If you’re an analyst or an associate in an investment banking division (IBD), you almost certainly want to move into private equity. Given private equity funds’ notoriously long interview processes, you may even be interviewing already in preparation for a move in 2018.

Be warned, however. Junior bankers who’ve already broken out into PE say the industry isn’t all that it seems.

Take working hours. They are not always better in private equity. They can sometimes be worse.

Most big banks have introduced measures curtailing juniors’ weekend working hours. However, the largest private equity funds still demand absolute commitment – all the more so because they’re usually staffed by principals and partners who cut their teeth in the bad old days of banking. “Working for a big U.S. fund like Carlyle or KKR is going to entail very long hours,” says one Italian PE professional, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If you want shorter hours, you need to move to a smaller European fund,” he advises.

Small European funds are no guarantee of a perpetually easy life though. One ex-banking associate who now works for a fund in Europe, says long hours are simply part of the private equity model. “People who move out of banking have the misconception that you’ll be doing things on your own terms in private equity because you’re the client,” he says. “But this isn’t the case. When a deal comes around you’re still working to someone else’s time timetable. Processes are tight and you can’t prioritise your work-life balance.”

The good news is that you won’t be doing deals all the time, creating opportunities to catch up on life and sleep. But this too can be a disadvantage.  Just as banking juniors are ground down by incessant pitches for deals that never happen, so private equity juniors say their time is spent searching for investments that rarely come off. “We actually execute maybe one deal a year,” says another PE junior. “It gets quite demoralising when you’re looking at a range of deals that never go ahead.”

And then there’s the issue of personality. While banks like Barclays and Goldman Sachs have taken concrete measures to curtail the power of their managing directors by allowing juniors to review MDs’ performance on a continuous basis, some private equity funds – particularly smaller ones – operate like personality cults.

“Everything here depends on the mood of the managing partner,” says one PE junior. “When he’s happy, we’re all happy. When he’s not happy he shouts at people and we tiptoe around for fear of upsetting him.”

Another PE professional notes that there’s, “nowhere to hide,” in small funds. “In banks there are so many people that you can usually find someone senior you get along with,” he says. “In a small private equity fund you don’t have that choice – you need to get along with everyone.”

This means that it’s unwise to move into private equity unless you’re an accomplished charmer. All the more so, because it’s not just your colleagues you’ll need to navigate, but also the personalities in the firms you’re investing in. “People who come to private equity from banks underestimate the importance of being able to read and judge management teams,” says another ex-banker. “Almost anyone can build financial models and analyse a deal. The alpha in private equity is really generated from forming strong relationships with management teams. This is far harder to achieve.”

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Investment banks have continued to battle for people to head up their technology functions throughout 2017, and Goldman Sachs has been the target in recent months. The latest MD to leave Goldman’s technology group is Caroline Arnold, who quit to join Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a managing director and global head of enterprise technology.

Arnold’s responsibilities encompass audit, the chief administrative office, global human resources, global corporate affairs and legal technology. She is reporting to Laurie Readhead, a control function technology executive and the bank’s chief data officer, a BAML spokesperson confirmed.

At Goldman, Arnold worked for four years as an MD and the global head of compliance technology responsible for enterprise design and global efficiencies, as well as securities profitability. Goldman hired her after a 20-year tenure at Morgan Stanley. Arnold led a practice area group at Morgan Stanley that executed the technology strategy for client relationship applications, profitability and many client-facing websites. She was responsible for the technical decisions and project execution for Morgan Stanley’s custom-built software platforms.

She’s the second senior tech hire from Goldman to join BAML in recent months. Howard Sloan, most recently a managing director and chief information officer of Goldman Sachs Bank USA since 2016, left to head up BAML’s wealth management back-office technology. Goldman also lost Karen Rossi, a managing director within its investment banking technology division, to J.P. Morgan in November.

BofA Merrill Lynch recently lost Chris Shilakes, a 20-year technology investment banking veteran, to Nomura.
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When Goldman Sachs announced its new managing directors last month, there were plenty of technologists on the list. However, the Goldman technology staff who didn’t make the MD cut won’t be that cut up: they have other things to aspire to.

While most people in banks can simply climb the established analyst-associate-VP-director-managing director hierarchy, technologists in investment banks can aspire to be “fellows” or “distinguished engineers” as the highest (not necessarily managerial) rank. Goldman Sachs has fellows; banks like Citi and J.P. Morgan have distinguished engineers. And at Goldman Sachs, next year is a fellow promotion year.

“Technology fellow is the highest accolade given to “technical thinkers” within the organization,” says former senior technologist at Goldman Sachs. “Goldman Sachs has a long history of building a technical career path alongside a management path, and the tech fellows are the leaders of the technical route. They own the technical strategy of the firm,” he says.

For the moment, Goldman has around 80 technology fellows, including Mark Langham, the London-based global head of futures trading technology, or Paul Uminski, the New York-based global head of investment research technology. Some fellows are also MDs. Many, though, are VPs. If you want to be a fellow, Goldman technologists say you’ll need to display your, “authoritative knowledge…technical leadership, innovation and problem-solving expertise.”

While Goldman has 80 fellows, J.P. Morgan insiders say the bank only has 22 distinguished engineers. 21 are men. The only woman in the category is Tracey Pletz, an enterprise architect. Male distinguished engineers at JPM include Carl Nolf, an MD who’s been with bank for 20 years, Ian Miller, the chief architect for commercial and investment banking core processing, Matt Tice, an executive director-level network engineer in Ohio, and Suresh Shetty, an ED-level architect in NYC.

Citi’s distinguished engineers include Chris Clayton, a storage specialist in London, and Lajos Csémy at its office in Hungary.

So, should you aspire to be a fellow or distinguished engineer rather than an actual managing director? Yes, if you have expertise in a particular domain and want to develop that further rather taking a step up into a broader management role.

“Distinguished engineer is something to aim for if you’re very technical and want to extend your sphere of influence,” says the J.P. Morgan technologist. “You might still get to manage people and core technology functions, but only in your area of specialism,” he adds.

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The head of equities at Man AHL has left after nearly ten years at the hedge fund to join Balyasny Asset Management as it wraps up an expansive year with a quantitative portfolio manager hiring spree.

Paul Chambers, a partner and head of equities at Man Group’s $19.2bn quantitative hedge fund AHL, has just joined Balyasny as a portfolio manager in its London office.

Chambers joined Man in June 2008, from fund manager Old Mutual where he was a quantitative developer. He’s held various roles over the last nine and a half years including senior quantitative portfolio manager and co-head of equities. Since 2015, he’s been a partner and head of equities at AHL. He left in November and joined Balyasny earlier this month.

Balyasny, the $12.1bn Chicago-based hedge fund, has been expanding its London operation over the course of 2017, hiring traders from investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan as well as from hedge fund competitors. Headcount increased in the UK by 86% throughout 2016, according to its latest accounts, and by a further 24% this year.

More recently, however, it has turned its attention to hiring quants. As well as Chambers, it also hired Steve Zymler, a senior quantitative researcher at Citadel who left in June, as a portfolio manager. He joined in November. Meanwhile, Salvatore Tesoro, a Cambridge PhD who spent just seven months as quant researcher at Credit Suisse, joined in September as a quant within its systematic strategies division.

Balyasny’s quant buildout started in the U.S. earlier this year. It hired Ulrich Brandy Pollmann, a managing director and senior quant trader at Credit Suisse in New York, as its global head of systematic strategies in April. It’s since brought in Shaoyi Li from Point72 Asset Management and Mason Liang, who joined from GMO in November.

Balyasny stated its ambitions earlier this year to become the ‘Amazon’ of hedge funds, and has been making significant hires across most investment strategies.

However, most hedge funds are in the market for top quants even as the end of the year approaches and firms start to eye hiring plans for 2018. Capula Investment Management, the $13bn hedge fund that has lost a series of C-suite employees this year, has made a series of quant hires over the past two months.

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Stress is ubiquitous in financial services. The burnouts of Hector Sants at Barclays or Lloyds CEO António Horta-Osório are high profile examples of the pressures of working in demanding banking jobs. But aside from the deleterious effect on your health and well-being, there’s another consequence of endemic stress in financial services – it fuels scandals.

The financial services industry is not filled with bad apples looking to flaunt the rules, but with professionals who by and large try to do the right thing and are prone to mistakes with unintended consequences. The cumulative affect of minor indiscretions is probably more likely to explain the huge uptick in banking misconduct than the London Whales and Jerome Kerviels of this world.

Financial services is a high reward, high-pressure sector. But working under constant stress impacts your mental capabilities and ability to make decisions. If you work all hours, you never get much parasympathetic activation – when the body recoups energy and metabolically rebalances, and your brain integrates and organises its experiences. I’ve met seemingly super-fit City workers who never properly rest, and their health is not as great as they think.

Allostatic load, or the wear and tear on your body, accumulates when people are exposed to repeated or chronic mental and physical stress. Working 14-16 hours a day in a City job might not be physical work, but it pleases huge stress on your biological system with no chance for recuperation.

I believe that scandal in the financial sector and the stress of the work are natural bedfellows. Bombarding financial institutions with regulation is one thing, but the firms also need to think of the well-being of their employees to prevent further blow-ups. A company is really simply a collection of relationships, as the term implies, but City firms forget this all too quickly. To deal with root causes of behaviour that can lead to danger, there are four ways to tackle conduct and culture.

Foster positive relationships:

Without good relationships in place at work, humans decline very quickly. Our bodies and brains become hyper-defensive and vigilant, and waste precious energy as heart and nervous systems stay in arousal for longer than they should. The resultant energy drain decreases our ability to question our own or others’ assumptions, biases or decisions.

There needs to be an environment that fosters trust, where anyone can question the status quo and where leaders encourage collaboration rather than leading in an autocratic way. Most financial services organisations are still a long way off.

Understand how things really get done:

Don’t look at the org charts – this is not how modern financial services organisations really work. Firms need to look at the informal networks and relationships that lead to the work actually getting done, how quickly the messages pass from management to the wider team, and where the real silos are as well as who the influencers are and where the bottlenecks hit. We use AI-driven technology to analyse complex organisational networks in highly visual and informative ways.

Many ethical problems, notwithstanding the headline grabbers, are borne of someone being afraid to rock the boat, being too tired to question the way things run or not being able to see a chain of outcomes. To change things, an X-ray of the real networks to establish the real influencers who can help you is a good place to start.

Getting the right architecture in place:

You can’t intensively farm trust. HR might be kept busy, but if it’s not focused on creating better conditions for trust, good relationships and cultures by knowing how humans connect or disconnect, it’s not doing much good at all. Engagement surveys are one thing, breaking down hierarchies and creating true coaching cultures is quite another.

Teaching line managers how to run meetings in ways that draw out the best thinking, giving people autonomy, and eliminating edifices that engender committee rule are where it’s worth taking some risk. Yes, keep risk frameworks systemised but don’t think systemising people in the same way will yield the collaboration you desire.

Emotional and mental well-being:

There are a lot of misconceptions about physical health. My work as an executive coach tries to go a bit deeper than the obvious stuff people are aware of. There’s some cool medical grade technology out there now that helps us understand the biological cost of our working day and generate useful insights on rest, sleep, nutrition and exercise. But insights into emotional and mental health is where it gets interesting.

What I look at is regulating, not ignoring or suppressing, emotions. What does that look like? Well, think of any stressor you might encounter in your life: a client deadline, unreasonable or sabotaging behaviour in a meeting, someone taking credit for your work, a “go get it” culture producing commission fights – the list is endless and they all produce emotional and physiological responses.

Your default response to this is a negative emotion, which over time can be hazardous to your health. You can, however, regulate this. Part of this is practising getting into ‘coherent states’ – think clinical breathing supported by technology. It’s a more scientific and measurable form of mindfulness. A state of biological coherence allows more blood glucose and other essential “brain foods” to be directed towards your frontal lobes, the part of the brain associated with decision-making and impulse control.

At the merest whiff of stress in usual situations, energy is diverted towards the more primal areas of the brain, which keep us safe. The trick, through guided techniques, is to try and control this. Learning to discern emotions, labelling them and the impulse to act, and then critically think through how well it will serve you at that moment are all key. It’s difficult to think yourself into something more positive if the brain is tired, so by giving it an energy boost by resetting our heart and nervous system, it is possible with practice to change mental states quite easily and quickly.

So what’s in it for you? Apart from the health benefits, learning core skills of coherence and emotional regulation does a lot to recover energy and make you feel like you’re on your A-game more of the time. Increased energy means the brain can resist bias and impulses, so your thinking and decision making is better. Many issues didn’t start from intentional dishonesty, but usually from tired, stressed people making important decisions the wrong side of 7pm.

James Parsons started his career in equities for major investment banks before working in real estate finance. He began retraining as a coach 10 years ago and works with individuals, teams and leaders at City firms. Find him at www.untapped-talent.co.uk

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This may change by the time I’ve finished writing this sentence, but bitcoin ended at $16k yesterday, following wild swings that hit highs of $20k within 90 minutes on Coinbase Inc’s GDAX exchange. Whether you believe bitcoin is a bubble waiting to burst, or an asset class about to go mainstream, yesterday was all about the cryptocurrency. It’s now up 600% in December.

One Australian bitcoin entrepreneur became a billionaire – for 45 minutes – the ‘Facebook Two’ Winklvoss twin’s net worth exceeded that of Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a crazy ride. “People are looking at a video game as a regular market. And it’s clearly not, otherwise it wouldn’t be where it is already,” Walter Zimmermann, technical analyst at ICAP TA told the Financial Times.

All of this came just before Bitcoin aims to go mainstream. With 10 days, CBOE Global Markets, the US derivatives exchange, is due to launch bitcoin futures. J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has described bitcoin as a bubble that will inevitably burst, but many are ignoring the warning signs – not least of all security breaches – that it could all go belly up.

Big banks, generally, still remain unconvinced, as do institutional investors. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Citigroup all signed a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and lobby group the Futures Industry Association objecting the introduction of bitcoin futures. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is on the bubble side of the fence, but hasn’t discounted it entirely. Other senior bankers are more vocal about its dangers.

RBS chairman Sir Howard Davies, has likened it to Dante’s Inferno. “Put up the sign from Dante’s Inferno – ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ – I think that’s probably what’s needed,” he said speaking on Bloomberg TV, adding that the cryptocurrency appeared to be a “frothy investment bubble”.

Separately, the carnage of investment banks’ research ranks is no secret as MiFID II regulation is set to finally come to pass on the 3 January next year. MiFID requires banks to unbundle the cost of research from other trading costs, the result being a brutal thinning of the ranks of equity researchers churning out low-value notes en mass in favour of more star analysts likely to bring in buy-side dollars. But some firms are going for volume recruitment, and are picking up analysts on the cheap.

Swiss bank EFG Asset Management told Bloomberg that it had doubled its research team to 18 people before MiFID II hits, and they’re paying them less. “The knock-on effect of ETFs, passive investments, as well as MiFID II means that there are many research analysts out there available at cheaper prices than they were before,” Moz Afzal, the London-based chief investment officer at EFG Asset Management.

Meanwhile: 

Harold Ford Jr, a former Democratic congressman and Morgan Stanley MD, has been fired by the bank for alleged sexual misconduct (Financial Times)

Goldman Sachs is hiring 200 people in Dallas for its personal lending unit, Marcus (Dallas Business Journal)

Goldman has disappeared from the Chinese IPO Market (Bloomberg)

Standard Chartered is already struggling to attract talent because of Brexit says CEO Bill Winters: “Some of the best talent that we can have in the UK marketplace is coming from students that have chosen to study here and then stayed for some extended period afterwards… We’ve noticed that’s been impacted already. (BBC)

Christopher Hohn, TCI Fund Management and LSE activist investor, earned $1m every day last year (Bloomberg)

Female hedge fund manager was awarded $3.8m, but claims she was let go from Baupost on gender discrimination and illness (Business Week)

What to get your billionaire this Christmas (Bloomberg)

I bumped into Lloyd Blankfein, called him Jamie Dimon and asked to have my photo taken with him. I’m starting at Goldman Sachs in a few weeks. (Wall Street Oasis)

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Firing people in France is a bit like that George Clooney movie Up In The Air, where he’s parachuted in to deliver the bad news, except with fewer tears and more wild gesticulation and the threat of violence.

I’ve worked in senior jobs within predominantly French investment banks over the last 20 years, in London, New York and Paris. Each and every time I’ve had to lay people off in France, I’ve had a bodyguard on hand in the room – you just never know how it’s going to go. The presence of security at least tends to put people off leaping across the table and throttling you.

Firing people in France is near impossible. There are so many unions and laws protecting the rights of employees, people just don’t expect it. But this is investment banking – restructures happen all the time, banks expand and contract as easily as a hyperventilating field mouse. French people, at the least those in France, don’t know how to handle it. I say this, by the way, as a proud Frenchman.

Brexit is being painted as a potential disaster for the City of London and also a miraculous homecoming for a whole tribe of French or German bankers just waiting for an opportunity to move home. But if it ends up being just a whole load of French and German people heading back to the motherland, it’ll be bad for these new Continental European operation.

Aside from the firing issue, there’s a bigger problem. I’ve been there at the outset when French banks moved into London. Essentially, what it enabled us to do was move from a model of employing predominantly French traders, sales and research professionals in Paris to having the pick of the best international talent on the ground in London.

This is a huge advantage. Not only have the best people flocked to London, meaning that if you’re able to recruit the right people, you have every chance of competing against the best international banks.

But it’s also much easier to get rid of people if they’re not working out. The last thing you want if you’ve hired a duffer is to have to navigate complex employment laws in order to be able to show them the door. London is all about survival of the fittest, you can either cut it or you’re out. And I’ve never needed a burly 6 foot man behind me to deliver the news.

Louis Brodeur, a pseudonym,  is a former senior trader at a French bank in London 

““

Goldman Sachs went first. Now Citi and Bank of America have made their own managing director promotions. And some people in their markets divisions are not happy with the outcomes.

At Bank of America, the fixed income business didn’t have the best year and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) business is said to be comparatively unprofitable compared to other divisions, but top directors were promoted just the same. New London BAML markets MDs include: Jim Kaye, director of execution services and overseer of the bank’s electronic trading business, Mohamed Farsi, a senior middle east salesman with clients in Dubai and Saudi Arabia; Caleb Wright, head of EMEA equities and market structure; Marc Goldberg in credit structuring, and Cecile Gambardella in emerging market sales.

At Citi’s London markets business, promotions are understood to include: Marcus Satha, the recently promoted global head of short term interest rate trading; Helen Brookes in FX business management; Al Saeed, global head of the institutional clients e-commerce sales and product for the FX and local markets business at Citi Velocity, Citi’s single dealer FX trading platform; and Brandt Portugal, an FX corporate salesman covering the Benelux, Nordic and Irish markets.

Barclays is also said to have promoted its new round of MDs in the past twenty four hours.

Unlike Goldman Sachs, which releases its full list of MD promotions, neither BAML, Citi nor Barclays publicize who got bumped up.

Inevitably, there are some complaints from those who feel overlooked. Promotions are understood to have been few and far between in Citi’s UK rates business and some male markets professionals are understood to be irked by the elevation of women, who they claim are benefiting from the bank’s emphasis on diversity.

Neither Bank of America nor Citi responded to a request to comment.

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Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
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Deutsche Bank has continued the build out of its equities business, following the appointment of new global head Peter Selman in November, by bringing in a new head of equity derivatives for the Americas.

Mark Chen, latterly head of flow equity derivatives at Citigroup, has just joined Deutsche Bank as co-head of equity derivatives for the Americas, according to sources close to the situation. Deutsche Bank declined to comment on the appointment.

Chen will lead Deutsche’s equity derivatives business across the Americas alongside David Silber, who also joined from Citigroup. He was previously a managing director and head of North America execution sales, and officially came on board at Deutsche in June.

Chen is another high profile recruit to help revive the fortunes of Deutsche’s stock trading business, which has suffered nine consecutive quarters of declining revenues. In the first three quarters of 2017, it made €1.75bn in equities revenue, an 18% decline year-on-year, while most investment banks’ posted relatively flat revenues.

In November, Peter Selman, Goldman Sachs’ former co-head of equities trading who retired last year, was named as Deutsche Bank’s new head global equities. Selman, who started his career in London, has a background in equity derivatives and headed the division at Goldman before taking his latter role. He takes over from Tom Patrick, who was named head of Deutsche’s Americas business in August.

Chen’s appointment is one of a series of recent senior appointments within Deutsche’s U.S. equities business. Eric Johnston, head of U.S. cash trading, and David Lewis, head of international high touch trading in the Americas, also both joined in November.

In its third quarter results Deutsche singled out equity derivatives as a reason for lower revenues, saying that they were “significantly lower” due to lower client activity and volatility.

Deutsche’s CEO John Cryan noted the the poor performance of its equities division during the third quarter results and said that it was hiring to address the problem. “The equities business continues to need more investment in infrastructure and people, which we plan to make,” he said.

Chen spent six years at Citigroup in New York, joining in 2011 from Citadel Securities, where he was a vice president in equity derivatives trading. He graduated from Stanford in 2006 with a degree in Computer Science, and started out at Morgan Stanley as an index derivatives trader.

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J.P. Morgan is one of the most advanced banks when it comes to data science and machine learning. It hired in Geoffrey Zweig from Microsoft in February 2017 as head of machine learning. It’s actually launched a market-making product (LOXM) based on machine learning and it recently promoted Samik Chandarana, a former credit trader, to head its data science and analytics (effectively its machine learning) strategies.

Chandara hasn’t actually started his new job yet – he’s still a trader, but he’ll be starting it soon and in an interview posted on J.P. Morgan’s Youtube channel, he expresses various opinions about what it will entail. The bottom line, as Saeed Amen explained in a recent blog, is that machine learning and data science jobs in investment banks aren’t necessarily as exciting as they seem.

Chandarana alludes to the fact that far too many machine learning projects in investment banks come to nothing at all. The record of, “productionization of innovation” at banks is, “challenging,” says Chandarana. In other words, banks innovate but nothing comes of it.

To overcome this, Chandarana says people working in his area need first of all to, “get the trust of the underlying customer,” and that initially these customers will be, “internal.” Like other exponents of machine learning, Chandarana reiterates the notion that machine learning will eliminate mundane tasks and free human beings to pursue higher value work. However (and he doesn’t say this), it’s clear that internal customers might be resistant to machine learning because they think it will steal their jobs.  

Despite internal clients’ skepticism, Chandarana says the aim is to make machine learning and analytics part of people’s daily lives at J.P. Morgan.

However, this isn’t going to happen quickly: a process must be followed. First of all, Chandarana says analytics teams need to collect a set of, “problem statements,” describing exactly what internal clients need. Then it’s necessary to see if there’s enough clean data to solve these problem statements (and to clean it or find more data if there’s not). Only then can the team start building solutions, and when it does it mustn’t get to carried away. Twice, Chandarana says they need to keep things simple: if regression analysis is all that’s required, regression analysis is all that will be used. The implication is that machine learning and analytics teams like to over-complicate issues.

Chandarana also says he’s more interested in hiring people who “know how to work with customers” and are “like-minded” than pure “book-smart” talent. However, he acknowledges that J.P.M’s analytics team will need to partner with academics and fintech firms (which might have more book-smart) people if it wants to remain up to date.

Lastly, Chandarana seems bemused to find himself heading J.P.M’s analytics business. He describes himself as an, “accidental banker,” and says he aspired to be a techno DJ whilst at university. He collects vinyl records and likes physical books. If you want to present yourself as a “like-minded” soul during a J.P. Morgan analytics interview, these are probably good things to know.

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Bank of America Merrill Lynch has landed another top technologist in New York as it continues to bring in senior hires before the end of the year.

Following on from the appointment of Caroline Arnold, who quit Goldman Sachs to join Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a managing director and global head of enterprise technology, earlier this month, it’s now hired from the post-trade giant the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). Mieko Shibata, who has spent nearly four years heading up the firm’s derivatives technology group and global trades repository.

Previously, Shibata was an MD in the corporate and investment banking (CIB) technology group at J.P. Morgan, where she worked for four and a half years on CIB clearance and collateral management technology.

She’s also a former MD in the institutional securities group at Morgan Stanley, where she began her career in the Tokyo office before earning a promotion and relocating to New York, then London and eventually back to Wall Street. During her two decades at the firm, she rose from application developer to vice president of global custody integration services to executive director and the head of U.S. settlements and post-execution trades technology. After getting promoted to MD, she worked as the head of listed derivatives post-execution technology at Morgan Stanley before moving to J.P. Morgan in 2010.
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Here’s what Goldman, J.P. Morgan, BAML and Morgan Stanley pay in the U.S.

If you're in banking or trying to position yourself for a job at a bank, you want to know what the heavy hitters of the industry pay in the U.S.

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Yes, smoking is a dirty habit. It’s for addicts or nihilists, depending upon your perspective. But the more us dirty, nihilistic smokers are vilified, the more we pull together – and this has its advantages.

I work in banking and I smoke. Depending upon my mood I either smoke in a quiet corner or in the main smoking area. The main smoking area is like MD-central.

Because managing directors (MDs) are often in their 40s and people in their 40s got addicted to nicotine before everyone totally understood the “issues” around it, there are a lot of smoking MDs in banking. When you’re a junior (like I was) and you go to the smoking area, you’re therefore among senior managers. A conversation over a cigarette is very different to one in the office. You’re more relaxed. Work conversations are informal and confidential. You get to know people on a different level when you’re pulling on a Marlboro Red.

This matters. When you’re a junior in a bank, MDs are like gods. Thanks to cigarettes, I got to know quite a few MDs and senior directors when I was just an associate. Sometimes they’d drop by my desk and colleagues would look at me agog. “What did he want from you?”, was a popular refrain. (A lighter, maybe?)

It didn’t really matter what they wanted: what mattered was that I was seen in the presence of these idols and that I got to bask in their reflected glory. In banking, it’s not just how good you are – it’s who you know. And I knew these senior smokers. I never ass kissed. We just smoked together and we got along. I had a system of etiquette: I never went up to them; I let them come to me. I never asked them for anything (not even cigarettes). I built a rapport. And it payed off in my  “aura.” For a bit, I was a kind of celebrity and the internal face of my team (my manager even asked me to cut down on interaction with teams elsewhere in the bank, probably out of paranoia). I got promoted to VP, faster than usual I like to think.

Of course, there are other ways of meeting MDs and people who go to the gym are going to say they get MD facetime while they’re pumping on the machines or hanging around the showers. But, let’s be honest – you’re not going to get much of a conversation when you’re flexing or standing in the nude, and smoking is a whole different thing – when you’re smoking, you’re actively killing yourself. There’s a camaraderie in that.

Smoking’s also quick. You can smoke, and then you can work. It’s the perfect promotional lever. – So long as you live long enough to enjoy the fruits of your efforts, and let’s face it  – none of us will live forever. Marlboro anyone?

Sean Riley is the pseudonym of an MD at a US investment bank

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Brexit isn’t just about a few thousand trading jobs making their way to continent. It also means that investment banks are questioning the wisdom of keeping jobs in high-cost centres like London, and more roles are gravitating towards cheaper locations. Goldman Sachs, Standard Chartered and J.P. Morgan are already hiring in Poland, for example, and these are everything from risk, technology and quantitative finance roles.

While London’s crown wobbles, New York has its own problem potential banker exodus catalyst – tax. The shake-up of the tax system in the U.S., which the Republicans hope will bolster tax revenues, are likely to hit high-tax states like New York hardest. The Tax and Jobs Act, which limit how much total income tax can be deducted against local and state taxes, will result in a big hike for high-earning bankers and fund managers in the Big Apple. Wall Street is starting to react.

As the Financial Times reports, Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers have found their voices on the issue, and think finance professionals will leave. New York, Connecticut (a centre for hedge fund managers), New Jersey and California are all high tax states. If these tax rises go ahead, bankers could move to cheaper locations.

“While I don’t expect significant job dislocations immediately, over time this will be a major blow to keeping New York City the world’s undisputed financial capital.” said Paul Taubman, head of boutique investment bank PJT Partners. The current proposals mean that some high earners could go from paying 50% tax, to somewhere into the mid-50s, said that FT.

There are already some in London fake boohooing about the prospect of bankers going after Brexit, and it’s easy to view these protests in New York as the grumbles of the 1%. But Dan Donovan, a Republican congressman whose district serves the Staten Island and south Brooklyn areas of New York City, however, believes it could be catastrophic. “Losing even a small percentage of those households will decimate the state and city tax base,” he said.

Separately, Barclays’ bankers are staying put. After a successful hiring freeze in 2016, which resulted in over 13,000 people leaving through attrition, Barclays has been building its investment bank again in 2017. But Barclays is arguably the bank most tied to the UK after Brexit – it has said in the past that just 150 jobs will need to be relocated to Dublin as the UK leave the EU – and staff are reluctant to leave as a result. Going to another bank now is seen as too risky.

Bloomberg reports that Barclays’ UK attrition rate has fallen to 8%, and globally just 10% of people left voluntarily in the year to October – down from 12% the year before. CEO Jes Staley has been trying to revive its investment bank, and has been hiring both deal-makers and sales and trading staff – as well as investing more in technology – but investors have become increasingly impatient waiting for the turnaround as the share price continues to slide. The bank has pledged to cut costs by $1.3bn and cutting employees are key to it achieving its target of a return on tangible equity of more than 9% in 2019.

Meanwhile: 

23% of Barclays’ new MDs are women (Financial News)

RBS CEO Ross McEwan: “Businesses like ours have to move forward as though we are not going to get any form of deal that would good for banking.” (Bloomberg)

Two former bankers have set up a shop selling English goods in Luxembourg to capitalise on the influx of financiers (Bloomberg)

Andrea Orcel is not optimistic about 2018 (Reuters)

Shareholders are rallying around LSE chairman Donald Brydon (Sunday Telegraph)

Meet the man creating a merchant bank from scratch (Sunday Times)

“Christmas has come early for financial firms.” (City of London Corporation)

Not all people in finance fear a Corbyn government (Financial Times)

Bank of England could start shifting staff to Birmingham (Financial Times)

The Bitcoin bonus (NY Post)

Bitcoin is an exclusive club (Blomberg)

Trolling Jamie Dimon worked out well for this Bitcoin firm (Business Insider)

“Crazy imaginary internet money” (The Onion)

Meet Håkan Guldkula, the Swede from a tiny village tried his luck on Wall Street, lost it all and then became the investment banker who knows everyone (Business Insider)

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If you’re a trader who’s fearful that your entire species will be displaced by intelligent algorithms, don’t be. Daniel Ciment of J.P. Morgan says it won’t happen, and Ciment should know.

Ciment is J.P. Morgan’s global head of electronic equities trading. His division pioneered LOXM, the self-teaching trading algorithm whose ability to learn from the past enables it to execute large, complicated equities trades without moving markets. When news of LOXM’s existence was first revealed by the FT, its designer David Fellah suggested it could be ominous for humans on the same turf.  “Such customisation was previously implemented by humans, but now the AI machine is able to do it on a much larger and more efficient scale,” Fellah said.

Ciment, however, suggests that for traders as a whole there’s no need to panic. In the last of J.P. Morgan’s series of videos on the use of technology and artificial intelligence in banking, Ciment says the popularisation of intelligent algorithms in trading can be compared to the arrival of the internet for travel agents or modern telecommunications for switchboard operators. Whereas traditional travel agents and switchboard operators disappeared, jobs in both sectors proliferated. There are more jobs today than there used to be, they’re just different.

While individual traders might still disappear (particularly if they specialize in placing complex trades without moving markets), Ciment says AI could give traders as a breed a boost. The survivors will work alongside the new algorithms to get the best execution for clients. It’s becoming very important for traders to know how to use the new tools, he adds.

Ciment doesn’t divulge exactly how LOXM works. In a broad-brush overview, he says artificial intelligence is the next phase of a trading revolution which until recently was focused on speed of execution. Now that speed is ubiquitous, he says the future is about having the best self-teaching algorithms that can learn from billions of past transactions to achieve best execution. In the same way that Google is introducing AI to the search process to help predict what individual users are looking for, Ciment says machine learning should soon be able to personalize execution for particular clients: “Machine learning algorithms will know that they see this type of trading from this type of client and that type of trading from that type client. They will adapt from client to client,” he says.

Ciment reiterates earlier claims that J.P. Morgan is years ahead of rival banks when it comes to the use of machine learning in trading. Whereas banks can improve the speed of their execution quickly simply by investing in hardware and infrastructure, he says intelligent algorithms take a long time to develop. “The industry is starting to wake up to this…J.P. Morgan was lucky enough to this process two years ago.”

Addendum: We’re informed that you can see how LOXM works here….

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The former head of media, communications and information services at Jefferies has ditched investment banking to join a small investment firm focused on technology.

Alex Kelloff, a managing director at Jefferies in New York who was promoted to joint head of the media, communications and information services investment banking in 2015, has left to join SDC Capital, a specialist investment firm targeting investments in data centres.

The firm was started earlier this year by Todd Aaron, the co-founder and co-CEO of Sentinel Data Centers, which he has headed up since 2001. He started the investment firm in March.

Kelloff joined Jefferies in 2004 as an investment banker focused on the telecommunications sector, following the completion of an MBA at INSEAD. He ran the media, communications and information services investment banking division at Jefferies alongside Craig Mineard, who remains at the bank.

Kelloff is a partner at SDC Capital, which says that it aimed to make structured equity investments across the technology sector, with a focus on data centres and network platforms. Its most notable transaction so far is an investment in Brazilian data centre provider Ascenty alongside private equity giant Blackstone. The amount was undisclosed.

As well as Kelloff, SDC Capital has also hired Paul Hines, a veteran of Sentinel Data Centers who has spent the past eight months working for Citi in New York.

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If you want to make MD in an investment bank, should you work for Barclays or for Goldman Sachs? Statistics released by each bank on this year’s MD promotions suggest it depends upon your career path.

Surprisingly, it looks a lot easier overall to make MD at Goldman than at Barclays. The U.S. bank promoted 509 people this year out of its staff of 38,500. New MDs therefore accounted for 1.4% of Goldman’s total headcount, or 0.7% per annum when you consider that Goldman’s MD promotions are biannual.

At Barclays, by comparison, less than half this proportion made MD this year. The UK bank’s 74 MD global promotions spanned the corporate and investment bank (CIB), the private bank, overseas services, and Barclays’ international cards business. Given that Barclays’ CIB alone employs more than 20,000 people, while Barclays’ International (which includes the investment bank and non-UK consumer cards and payments) employs 36,900, the implication is that just 0.2% to 0.4% of Barclays’ staff made MD.

In other words, Barclays is pretty parsimonious when it comes to handing out promotions.

You’re more likely to get promoted to MD at Barclays, though, if you join the bank part way through your career. Of this year’s Barclays’ managing director pool 65% didn’t work their way up through the Barclays’ graduate recruitment programme; they were promoted after joining the bank later in their careers. By comparison, only a third of Goldman’s new MDs didn’t join the bank as either an analyst or an associate.

Goldman promotes its own; Barclays promotes people it hired from other banks.

This might help explain exits from Goldman Sachs to Barclays – although recent Barclays hires like Asita Anche joined as an MD after also being an MD at GS.

Unlike Goldman Sachs, Barclays doesn’t release the names of the people on its MD list. Sources say the new MDs aren’t uniquely in the front office and include the likes of Maria Serova, a COO in Singapore who joined from VTB in 2008, and Esther Bernstein, a fixed income business manager in New York City who joined from Deutsche in the same year.

37 of Barclays’ new MDs (50%) are in the Americas, where Barclays coincidentally makes around 50% of its investment banking revenues. 

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Photo credit: vernonwiley, Getty

David Zammit, Head of Sales and Distribution for Citi’s Wealth Management business in Australia, has an ambitious goal for the next three years: he plans to double the size of his team of Relationship Managers.

Leveraging its capabilities as a global bank, Citi Australia announced earlier this year that it plans to reposition its wealth management business to focus on meeting the needs of Australia’s high net worth (HNW) investors, a rapidly growing segment of its client base.

“Citi globally has been an adviser and manager of choice for wealthy individuals and families for the past 200 years, and we see an opportunity to leverage that expertise and both better serve our clients and grow our client base in Australia,” says Zammit.

“It’s not about creating something new for our Australian operation. We have some of the best structured investment offerings in the country, and have been building wealth management relationships with clients for decades. But we want to expand our operation in Australia, offer a more holistic wealth management solution, and drive growth through our relationship managers who are recognised by our clients as industry leading,” he adds.

Zammit says the recruitment drive is about keeping pace with the rapid expansion of Cit’s wealth business. “Examining our growth projections for the near future, we will need to hire around 100 new Relationship Managers in the next 24 months to best serve a growing client-base. At Citi we’re looking for high-quality, entrepreneurial candidates who want a challenging, innovative job at a global bank.”

Zammit says several important economic trends are driving more clients to seek out Citi’s wealth services. These include a protracted period of low interest rates in Australia, fears of a potential property bubble, and a benign equities market.

“Because of this, clients are facing an increasingly tough investment environment, where it’s harder to make money above inflation and tax,” he explains. “Our wealth management insights have therefore become more valuable and – largely through word of mouth – awareness of our research, investment products and advice, has recently been spreading in Australia.”

Relationship Managers at Citi service HNW clients with more than $1m to invest. “We’re seeking senior Relationship Managers or financial advisers, who have significant technical knowledge, and at least 10 years’ experience, ideally from an international firm,” says Zammit.

Citi is open to providing training for junior relationship manager roles, he adds. “We’re recruiting on a very large scale and our training is second to none, so for these positions we’ll consider candidates from other parts of the financial services sector.”

The new roles will be based in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane – the cities experiencing the most client growth – but Zammit welcomes applications from across Australia and globally. “For example, you could be a returning Australian expat, or from a market like Hong Kong, China, Singapore, or Korea. Many of our wealth clients are originally from Asian countries,” says Zammit. “We want to recruit Relationship Managers from a diverse range of backgrounds to match our diverse client base.”

No matter where you are applying from, Zammit says you need to be “passionate about markets” to work in wealth management at Citi. “We have an open architecture policy, so our Relationship Managers don’t just provide Citi’s investment products and solutions. To succeed here, you must have broad technical knowledge across the market – from equities to fixed income.

“You must also understand what makes up clients’ portfolios and what their risk profile is,” adds Zammit. “Some clients want Relationship Managers to validate their investment thinking, while others want actual recommendations.”

As well as having investment skills, Citi’s new Relationship Managers will focus on “building trust and rapport with clients”. “Our clients make significantly sized investments with us and that brings with it a large amount of responsibility,” says Zammit.  “Our Relationship Managers guide and direct clients, and discuss the possible risks around the corner.”

Zammit says new Relationship Managers who join Citi are often struck by the “entrepreneurial” working environment. “We’re creating roles in which Relationship Managers actually feel like they own the business, which sees them go above and beyond to serve their clients.”

The size and nature of Citi’s operations in Australia give its Relationship Managers “the best of both worlds”, says Zammit. “Locally, we’re smaller than the four domestic Australian banks, allowing us to be nimble and adapt quickly to market changes,” he says.

Citi’s global presence also means it offers exciting opportunities for career advancement. “A high proportion of our employees in Australia end up being promoted internally or offshore, while others move into different roles at Citi,” says Zammit. “Our emphasis on internal mobility is often a big motivation for Relationship Managers moving to Citi and staying with us. Once on board, high performers can expect to find career advancement through a variety of opportunities both on-shore or via Citi’s global network.”

Image credit: Getty

If you’re contemplating a move from London to Frankfurt, you might think you’ll be able to get away with dressing in the same way. After all, the banking industry is fairly homogenous across Europe and bankers in the two cities might be expected to dress similarly.

Wrong.

The Frankfurt dress code is very different to London’s. What’s normal in London will be looked at askance in Germany.

1. There are very few tailored shirts in Frankfurt 

OK, plenty of London bankers buy shirts in bulk at TM Lewin, but there are also those who buy affordable tailored shirts in Jermyn Street. In Frankfurt, tailored shirts are rare. Instead, most German bankers get shirts from shops like Olymp, Eterna or Seidensticker. The quality of the fabric isn’t great, but everyone wears them and if you do too, you’ll fit in.

2. No one in Frankfurt wears braces (suspenders in America) 

If you’ve seen the Wall Street film, you might be one of those bankers who likes to wear red braces/suspenders. Don’t do this in Germany. This trend hasn’t hit Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, bankers wear belts.

3. Bankers in Frankfurt don’t do colourful socks

Germany might be home to the prestigious Falke sock brand, but this doesn’t mean German bankers wear pink and green socks like their counterparts in London do. In Germany, you wear black socks. Stick to this rule unless you want people to look at your ankles.

4. Avoid double monk strap shoes

London bankers love their double monk strap dress shoes. Some German bankers are catching onto this, but not many. If you want to blend in, stick to something more conservative, like the classic Oxford shoe.

5. Get yourself a fancy watch

Watches are out in London banking circles, especially among juniors. In Frankfurt, however, even analysts are judged by the ornamentation on their wrists. I’ve seen first year analysts with Rolex Submariners (sometimes called, “the Analyst watch”). This is usually bought with the signing bonus, with your first bonus after being promoted to Analyst two, or imparted as a graduation gift by rich parents. In London, understatement is chic – the most you’ll see is an Apple watch, typically in a childish colour like blue, green, violet or red.

6. But revert to the trusted classics on casual Fridays

If there are discrepancies between London and Frankfurt on most days of the week, there’s more homogeneity on so-called “casual Fridays,” when male bankers everywhere seem to dress the same. In Frankfurt, like London, you’ll need to get yourself a pair of branded loafers or Timberland boat shoes, some branded chinos and a nice shirt (preferably from Ralph Lauren) with cuff links. Equipped with all this, you’ll fit just as well into Fressgass as Canada Square.

Alex Bergen graduated from the University of Mannheim and Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. He worked as an analyst in investment banking in London and now works as an M&A professional in corporate development in London. Prior to that, he gained investment banking working experience in London and Frankfurt. Alex is now dedicating his time to sharing career advice via the ‘M&Academy’ platform, where he discusses how to get into M&A, ECM, corporate development, private equity and leveraged finance. You can visit his Facebook page, FastTrackForYourFinanceJob, here. 

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My parents immigrated from Guyana in the early ’80s, both from poor farming families. My father worked to pay for his college education while being financially responsible for his parents and younger siblings, and my mom worked in teaching and in insurance. None of them had backgrounds in finance, so I started from scratch on figuring out my career.

Growing up in an immigrant family, I held financial security as a priority. My parents envisioned me as a pharmacist or doctor, though this type of work didn’t excite me. I was attracted to finance because of its ties to our economy. I wanted to understand how to do fundamental analysis of companies and figure out what impacts investor decisions and the movements of the financial markets.

Seeing my parents work hard to achieve their goals despite their humble beginnings inspired me to go after the career I want. You need this type of hunger to get your foot in the door on Wall Street.

Getting my start

I became interested in financial services during my freshman year at the City University of New York’s Baruch College. I wanted to become an expert in evaluating specific companies across an industry, and I felt that the college’s Financial Leadership Program would equip me with the necessary skills to achieve this. I knew I needed to learn more about finance beyond what I was reading from career guides and I wanted to build my soft skills, so I applied to FLP. It helped me to gain access to employers for which some other schools are a higher priority for recruiting.

If you are looking to break into finance with few connections, building your network can be frustrating if recruiters just focus on the Ivy League and a small number of other elite schools. Luckily, Baruch’s reach on front-office positions in finance has been growing, and I’ve found building connections with its alumni to be helpful.

The process of applying for an internship in finance and establishing your career requires you to prove yourself. A lot of interviews in financial services are designed to test your ability to handle stress and the quantitative nature of our work. If you’re passionate about this world, reading financial publications regularly and taking relevant classes are musts.

My first finance internship was for a family office in New York. After that, I interned at a boutique investment bank evaluating deals in the technology space and then in equity research at Bank of Montreal (BMO) Capital Markets. These roles confirmed that I was on the right career path.

These internships, as well as Baruch’s classes and campus clubs, taught me how to manage my time, as I worked while attending school full time, and deal with different personalities and cultures. Seeing a woman of color in the workplaces I’ve been in was rare. I come from a different background than some of my colleagues, as many of the interns I met had come from families with roots on Wall Street or from schools whose students are heavily recruited for finance jobs. so I’ve had to learn about – and adjust to – these differences.

During my summer at BMO, I treated every day as if it were an interview. Taking an Excel class at Baruch, teaching myself financial modeling and getting additional training through FLP also helped me to acquire skills for fundamental analysis of companies and prepare for working at a bank.

I realized the importance of building my network and demonstrating endurance and a willingness to learn. Coming from a hardworking culture like at Baruch, students sometimes forget the importance of meeting others in their organizations. If I had a do-over, I would have connected with even more people across each firm while working those internships. Often, students seek out the people whose jobs they want. That approach is too narrow and doesn’t educate them about other roles they could potentially be interested in.

After almost five years at BMO Capital Markets, I decided to join Wells Fargo Securities. Its equities presence is growing, and I worked on an equity research team that was collaborative, hard-working and personable.

Work environment and hours

Many people think of the banking industry as traditional and rigid. While some aspects of bank jobs confirm these stereotypes, I was surprised by how much my coworkers cared about issues like diversity and equality in the workplace.

Even a small amount of support went a long way in getting my firms more involved with investing in scholarships for under-represented minorities interested in business and hosting events with prominent women in finance. Nonetheless, lack of representation for both groups is still an issue across banking.

It is widely understood that you give a large number of hours of your life to certain jobs in this industry. But the exposure and experience that you gain pay off in spades. For the first couple of years, you have to be able to say yes to everything and work many hours.

Working in a fast-paced environment where a large amount of money is dependent on the timely flow of information is exciting to me. Although it is hard work breaking in, I never had second thoughts. Working in this type of environment has prepared me for anything and was a great way to meet people who have served as mentors and contributed to my professional success.

Kamellia Saroop is currently a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business and a former equity research associate at Wells Fargo Securities and, prior to that, BMO Capital Markets.

Follow @danbutchrwrites

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Barclays’ investment bankers have had a good time of it since the departure of their previous ex-retailing banking CEO Antony Jenkins and Jenkins’ replacement by Jes Staley, a red-blooded ex-J.P. Morgan man with a trading bent, but  all this fun could all be about to come to an end. As Patrick Jenkins points out in the Financial Times, Staley’s judgement is now due.

The judgement in question relates to the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s investigation into Staley’s misguided attempt to unearth the identity of a whistleblower earlier this year. To be reached by Andrew Bailey. the FCA’s “firm but fair” chief executive, the judgement has the potential to unseat Staley and give Barclays its fourth chief executive in just five years. The outcome matters for both men: Bailey could succeed Mark Carney at the Bank of England and may be looked upon unfavourably if he’s seen as too easy on Jes; if it goes badly, Jes may decide to go back to America and his artisan crafted boat.

People working in Barclays’ investment bank should view the upcoming judgement with trepidation. If Jes is exonerated, their Christmases will be merry and the plan for returning Barclays to its former risk-taking glory will proceed as intended. If Jes is jilted, there’s a risk that Barclays will undergo yet another change of strategy under a boss less amenable to the investment bank. If so, it would come at a bad time: the return on equity in the investment bank was just 5.9% in the third quarter,  well below the cost of capital. Staley intends to grow his way out of this; another CEO could just as easily decide to cut. The only upside is that Barclays’ share price, down 13% this year, is expected to rise if Staley goes. This could benefit anyone with deferred bonuses, although Barclays cut deferrals last year – so even this slender benefit could well be negligible.

Separately, people ask for some strange things when they move to Paris. The New York Times has been looking at how the city of light is changing in its attempt to woo post-Brexit bankers. The contortions include a room in the French finance industry which has been bedecked to look like a start-up and includes a sign saying, “On your mark, get ready, innovate!” There’s also an agency you can call when you’re an international company pondering your move. Someone called it  and asked where the executive “dancing clubs” (““Kind of a social club for executives and their wives.”) One was unearthed in Western Paris.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs is having tea and biscuits with John McDonnell of the UK’s Labour party. (Bloomberg) 

The easy life is over on the buy-side. In 2018 people will be asked to do more for less. (Business Insider) 

Oxford researcher says artificial intelligence is a speculative bubble. (BFM Business, in French) 

How to develop an AI stock picker: “If you partition the problem into two steps – predicting future fundamentals from historical fundamentals, and then use those future fundamentals to predict price – the complexity of deep learning can be made useful and improve the model.” (Bloomberg)

There’s an expectation that mothers won’t work in Frankfurt. (Financial Times) 

Former British brokers in Luxembourg have opened a shop selling Marmite and British goods to coming Brexit hordes. (Bloomberg) 

One senior executive at a large US institution said he had privately told the UK government that if it “pulled a rabbit out of a hat 10 minutes before midnight” on March 31 2019, then banks including his would reverse their decisions to leave the UK. (Financial Times) 

As a possible prelude to the Bank of England moving from London Birmingham, Mark Carney spent a day in Liverpool last month. (Bloomberg) 

HSBC struggled to hire 1,000 people in Birmingham, despite offering all kinds of sweeteners to get staff to move there. (BreakingViews) 

Citi’s investment bankers are on a roll. (Business Insider) 

Blockchain company raises $42.5bn in just two weeks. (Business Insider) 

Bankers work more than 40 hours a week to justify themselves to their employer. (Financial News)

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