a front office position has become something of a pre-crisis, pre-Kweku dream.

And yet, changing tack in your career is still possible. These, according to recruiters and bankers who have made the switch, are the current trends.

1. Trading assistant to trader

It might be reflective of how trading jobs are developing into increasingly electronified or process-driven positions, or maybe it’s down to the exodus of investment banking traders to hedge funds, but trading assistants are increasingly being promoted to become actual traders.

One recent example is Martin Lacey, an FX exotics trader at J.P. Morgan, who moved across from a five-year trading assistant job at the bank, having previously worked in a market risk position.

Recruiters suggest that a deep understanding of the product area combined with being a known entity to the bank is necessary to make the move internally.

2. Prop trading to fund management

Prop traders are, of course, being pushed out of investment banks are regulators force firms to close down their internal trading desks. This has resulted in a flurry of new hedge fund launches by senior traders who then poach their former reports. But launching a hedge fund is risky, and many traders who fled to the buy-side have since returned.

Credit Suisse is attempting to sell asset management as an alternative career to prop traders thinking of departing for the hedge fund sector. This could be a good move, as we’ve mentioned previously, trading careers tend to go on a downward trajectory after 30 and asset management presents itself as a viable long-term career.

3. Big Four consulting to programme manager

Consultants at Big Four professional services firms are increasingly looking to reinvent themselves as programme managers for “end-users” on change and transformation projects, says Ben Cowan, director at recruiters Investigo Change Solutions.

“They’re used to stakeholder management, are good communicators and get the project moving. They’re also keen to remove the sales element from their job,” he says.

The pay also helps – programme manager jobs in change pay upwards of £1,200 a day.

4. Mid-ranking investment banker to private equity

The route from analyst and associate in investment banking into private equity is a well-trodden path, and one that has become increasingly popular globally over the past 12 months. However, it’s not a one-way track.

“As surprising as it sounds, a lot of former investment bankers are returning to the sell-side after a few years’ experience in private equity,” says one PE recruiter who didn’t want to be named. “The result is that private equity firms are increasingly turning to associate directors or VPs.”

5. Investment banking to Big Four advisory work

In the old order of things, investment banks used to tap newly-minted ACAs from the Big Four accounting firms for their corporate finance divisions. Now, the flow is all the other way as Big Four firms expand their advisory functions.

The latest recruit is Paul Staples, a former senior managing director at BNP Paribas, who joined Deloitte as a partner in its corporate finance division earlier this month. This follows KPMG’s recruitment of James Agnew, the former chairman of corporate broker at Deutsche Bank, in October and Peter Whelan, a former Rothschild banker, leaving for PwC.

The hours won’t necessarily be any less brutal, but the job security could be greater.

6. Front office investment banker to FinTech start-up

FinTech firms, specifically smaller financial services technology start-ups, are disrupting the way that financial services organisations are thinking about IT. Whether that’s new competitors, or cheaper solutions that would have previously been built in-house, FinTech start-ups are proliferating in greater numbers At the helm of many are former investment bankers.

“There are so many front office investment bankers here,” says Nikolay Storonsky, founder and CEO of fintech firm Revolut based out of Level 39 in Canary Wharf and a former trader. “A lot of the best guys have left the industry.”

As well as Storonsky, Paul Reynolds – a 30-year fixed income trading veteran – quit to start Bondcube, while Stu Taylor, a former managing director at UBS, launched Algomi.

7. Trading to risk management

Risk management is becoming better paid, more interesting and higher profile within investment banking. Trading is becoming increasingly electronified, ever smaller and increasingly shaky. Not surprisingly, traders are trying to orchestrate an internal move into risk management.

“We are seeing some front-office staff such as traders transition to the middle office or into risk related roles where their knowledge of products and trade processes is valuable,” says Luke Davis, vice president of Robert Half UK.

8. Technology project manager to transformation specialist

Again, it’s a case of former technology project managers trying to emphasise their experience on change projects for contract roles that could see £200+ added onto their day rates, says Cowan.

“It’s not necessarily a case of reinventing themselves to ride the transformation wave, more re-emphasising their change experience and ability to communicate technology needs to the business,” he says.

A few months ago, we noticed a trend. People who had worked in finance were going back to college. And once back at college they were studying an unfamiliar kind of course: machine learning.

There weren’t hundreds of them, but there were enough to make us sit up and take notice. Take Andrew McDonald, a former executive director in longevity products at KBC, who’s been studying a PhD in machine learning at University College London (UCL) since September 2012. Or Ronnie Stafford, a former trading technology professional at Reuters, who also started the UCL PhD in machine learning in September 2012. Or there’s James Lloyd, a former hedge fund analyst, who’s studying a PhD in machine learning at Cambridge.

What could be the attraction of these machine learning courses?

Check out this advert for Google’s new London-based ‘DeepMind’ artificial intelligence unit:

Goldman Sachs also appears to have a London-based machine learning team. Trung Huynh, a software engineer, joined the bank as a strategist in January. Maybe it’s time to forget that Masters in Finance and go for something a bit more contemporary. 

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This is not turning out to be a good week at Deutsche Bank. Firstly, the bank’s shares fell nearly 6% yesterday over concerns about its exposure to Greece. Secondly, even before outgoing co-CEO Anshu Jain has left, stones are being turned on the LIBOR affair and there are allegations that he “knowingly made inaccurate statements” to the Bundesbank. And thirdly, senior Deutsche staff are quitting – seemingly unexpectedly.

With luck, this could all be little to worry about. Deutsche Bank’s direct exposure to Greece is limited – at the end of January the German firm held just €298m ($332m) in Greek corporate and public debt. Anshu Jain has dismissed allegations that he misled the Bundesbank as “baseless”. And yesterday’s “shock” departure of Henrik Asklaksen, Deutsche’s global head of M&A for more than a decade, may have been foreseen by someone on Deutsche’s side. The Wall Street Journal points out that Asklaksen’s exit comes only one month after Deutsche hired Jeff Urwin, the former co-head of global banking at J.P. Morgan.

Time for a Change (eFinancialCareers)

It’s difficult to make a career switch in investment banking now, but not impossible.

Think Like a Machine (eFinancialCareers)

Increasing numbers of financial services employees are signing up to machine learning courses. With good reason – Goldman Sachs and Google are hiring.

Morgan Stanley Fixed Income Push (WSJ) 

Morgan Stanley wants to push into fixed income. Again. Only last year it was eliminating jobs from its rates and foreign-exchange trading desks. Now rates will be at the start of a new expansionary push.

Second Time Lucky (Reuters) 

Morgan Stanley is reinvesting capital previously held against unprofitable trades into areas like municipal bonds, credit and securitization.

Expansion Pays Off (Bloomberg)

Citigroup has been expanding its U.S. derivatives trading business and has just overtaken J.P. Morgan at the top.

Heyday for M&A (Financial Times)

U.S. M&A was up 60% in the first half, making it the best start to the year since records began in 1980.

I Love Growth (Financial Times)

Tidjane Thiam has been telling Credit Suisse staff that he does not love Asia, he just loves growth.