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Goldman Sachs started the trend a decade ago, and most every big bank has since followed suit. Paid internship-like programs designed for experienced candidates who voluntarily left the workforce for a number of years who are now looking to return are now a thing. The concept behind the programs is to tap into an underrecruited talent pool that may be struggling due to a lengthy gap in their resume – typically women who stepped away to raise a family. It’s also hard to deny that the initiatives are good PR; dozens of articles have been written on Goldman Sachs’ “returnship” program – a phrase it actually trademarked – as well as similar initiatives offered by other banks, including J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays.

But just how successful are these 8 to 12-week programs, which, like traditional internships, offer recruits training while also scouting for potential full-time hires. We scoured through articles written several years ago – including one of our own from 2013 and a New York Times piece from early 2014 – where banks touted returnees who were recently made full-time hires. We then cross-referenced the names through LinkedIn, Finra and other sources to see where they are now.

Generally speaking, those who were hired at the conclusion of their returnship have mostly found success, particularly when it comes to job security. While not all have been promoted over the past few years, several have. Others have moved on to bigger positions at rival banks.

Featured in our article, Elyse Goodman was hired into the operations group at Goldman Sachs in 2010. Six months after publication, she joined the investment management division’s communication department and has since been promoted to co-head of a global team of analysts and associates, according to her LinkedIn profile. A member of Goldman’s inaugural 2008 returnship class, Arlene Houston started in regulatory operations in Jersey City and was eventually made VP of equity derivative negotiations in New York. She left Goldman in 2015 to join J.P. Morgan, where she is now an executive director who manages capital stress testing.

Andrea Chermayeff, who was selected as a member of J.P. Morgan’s initial “re-entry” program in 2013 following 15 years away from the industry to raise her children, landed a full-time role as a business manager within JPM’s private bank, according to the Times piece. She is now an executive director and lending advisor for high-net worth clients. A member of the same class, Hope Tully joined J.P. Morgan full-time following a 14-year layoff to raise her kids. She still works as a vice president in the global strategy group. Only one banker mentioned in the 2014 Times article is no longer working in the industry, at least according to LinkedIn. She spent three-and-a-half years with Morgan Stanley’s asset management group before leaving in 2017.

Among the more than dozen other returnees who were featured in separate years-old articles, only one isn’t currently working, according to LinkedIn. Two have been named executive director, though no returnee we came across has made MD. Some jobs are client-facing, though no one we identified works in a traditional investment banking role.

Ten years following Goldman’s launch of the industry’s first-ever returnship program, it therefore seems clear that the concept is more than PR fodder. The programs have helped banks find and, perhaps more importantly, retain talent that may have otherwise gone overlooked. (The level of turnover among returnees is well below industry norms). However, it’s important to note that those few who get the initial opportunity and turned it into a career have otherwise impeccable resumes.

Of the four bankers featured in the Times piece, two received their MBA from Harvard while a third has both her masters and law degree from Duke. Three worked at a tier-one bank before taking time away, while the fourth had a background in private equity. The backgrounds of others are similar. The fact is, the bar may be even higher for returnees, despite the fact that they need to go through the equivalent of a paid internship before earning a full-time offer. It’s a good option, but you better bring more than just a gap in your resume, along with a good reason for having it.

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Remember that UBS dress-code? The one that commanded women at the Swiss bank to avoid black nail varnish and everyone to trim their toenails? This week, another Germanic bank has pushed the boundaries of corporate dress sensibilities: Bank Frick, a small bank in Liechtenstein (and with an office in London), has gifted each of its employees a pair of corporate-trainers (sneakers if you’re in the U.S.) to wear to the office.

The sneakers in question are the Frick company colours of blue and white. They’re being distributed to mark Frick’s 20th anniversary and a shift to what the bank describes as, “a modern, hybrid style that constitutes a middle ground between business and casual clothing.”

It’s not just trainers. Frick employees are also now permitted to undo a top button and to discard their tie (if male). If female, they must wear “one business style element” to their outfit, and the rest is up to them. The only stipulation is that the outfit must be “clean and tidy” with “no holes.”

Where Frick has ventured first, other banks may follow. Goldman Sachs already allows its technology staff to wear “totally casual” clothes, but has yet to produce its own blue gym shoes. Anecdotally, the preferred tech shoe is Yeezy trainer, although this may be a little 2017.

Frick says the company shoes and the freestyle dress code are intended to reflect the fact that its, “visitors and clients have more of a fintech or blockchain background.” The bank supports initial coin offerings (ICOs), provides custody of crypto assets and dealing services in leading cryptocurrencies, and makes crypto assets bankable.

Frick says it’s confident the whole package will make it a more attractive employer, both to people inside and outside of banking. For those who might have an aversion to light blue and white trainers, Frick does offer room for self-expression: dark blue or turquoise trainers are also an option.

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Banks in Singapore are still recruiting specialist senior technologists from abroad, in a bid to overcome local talent shortages and competition from tech firms. But overseas hiring at a junior level has slowed to a crawl as the government encourages banks to take on more young Singaporean techies, say recruiters.

Technology is one of the few job functions in which both global and local banks in Singapore have recently been adding hundreds of new employees to their headcounts. DBS, for example, recruited about 200 new technologists in the year to end-May, while more than a third of J.P. Morgan’s Singapore staff now work in tech.

“Banks in Singapore have been growing their technology teams very aggressively over the last few years, and there’s now a noticeable gap between the supply of local candidates versus the demand for them,” says Lucas Yeo, head of banking and finance at recruiters Tangspac. “Tech firms are also hiring from banks, which increases this talent shortage.”

As a result, the Singapore government is still allowing experienced foreign technologists in specialist roles to relocate to the country as it “rebalances” the education system to boost the local tech workforce over the long term, according to Bloomberg. “Talent is very short everywhere in the world – AI talent, software programmers,” Education Minister Ong Ye Kung told the newswire last month. “We let them in because we require a critical mass for the sector to take off, while we continue to train Singaporeans for those jobs.”

Adam Davies, associate director and lead IT recruiter at iKas International, says demand for experienced techies in Singapore finance “is growing all the time”. “So it’s inevitable that banks and fintech firms are looking overseas for certain niche skills.”

Which particular technology skills do overseas job seekers need to have? “Developers with experience in full-stack, front-end, back-end or mobile development are highly sought after,” says Michael Nette, a director at recruiters Ambition. “Languages which are in high demand in Singapore banking include Java, Python and Go for back-end, and ReactJS, AngularJS and VueJS for front-end.”

“Cyber security, cloud, DevOps and senior architecture roles are also increasingly being sourced from overseas,” adds Adam Edwards, a business director at recruiters Hays. “This is because the technology is quite new and the skillset is not as developed in Singapore as in overseas markets.”

Yeo from Tangspac has also seen senior foreign candidates land jobs in Singapore because they have experience in fields such as AI, machine learning, data analytics, and UI/UX, or they understand niche banking products, including T24, Triple A Plus, and Murex. “Given the wide range of tech skills required by banks, the high degree of proficiency required in each one, and the fact that the in-demand skills are constantly changing, it’s difficult for experienced talent to come from the Singapore market alone,” says Yeo.

By contrast, junior jobs are increasingly being filled by Singaporeans, both new graduates and young tech professionals. Banks have been prioritising local hiring for all roles since the 2014 Fair Consideration Framework introduced an obligation to advertise jobs to Singaporeans before foreigners. The law only applies to positions paying under S$180k, but that includes almost all junior banking tech vacancies.

“Compared with four years ago it’s more difficult for banks to hire at associate level, for example,” says Davies from iKas. “But at VP and above its not a problem for most banks.”

An overseas technologist’s chances of obtaining an Employment Pass to work in Singapore depend not just on factors such as their skills, experience and salary, but also on the ratio of foreign vs local staff in the team and/or bank they are applying to. The Ministry of Manpower has recently stepped up its scrutiny on companies with a disproportionately low concentration of Singaporeans in their workforces. This may mean that banks that already employ a high percentage of local technologists may potentially be given more leeway to hire from abroad when they need to, say recruiters.

“Conversely, I’ve seen some banks experiencing more challenges than others when hiring foreign technologists. These banks are now working to take on more local talent, giving them an additional quota to hire from overseas,” says Davies, without naming the firms. “Every bank has to get the balance right between having local and overseas people on their payroll.”

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It’s not unusual for banks to indulge in what is commonly known as ‘upgrading’, but rarely has it been quite so brazen as at Nomura.

You will (or might) recall that back in July Nomura suddenly reversed its policy of expanding its emerging markets business and pulled the plug on various traders it hired the year before. In June, it also dumped Fred Jallot, its global head of credit and asset-backed securities in EMEA, and it reportedly eliminated heads of businesses like Nick Oxlade (head of European credit sales), and Manolo Pedrini (head of European rates sales).

Three months later, Bloomberg says Nomura is back in action. After eliminating 50 people in total, it now has a hiring plan. Bloomberg says Steve Ashley, who runs global trading at Nomura, didn’t just want to cut costs when he had a change of heart about many of his key employees, he wanted to ‘replace senior staff and change the leadership in London.’

This means more hiring. And it has not gone unnoticed (by us). We suggested in late July that Ashley seemed to have something afoot when he promptly recruited some of his former RBS colleagues (James Konrad, Biagio Lapolla and Robbie Anderson) for flow rates trading. Since then, Bloomberg notes that Ashley has also hired John Gousias from hedge fund Millennium Capital Management to run credit trading. He’s reportedly expanding a whole new business called Client Financing and Solutions (CFS) which creates structured credit products for clients. He also wants to increase credit trading revenues by 25% with his shiny new team. Let this be a warning to anyone who’s settled into their comfortable trading job for the long term – at Nomura or elsewhere. Banks are rarely satisfied.

Separately, have you ever considered that you might be that thing? – An ‘insecure overachiever’? Laura Empson, an academic, who has written a book on the subject has been talking to the BBC and getting various insecure overachievers to confess. One of them is Jeremy Newman, the former CEO of accountancy firm BDO: “It feels like a constant need to prove you should be where you are,” he says. Empson says IOs are characterized by fierce ambition and a profound sense of their own inadequacy.

If you have self-diagnosed as an insecure overachiever, there may not be much you can do to get rid of it. Under Empson’s formulation, over-achievement stems from a childhood in which there was psychological, financial, or physical insecurity. Banks and professional services firms manipulate the syndrome and set out to recruit overachievers, because they know they’ll work very, very hard (and overachieve).

You can, however, be aware of the colleagues who trigger your competitive over-achievement, find a job that doesn’t play upon it, and stop reformulating your goals higher and higher each time you reach one. “Once an insecure overachiever has achieved a goal, they tend to discount it quickly and set the bar even higher,” says Empson. ” So when you have achieved something, remember how concerned you were about not succeeding, how often you have succeeded in spite of these concerns, and challenge yourself to believe the evidence of your persistent pattern of success.”

Meanwhile:

Justin Gmelich, the top credit trader at Goldman Sachs, says the corporate bond market has become “super-procyclical” and that untested changes to market structure could cause liquidity issues when the market turns. He also said that Goldman has obviated the need for human traders to respond to pricing requests (which were previously coming once every six seconds), by building a pricing engine for 14,000 different bonds. (Business Insider)

Deutsche Bank’s Japanese head of M&A and Japanese COO are both leaving. (Bloomberg)

Jeremy Monnier, the former global head of FX structuring at Deutsche Bank, joined Barclays. (FX Week)

Bank of America hired Stefan Burgstaller, an analyst from Goldman Sachs, to be vice chairman of investment banking for Europe. (Financial News)

This is what all the different kinds of quant investing (factor investing, risk parity, systematic global macro, event driven arbitrage, statistical arbitrage, CTA) actually mean. (Bloomberg)

Law firm embraces denim. (Financial News)

Watch your children play football to boost your testosterone levels. (BPS Digest)

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Have you heard? Natwest Markets (AKA the old RBS) is a bit of a payer? So say various headhunters who claim to have seen it in action, bidding for candidates.

“Everyone still thinks Natwest Markets is constrained and super-regulated, but they can still pull out big packages when they want to,” says one senior fixed income headhunter, speaking off the record. “There have been a few occasions when they’ve surprised us recently.” The head of a rival fixed income search boutique agrees: “Natwest are pushing out. They’ve been one of this year’s big spenders.”

Any big spending seems to have been borne of necessity. After Steve Ashley poached James Konrad, Biagio Lapolla and Robbie Anderson for Nomura’s flow rates trading in July, Natwest has been on the back foot. “They lost their rates trading desk to Nomura, so people going there have been able to name their price,” claims one headhunter.

These people have seemingly included the likes of Juliette Jestin-Knapp, a former inflation trader at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who is said to be joining Natwest Markets imminently. The bank also hired Vladimir Piterbarg, who left Rokos Capital Management in July.

Natwest Markets’ new reputation for generosity might come as a surprise to those who work there already. RBS’s 2017 remuneration report put average pay for material risk takers at Natwest Markets substantially below all U.S. banks and five per cent below Barclays. Only Standard Chartered seemed to pay less.

One headhunter close to RBS said the bank, which is still majority-owned by the British government, pays on a par with big European banks like Deutsche Bank and Barclays, and is more generous than the likes of HSBC and BNP Paribas, However, he contested the claim that Natwest Markets’ hires can “name their price.” The bank will frequently offer a pay increase of up to 20% as an inducement to move, in line with the rest of the market, he said. Anything more than that tends to fall foul of RBS’s “robust” HR process.

RBS’s attempt to rebuild its rates desk comes as other banks are hiring in the area too. Per-Fredrik Emanuelsson, the former head of rates and emerging markets trading at Commerzbank (previously of BNP Paribas and Barclays) is understood to have quit last week for Nordea.

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As banks dangle their feet in the murky waters of machine learning and spend big money recruiting artificial intelligence professionals for what have so far been uncertain returns, they may want to spare a thought for Google. The tech company has just published accounts for DeepMind Technologies Limited, the British-based artificial intelligence company it founded in September 2010. The results show just how costly investing in artificial intelligence can be.

For the year ending in December 2017, DeepMind’s UK wage bill amounted to £201m, up from £105m the previous year. It was largely thanks to this that the company made an operating loss of £279m (up from £124m one year earlier). Painful.

DeepMind’s deepening costs come after CEO Demis Hassabis said in December that the company had doubled its headcount to 700 over the previous 12 months. The implication is therefore that Google pays each of its DeepMind employees around £280k ($363k) a head. – Possibly even more given that some of those 700 may be based in its other global offices in Alberta, Montreal, Paris and Mountain View and therefore paid outside the UK.

Alphabet’s generosity is all the more impressive given that DeepMind’s revenues are diminutive. Last year, the company earned £54m from other Alphabet Group ‘undertakings.’ Many of DeepMind’s initiatives are research-focused and directed towwards healthcare, environmental or social requirements. The company has been helping Imperial College London to develop screening technologies for breast cancer, for example. It’s also enabled Google to use less energy in its data centres and – famously – developed AlphaGo, a computer programme which beat a human Go player in 2015.

A lack of revenues and the high cost of hires isn’t dissuading DeepMind from expanding further in the UK: the company currently has around 30 vacancies in London. If banks – who are also after deep learning talent – want to compete, they may need to raise their game.

Photo: Getty

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Deutsche Bank’s credit trading business is quite something, according to financial services intelligence firm Coalition, which ranked it joint first with J.P. Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s credit businesses in the first half of 2018. This may have something to do with the efforts of Chetan (Chetankumar Shah) and Ioannis (Yanni/John) Pipilis, Deutsche’s co-heads of global credit trading. But it could equally be traced to someone Deutsche insiders say has turned out to be an unlikely star player: Ardacan Celebi, a junior-ish trader on the credit index desk.

Celebi joined Deutsche fourteen months ago after starting his career at J.P. Morgan in 2014 and moving to Barclays 14 months later: he has a history of job-hopping, and with good reason; he’s very profitable.

“Arcan Celebi is one of the most profitable people in Deutsche’s credit business so far this year,” says one colleague. “It’s kind of funny – a lot of the more senior guys on the desk have lost money; Arcan is carrying them.”

Neither Deutsche nor Celebi himself responded to a request to comment on the claims. In the past year, however, Deutsche has become one of the biggest credit index traders in Europe from ranking around 10th previously, according to iTraxx. Celebi, who works under head of index trading Cedric Lespiau (who was hired from SocGen last year) and who is known internally as Mo Salah due to his theoretical resemblance to the Egyptian football player, is thought to be largely responsible for this.

Celebi’s success comes as Deutsche reportedly made $35m by successfully betting on Turkish economic turmoil in August. More recently, though, some insiders suggest the flow credit desk has lost money.

It doesn’t help that some of Deutsche’s more experienced director-level credit professionals have been leaving. The German bank’s direct lending team lost Neha Sethi, who went to Prodigy Finance in August, and Julien Carzola, who’s understood to have quit for Nomura. Meanwhile, structured credit trader Varun Garg is said to have left for Credt Suisse, while credit trading Bilal Kahloon has gone to Barclays.

Given Celebi’s history of job-hopping, Deutsche may want to induce him to stick around.

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It should come as no surprise that management consultants who work at McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) – the MBB firms – make more money than their counterparts at other big consulting companies. But just how much?

We took to Glassdoor to look at the average salary reported by consultants at MBB firms in New York and London and compared them to those working at the Big Four accounting firms – PwC, EY, Deloitte and KPMG. We looked only at management consultants, disregarding employees who described themselves as pure accounting and tax professionals as well as those with more junior and senior titles, like associate or director.

As you can see below, the differences are rather stark, with MBB firms in New York paying the average consultant roughly $60k more than those working at the Big Four. The spread is even more significant in London, where MBB consultants earn twice that of their Big Four counterparts, though salaries are down across the board when compared to New York. BCG appears the most generous, on both sides of the pond.

Largely considered the gold standard in the industry, McKinsey, Bain and BCG recruit from a short list of target schools and are extremely selective. But they’re also known to work their consultants harder than other firms. Our recent employee survey found that, on average, MBB firms scored twice as poorly as the Big Four when it comes to working hours. McKinsey, Bain and BCG also appear to prefer facetime, ranking toward the bottom in flexible working options. Moreover, earning the title of consultant is known to be a rather steep climb at MBB firms, which often encourage analysts and associates to go back to business school, though they tend to cover the bill for those who return.

All that said, those who make it through the gauntlet are handsomely rewarded, particularly compared to others in their field.

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If you work in banking, you will know that the industry is not short of women. In the bottom ranks, we’re everywhere. Research last year showed that women now make up 58% of the junior staff in finance firms. It’s the career of choice for plenty of ambitious intelligent girls. However, that same research found that only 26% of the senior ranks are female.

Finance is an industry where middle aged male bankers manage bright young women.

This in itself is one reason why women drop out of the middle-ranks. Male bosses in their mid-40s or 50s can’t handle them. Place an older man in a room with a beautiful, bright 24 year-old woman and he’s incredibly awkward. His instinct is to avoid these situations altogether.

I had a boss, for example, who seemed to find it almost impossible to talk to me. He couldn’t seem to communicate in my presence. It was easier for him to ignore me, so he wouldn’t invite me to events. On team social occasions, it was him and the guys.

The higher you go on Wall Street, the more this is a problem. When you’re junior – an analyst or an associate – you are promoted automatically. Beyond that, it’s all about how much your boss rates you and how much visibility you’ve got. When your male bosses avoid you, this is a problem. You don’t get much mentoring as an a young woman in banking.

For this reason, young women don’t get promoted. Their input gets ignored. Their male bosses listen to the male juniors who they can more easily hang out with and relate to. It doesn’t help that most of them are dating or married to women who are working or have worked in PR and fashion. Most male bankers like their women uncomplicated.

The higher you climb as a woman in finance, the more that the women around you are the secretaries and admins. Yes, there are some senior women in banking (the 26%), but they’re such a small minority that you don’t always come across them. I never had a female boss and although there were some great women who always went to bat for their juniors, some of the harshest feedback I ever received was from a female MD who said I needed to be more graceful and feminine.

If you want to get ahead in finance, therefore, you need to think about how present yourself. You need to be “nice,” but not so nice so you get railroaded. You need to be, “pretty,” but not so pretty that it’s threatening. You don’t want to be sassy, bold or masculine. The sweet spot is nice and pretty without being challenging. If you can master that, you’ll get ahead. Men, meanwhile, get to be themselves.

And so, brilliant young women passed over for mediocre men. And eventually they get sick of it. These bright, beautiful, bold young women realize there are better things to do. This leaves all the non-threatening mediocre men for the MDs to invite out for drinks and take home to meet their uncomplicated stay-at-home wives. It’s a vicious circle.

Amy Smith is a pseudonym

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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Nomura isn’t just building its credit solutions team in Europe. The Japanese bank has also hired a Deutsche Bank vice president for its team in New York.

Benoit Martin is set to join Nomura’s risk solutions group following his gardening leave, according to sources. Martin spent seven years at Deutsche Bank building structured FX risk management solutions and executing FX trades. He has his MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and is fluent in four different languages, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Nomura also just added 17-year UBS veteran Robert Allgyer as a managing director, seemingly in M&A. Allgyer started in September.

The hires come at a rather tumultuous time for Nomura, which is still trying to make good out of its decade-old acquisition of Lehman Brothers’ European investment banking business. Losing nearly $7 billion over the last decade, the bank’s European division has reportedly ousted roughly 50 employees in London since June, according to Bloomberg. The list of cuts includes several business heads and some of Nomura’s senior traders in the region. But the bank isn’t just making cuts; it’s replacing senior staff in an effort to kickstart the business. Markets head Steve Ashley is building a new Client Financing and Solutions (CFS) which creates structured credit products for clients, and aims to increase credit trading revenues 25%.

Nomura’s U.S. strategy has been changeable over the years, with the bank charging into new lines of business with fresh hires only to retrench and start anew. The latest effort has been an expansion of Nomura’s M&A business in the U.S.

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New Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon has long championed gender equality on Wall Street, publicly pushing banks to employ more women, particularly in leadership positions, the vast majority of which are still currently filled by men. It likely came as no coincidence that just a week after Solomon was named the bank’s next CEO, Goldman appointed four women to its highly-influential management committee, nearly doubling female representation on its most senior governing body. Less than a week on the job, Solomon is now taking aim at the junior ranks.

Back in March, Solomon and then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein set a goal of having an even gender split of college graduate hires by 2021. Speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit this week, Solomon provided more details around how that goal would be realized.

He said that, of the tens of thousands of investment banking applications Goldman receives each year, between 12,000 and 15,000 are deemed to be qualified candidates. Of that group, around 8,000 will be men and 4,000 will be women, he said. “If the recruiting process lets it go on its own way – lets the historical biases come in – you wind up with something that looks like two-thirds [men] and one-third [women]” in terms of hires, Solomon said. “But if you actually say: let’s go get the 150 best women out of the 4,000 qualified women and let’s take the 150 best men [out of the 8,000 qualified men], you wind up in a different place. And that’s…changed the perspective of allowing people to just gravitate to some of the biases that are built into the system.”

The comments are particularly interesting due to Solomon’s unique level of frankness and specificity. Every bank has gender goals, but most executives talk about increasing diversity by expanding and leveling the recruiting pool, rather than coming out and stating directly that they’ll hire a larger percentage of female applicants – even if that is a more realistic way of hitting short-term targets. Solomon also acknowledged that gender bias in the hiring process remains a reality through a “system” that also perpetrates Goldman Sachs. Again, bank executives tend to talk about diversity issues as an industry problem. Solomon appears to be suggesting that, if senior leadership didn’t step in, historical biases would have likely wormed their way into Goldman’s hiring process.

None of these thoughts are necessarily groundbreaking – there is plenty of research to back up the reality of gender diversity issues in banking. But, if nothing else, they showcase Solomon’s personality and leadership style: direct and expressive. “When you want to make changes, sometimes you have to just get simple and practical to what will move the needle,” he said. Providing what appears to be a hiring mandate rather than a goal is certainly one way to do that.

Elsewhere, the now-head of cross-asset strategy at Morgan Stanley proved there are a number of ways to get noticed by a potential employer. Sifting through resumes back in 2004, hiring manager Gregory Peters came across Andrew Sheets, who worked as a cartoonist at Brown University’s student newspaper. It was his finance-related drawings that helped him stand out from the pack.

“I thought it was perfect,” Peters, now a senior fund manager at PGIM Fixed Income, told the Financial Times. “He could take the most complex things going on in markets and turn them into these brilliant little cartoons.” Sheets didn’t stop drawing once he got the job. The FT published several dozen outside of their paywall that paint an interesting picture of the last dozen years in finance.

Meanwhile:

Senator Bernie Sanders wants to break up any financial company that has a total exposure of greater than 3% of gross domestic product. The list would only be 10 long, but it would include J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. (CNBC)

If you’re an investment professional looking for work, one interesting job opening just popped up. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is looking for a chief investment officer to manage his $10 billion charitable organization. (Bloomberg)

San Francisco-based hedge fund Criterion Capital Management is closing its doors after 16 years, though the founders seemed to hint at the possibility of a new venture down the road that has more of a long-term view. Criterion’s long portfolio has gained 850% since inception. (WSJ)

HSBC has hired seven senior infrastructure and real estate investment bankers just a few weeks after its board received an anonymous memo from senior dealmakers criticizing the investment bank’s leadership group. (Financial News)

A judge has ruled in favor of a female executive at Commerzbank in London who was unfairly “sidelined” and subjected to derogatory stereotypes after returning from maternity leave. (Financial News)

One-third of male executives have adjusted their behavior at work following the #metoo movement. Career experts worry that some men are “overcorrecting,” and are now leaving women out of business discussions and mentoring opportunities. (Bloomberg)

Crypto currency exchange Coinbase has lost the head of its institutional business. Adam White’s departure is significant as he was pushing Coinbase to hire traditional bankers as the exchange rolls out its institutional sales model in New York. (Bloomberg)

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If you want a trading job at an investment bank or a fund or hedge fund today, you’ll need a strong interest in the markets. You will also need a deep understanding of and tolerance for risk, and an ability to get up at 5am most days. However, while these factors are still necessary for the aspiring trader, they’re no longer sufficient.

Olivier Bossard is Professor of Finance and Executive Director of the MSc Finance at HEC Paris, which was ranked first globally by the FT this year. A former derivatives trader at SocGen and Lehman Brothers, he’s been teaching aspiring traders full-time since 2012. Bossard says his students arrive with misconceptions about what it takes to get into trading now, and that his role is to help them understand what contemporary trading jobs involve.

For everyone who’s not a student at HEC, these are the three insights Bossard imparts.

1. You’re going to need to be a strong mathematician with an ability to withstand pressure

You’re not going to get into trading if you’re not a strong mathematician. “Strong mathematical skills, trading discipline and resistance to high pressure remain the key skills to land a job and be successful in trading,” says Bossard. For this reason, he says candidates for trading jobs are often asked to solve complex problems during interviews – expect to be asked to solve mathematical questions, or even to complete a Rubik’s cube under pressure.

2. You’re going to need at least a basic understanding of coding

If you want to be a systematic trader developing the algorithms that underpin electronic trading strategies, you’ll need to be able to code. For most other trading jobs, Bossard says you won’t need to be a brilliant coder, but you will need to have a, “basic understanding of how oriented-object programming and functional/procedural programming work.’ This can be acquired through an introductory course in C++, C# or Python, he suggests.

Bossard says your aim should not be to program like a technologist, but to understand how technologists think: “It is about being able to interact with technologists and to understand the challenges they face and the solutions they’re creating. You need to be able to work across the implementation chain – from conceptualization to coding and then to validation.”

3. You’re going need to understand complex risk calculations

Lastly, Bossard says you’ll need to understand technical risk calculations. Thanks to the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB), which is being implemented in 2019, he says traders will need much greater understanding of (new standardized) methodologies for calculating risk than traders ever had in the past. “Previously, traders did not have to calculate their Expected Shortfall (ES), however now this must be calculated on a daily basis in addition to the conventional Value-at-Risk (VaR),” he says. It will also help if you understand what XVA exposure is – how it’s computed, and how it can be hedged against. This too means you’ll need impressive mathematical abilities (see 1).

Bossard says the most desirable students combine all of the above with (typically), a bachelors degree in maths or computing and a “high-level MSc in Finance programme.” Of course, he might be expected to say the latter given his role heading the masters in finance at HEC….

““

If you’re not familiar with the name Jas Sandhu, you can probably be forgiven. If you are, you are likely part of a small group of people at the top of the hottest hiring area for investment banks this year – equities systematic trading. In this niche, Sandhu is something of a star.

Those who know say that Sandhu, who has almost no online presence, was Morgan Stanley’s leading equities algo strat and a key player in the bank’s market-leading electronic equities business. He’s thought to have spent over a decade working for Morgan Stanley in London, until recently – when insiders say he disappeared and hasn’t been seen since.

Morgan Stanley isn’t commenting on Sandhu’s whereabouts, but he’s no longer on the bank’s internal directory. Rumour has it that he’s off to J.P. Morgan, although he’s not there yet – and J.P. Morgan isn’t commenting either.

If Sandhu is indeed moving next door to J.P.M., it will be a coup for the rival U.S. bank, which has been busy building out its electronic trading business to compete with Morgan Stanley, which seized the dominant position in the wake of the financial crisis.

Recent months have seen plenty of activity in the systematic trading space, particularly at Goldman Sachs, which is playing catch-up as it seeks to build its electronic trading business after years of comparative neglect. Goldman Sachs hired Tim Rohkemper from Credit Suisse and J.P. Morgan hired Fabian Mehmke from Deutsche Bank in August, for example. Goldman has been losing strats as well as hiring them though: algo software engineer Chandan Nath left for Google last month and the New York electronic trading team has suffered multiple exits.

““

The Financial Times is reporting today that multimillionaires in the UK are setting offshore investment accounts as a hedge against a Labour government run by John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn. They clearly think a Labour government is a risk. Should you get out too if you’re working in the City of London?

You don’t have to be very old to remember a Labour government in the UK – there was one in 2010 – but what about a proper socialist one, as opposed to the Blairite variety? To remember that, you have to be pretty ancient.

This could soon change. The current odds are about even for a Corbyn-and-McDonnell-led Labour party to win the highest number of seats in the next election (whenever that is). The omens are not great: McDonnell famously cited his hobby as “overthrowing capitalism” and Corbyn has consistently denigrated ‘casino’ banks and said that finance will serve Labour under his administration.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that political parties very often change their tune once in they are power and are buffeted by ‘events, dear boy, events’.

That said, the Labour 2017 manifesto gives some solid clues as to the likely flavour of things. In a word, it would be … interesting.

The biggest policy specifically involving the City itself is Labour’s plan to create a National Investment Bank “that will bring in private capital finance to deliver £250 billion of lending power [and] … will support a network of regional development banks that … will deliver the finance that our small businesses, co-operatives and innovative projects need.” It’s a familiar structure from some other European countries, most importantly Germany.

This is all touted as being in addition to what existing privately owned banks do, since – and this has been a consistent Labour accusation since the Great Financial Crisis – they are supposedly failing in their duty to lend for commerce as opposed to property.

To me, this implies one rather positive thing for City workers. The new bank would need to hire a whole heap of staff: loan officers, credit staff, line managers, IT professionals, the lot. Maybe that’s a good thing if you fancy a change from your job at Barclays (say) or a posting to a less expensive part of the country than London (Hull?).

Of course, it is possible, faced with the long and arduous task of setting up this banking structure from scratch, that Labour might look to cannibalise bits of the universal bank that the nation already actually owns: namely, RBS.

There’s therefore a very strong chance that RBS – rather than being punted out to the private sector again – becomes the core of the new National Investment Bank. Labour strongly hint at this when they state that they’ll launch a consultation on “breaking up [RBS] to create new local public banks that are better matched to their customers’ needs.” Good luck with keeping your job if you are a senior RBS manager under that scenario. The new management team will be political appointees charged with “delivering Labour industrial strategy”, not the old guard.

None of this would be good news for British banks’ shareholders. There is no way that the National Investment Bank’s activities would simply be complementary to what privately owned banks do right now – there would a massive temptation for it to provide loans and other services to companies that are already served by the big UK and foreign banks. More than that, the loans would be at a cheaper rate, since governments can borrow more easily than banks and the National Investment Bank won’t be focused on profits.

Thus existing banks would be competing with a new low cost producer. The overall effect would like the effect of Landesbanks in Germany: a heavy anchor on the private sector.

The other plans for the financial sector will probably be of only marginal impact, though. Labour has plans to “extend Stamp Duty Reserve Tax” and to “[put] in place a firm ring-fence between investment and retail banking”. The former – a sort of half-hearted Tobin tax on derivatives – would introduce extra bureaucracy and almost certainly not work to raise the sums counted on (about £5 billion) since the planned tax rates are too high relative to derivative bid/offer spreads. The latter – ring-fencing – is happening already anyway.

Needless to say, though, Labour’s specific plans for the finance sector are just one part of the story. More important is the wider economic approach that Labour would take. They are pledged to borrow and tax in order to spend and invest.

The ‘borrow and spend’ part of it could have some minor positive results seen from the City’s vantage point. First off, it will inject extra volatility into the gilts market – usually a good thing for gilts desks. Also, the debate over whether extra borrowing is a bad or a good thing (“it’s burdening future generations to pay inflated public sector wages now” versus “it’s borrowing at rock-bottom rates to invest in infrastructure for the long term”) will no doubt feed through to bigger swings in Sterling. Happy days for FX folk! Labour also plans to renationalise the railways. Fees for investment bankers beckon!

But, for the City, there’s no real silver lining on the ‘tax’ piece. Corporation tax will certainly rise from its current 20%. The recently announced plan to allocate 10% of shares to workers is also taxation by other means. And, of course, personal taxation will rise for ‘the rich’ (i.e. anyone earning over £80k a year) – the majority of whom work in the Square Mile.

Worse still, it is likely that if a Labour government found it necessary to look for a bigger tax take in the future, the City – whether in the form of its firms or its employees – is the golden goose is they would be tempted to turn to first. Let’s face it, squeezing the City ‘til its pips squeaked’ (to use a notorious expression used by one of last chancellors in ‘real Labour’ government in the 1970s) would be fairly popular with Labour’s supporters.

However, paradoxically, is the very juiciness of the goose that might be its best protection from excessive future pip squeezing. The financial services sector is the biggest single contributors to total UK taxation – 11% in 2017. Any UK government, Labour or Tory, is going to need that cash. With the City already unnerved by the uncertainty of Brexit and with other European capitals pouting seductively at London-based firms, could Chancellor McDonnell really risk an 11% hole in the public finances?

The bookies reckon we will have a coin toss’s chance of finding out.

Kevin Rodgers started his career as a trader in 1990 with Merrill Lynch in London before joining another American bank, Bankers Trust. From there he went on to work as a managing director of Deutsche Bank for 15 years, latterly as global head of foreign exchange. His book, “Why Aren’t They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis” was published by Penguin Random House in July 2016.

““

A longtime Credit Suisse veteran has joined Bank of America’s prime brokerage business in New York that made headlines earlier this year after its top executive was fired after allegations of sexual misconduct. Robert Salman started at Bank of America as a vice president in September.

Salman joined Bank of America six months after the firm made major changes to the unit that was previously led by Omeed Malik, who was fired for allegedly making advances towards colleagues and having relationships with female subordinates, charges which he denied at the time. The bank then fired two of Malik’s former colleagues who were accused of trying to cover up for their former boss by coordinating stories about his behavior during the investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal. In July, Bank of America agreed to pay Malik an undisclosed multi-million dollar sum to settle claims of defamation. Malik’s attorney said the former exec never engaged in any misconduct and that the bank had suppressed evidence showing the accusations weren’t credible, according to Bloomberg.

BofA eventually replaced Malik with Kim Stolz, an MD who was previously based in London as head of equity derivatives hedge fund sales in EMEA, and is said to be rebuilding the culture with some fresh blood.

Earlier this year, Credit Suisse made significant cuts to its U.S. prime brokerage unit, letting go as many as 20 executives, many of whom were very senior. Salman’s name wasn’t included in the list of departing bankers that we reported on back in March, though his LinkedIn profile notes that he took an eight month break before joining Bank of America. Salman had been with Credit Suisse for over 20 years.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

““

Banking isn’t sexy. It’s a cliché, but as with all the best clichés it’s also completely true. I’ve spent 14 years working in finance in NYC, latterly as a managing director. You might think I’m a sort of hero to the young. I am not.

Ten years ago, when I went out on campus, students would flock to me. I was like a god. It was before the financial crisis. It was when banks still paid big money, and when everyone thought we were these great guys with big watches and big futures. Now, when I go to campus recruitment fairs, I feel like a pariah. People still come to our table, but in much smaller numbers. I have to go and search for students who might want to work for us. They’re all congregating at the tables of tech firms and other industries.

This is a huge problem. If young people don’t want join banks, banks are going to wither from the bottom up. The problem is that we are trapped by their need to increase our return on equity. Everyone knows our big priority is cutting costs. Working for a growing tech firm is far more exciting.

This isn’t how it was in the old days. It used to be that you came into banking because you made $85k a year as an analyst and you tripled your compensation in the first three years. These days, you’re more likely to get a 10% to 15% pay rise annually. The really high performing Millennials don’t want that – if they’re putting in the hours and the effort, they expect to get paid.

It doesn’t help that my generation of bankers are tired and deflated. A lot of us came into this industry expecting something different. Now we’re hanging on because we’ve got five years’ of deferred compensation and can’t see what else to do. Our pay falls every year: the guys who were on $3m are now on $1m and the link to performance has been eroded. There’s no incentive to go out and kill it. We’re going through the motions and we’re not exactly giving off a dynamic vibe.

This is why, when we do persuade the 21-year-olds over to our table at careers fairs and we get them through our door, they often don’t stay. We have a big problem with our second year analysts. These are the juniors doing the grunt work. There are fewer of them and they have to work harder than their predecessors. They look up and they see me blocking their progress. They see that they’re only going to get pay rises of 15% a year. They see there’s no upside in it any more. And so they go off and do something else instead. Something cool. And I stay here, trying to pretend that I’m hip too.

Marty Smith is the pseudonym of an MD in the markets business of an international bank on Wall Street

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

Thinking of leaving an investment bank to work for Facebook? If you’re in London, you’re in luck. Facebook hired 330 people in London last year, and they weren’t all engineers.

Of 1,290 employees in London at the end of 2017, 578 were in sales, support and marketing and 712 were engineers. Both areas are growing: Facebook added 175 engineers last year and 144 support people, salespeople and marketeers. The social network spent £56m more on research and development in 2017 compared to the previous year, the majority of which were personnel-related costs, including share-based payments to senior-level engineers.

Average pay at Facebook in London was around £206k for 2017, around 54% of which was salary, with the rest paid in pension and shares. One year earlier, average pay at Facebook UK was £187k.

At Goldman Sachs International, average compensation is closer to £399k. It’s easy to see why technologists at banks in London might be tempted by Facebook though. Although Goldman Sachs is said to have hiked pay for entry level engineers to $100k (£75k) in the U.S., juniors in London complain that it’s very hard to earn good money in banking. T

Facebook UK increased revenues to £1.2bn last year, a rise of over 50%. It also increased the amount of tax it pays – from £2.5m to £17m, or 27% of 2017 profits. Due to the near £15m increase in taxes, Facebook saw a £10m dip in profit compared to the previous year. In December last year Facebook announced plans to hire 800 more people in the UK. It’s currently looking for someone to help it recruit university students in the country.

Follow @MadameButcher
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
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““

When people leave some banks of the world, they go out and do something different. Take the Ben Leonard, the former HSBC FIG banker who’s founded an organic wine company and a company to help first time buyers purchase a home. This, however, is often not the case with ex-Goldman Sachs bankers. ‘Retirement’ from Goldman Sachs is typically just a euphemism for a year or two on the sidelines before a new opportunity to prove oneself in banking comes along.

The latest ex-GS banker to re-materialize after after the shortest retirement in the world is Peter Enns, a man who spent 21 years at Goldman Sachs, latterly as chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs in Canada, and who supposedly retired last October. Not for long. Enns is now back as global head of the financial institutions group at HSBC, a bank that has been having a few problems of late – ever since some of its anonymous senior bankers went public with a memo about the alleged incompetence of their boss.

It’s not just Enns. The market is awash with ex-Goldman bankers who were supposed to be retiring but didn’t. Peter Selman, the former Goldman Sachs partner who’s now running Deutsche’s equities business is another case in point. It’s partly semantics: no one senior ever gets fired from Goldman Sachs, they only ‘retire’ and look for new jobs. It’s also a question of opportunity: when you leave a third tier bank, only fourth and fifth tier banks will be eager to hire you. When you leave somewhere like Goldman Sachs, all sorts of places want a piece of your action and what better way to heal a bruised ego than to parachute into a bank bursting for you to solve its problems. Call it superhero syndrome.

Enns may not be the last ‘retired’ Goldmanite to turn up at HSBC. The British bank clearly has a thing for ex-GS people, despite getting burned by Matthew Westerman, the ex-Goldman banker it hired in January 2017, who upset everyone with his aggressive approach. So far this year, HSBC says it’s hired around 24 investment bankers net – discounting all those who’ve left in a harrumph; six new hires were announced last week. Retired Goldman bankers who are bored with golf and looking for a new challenge know where to turn.

Separately, Financial Times journalist Laura Noonan has been trying out the jogging meeting with ex-Morgan Stanley analyst Huw van Steenis. One female banker told her such things are best avoided: “I come from a banking background where the team walk to Pret can become an exercise in who can walk the quickest, who is the alpha male.” You might be best fetching lunch on your own.

Meanwhile:

Brexit means lawyers in Dublin are suddenly popular and able to command big pay rises. (Financial Times)

What happened to the Zaoui Brothers? They’ve only done one deal this year and haven’t been seen for a while. (Financial News)

Barclays is cutting compliance staff. Five directors were made redundant in August. (Financial News)

Credit Suisse hired Ahmed Badr who left the Swiss bank to work for Renaissance Capital four years ago. He’ll help build the equities business in Saudi Arabia. (Bloomberg)

Partners at quant hedge fund CQS received an average of $4m each before tax for the year ending March 31st. (This is Money)

Inside Amazon’s use of artificial intelligence: cameras that can be taught when they’re seeing a bear and when it’s just your domesticated dog. (Fast Company)

Technology company employees are questioning what the projects they work on will be used for. Is it military intelligence? (NY Times)

““

It’s early autumn, and a car containing a female managing director, a female executive director and a female director from three different banks on Wall Street are driving out to the countryside for the weekend. Their current location and professions aside, they all have one thing in common: none have children. Coincidence? Maybe not.

Last month we published an article written by a vice president in an investment bank who claimed her 80 hour weeks, stressful job and demanding male colleagues (many of whom had young babies at home and therefore wanted to restricted their own working hours), were making it difficult to conceive a child. “The longer I work in banking, the more that I feel that I’m being made to make a choice: the ability to conceive, or the opportunity to become an MD,” she complained. “My male colleagues don’t have this dilemma.”

Men in banking (and men in general) might well disagree – and indeed many have done so, vociferously, in the comments box at the bottom of that article. But the senior women in the car heading out of town are in accord: woe betide the female banker who takes advantage of her fertility before ensuring she can afford some solid help with the outcome.

“The right time to have children [in finance] is when you are senior enough and wealthy enough to hire lots of nannies and housekeepers, and to have a house husband a la Helena Morrisey (ex-Newton CEO),” says one, who’s a director in the asset management division of a major bank. Her companion, an executive director in a sales role, suggests that before having a baby as a woman in finance you need to be at least in your early 30s and at least a director and then that you need to spend your (short) maternity leave checking-in with clients. – If not, you risk losing accounts to whoever covers them while you’re away.

Some would say the contemplative women in the car are already too senior to take time out for procreation. Another female vice president in another investment banking industry team in London, says it’s too risky for a woman to start a family when she’s an MD: “The men will get onto your accounts.” She says the best time to have children is when you’re a junior director: you’re established, but you still have time to build upon your profile after maternity leave. Don’t have children at vice president (VP) level: the mountain ahead remains high and your inclination to tackle it will dissipate with nappies and nighttime disruptions. “The women who have babies when they’re VPs don’t come back,” she observes.

Of course, banks do want women to come back. Goldman Sachs, for example, goes out of its way to entice lactating mothers with a service that ships their breast-milk back to their babies while they’re traveling to meet clients. But as women who’ve breastfed will know, milk production isn’t always predictable – and do you really want to be pumping in a client’s toilet to stop seepage?

There are alternatives. You can bottle feed. You can have children as an associate and find a generous grandparent to help (“I know someone in management who had a baby in their late 20s,” says an equity researcher. “That’s a risk – everyone’s super competitive and they’re cutting the lowest on the totem pole every year.”). Or you can get yourself a househusband from the start.

Either way, don’t expect sympathy from male colleagues. “We were reduced to a team of three people from five due to two of our VPs going on maternity leave at the same time with no ability to hire anyone in their place and no idea of when they were going to come back to work,” complains one man in banking about his fecund female coworkers. “It’s always hard to find the time for children,” says a male MD. “- I had my first when I was a first year associate and my third when I was a senior associate,” he adds. “I was at the office seven days a week all that time. I’m not sure how we coped.”

Of course, you can always decide not to cope. The women in the car on the way out of NYC went for this option. “Two of us decided not to have children because we just didn’t want them,” says the ED. “One of us couldn’t fit them in around her career. We were all working 60+ hours a week when were were in our 30s. It would have been difficult to have kids too.”

““

Alex Wilmot-Sitwell’s exit from Bank of America in March 2018 was a sign. Wilmott-Sitwell, who was BAML’s president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), reportedly resigned after six years because he wasn’t happy with the bank’s strategy of shifting people to Europe and because he felt marginalised by the promotion of Bruce Thompson as head of the non-European UK business. It turns out he’s not the only banker for whom Brexit is proving a political maelstrom.

As banks prepare to shift teams out of London to Paris or Frankfurt (mostly), insiders say Brexit has unleashed a wave of politicking within banks as senior staff compete to establish new centres of power. The winners and losers will help determine what the European banking industry looks like in future.

Bank of America is a case in point. In June, the U.S. bank announced plans to shift three executives to Paris, including Othmane Kabbaj, the former head of emerging markets EMEA fixed income, currency and commodity (FICC) sales, who became EU head of FICC sales in the process. BofA insiders say Kabbaj’s acolytes are keen to move with their man as a way of future-proofing their careers: “The implicit message is that if you move with your boss so that he can fill the seats that need to be filled in the new Paris office, your career will be taken care of,” observes one.

The same allegedly applies to those who move to work with Sanaz Zaimi, BofA’s global head of FICC sales, who also moved to Paris in June: London markets professionals who join her there soon expect to be remembered and rewarded in the Brexit afterlife.

However, the displacement of senior staff to Paris is also creating opportunities for those who stay behind, particularly those who have been marginalised by the new Brexit-related offices in Europe. At BofA, insiders say people like Diego Parascandalo, the EMEA head of FICC structuring, who’d originally been expected to move to Paris, but isn’t (partly because he doesn’t speak French), are shaping up as opposing centres of power in London. Similarly, Bernard Mensah, who took over from Wilmott-Sitwell as president of the European business and is also global co-head of FICC trading based in London, is allegedly seen internally as an alternative pole of power to Zaimi and Vanessa Holtz (the new EU head of FICC trading) in Paris.

“A lot of people here think the Paris moves are just the vanity project of a few managers,” says one BofA insider. “People are resistant to moving because costs are already high in the European business and it’s not clear yet that these big new offices in Europe are necessary.”

BofA declined to comment on the allegations, but one senior headhunter said it’s not the only bank where Brexit-related political issues are causing problems. “Exactly the same things are happening at Goldman Sachs, Citi and J.P. Morgan,” he says, speaking off the record. “Brexit has become a big political issue – managers are positioning themselves to benefit from the fallout, or competing on how willing their teams are to move to Europe.”

Arguably, Bank of America’s Brexit politics are particularly pernicious though. – The U.S. bank has historic fault lines relating to the combination of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, followed by the recruitment of a clique of ex-Goldman Sachs professionals under Tom Montag. “The Mensah-Zaimi-Montag dynamic is the one to watch,” suggests one insider.

Do banks’ returnship programs really work? A look at where returnees are today

Bank gives its employees corporate trainers to wear to work

Banks in Singapore still scouring the globe to find their technologists

Morning Coffee: The bank that dumped its most senior traders to hire newer, better, ones. Signs you are an insecure overachiever

Meanwhile:

Natwest Markets is gathering a new reputation for paying rather well

This is how much Google pays people at DeepMind in London

Meet Deutsche Bank’s secret 30 year-old credit trading star

How much more consultants earn at McKinsey, Bain and BCG than the Big Four

The art of being a woman in banking: Not too pretty, not too nice

Nomura is quietly building its New York solutions team too

Morning Coffee: Why it just became more difficult for men to get a job at Goldman Sachs. Doodling to get ahead

The three skills you need to get a first job in trading in 2018

Morgan Stanley lost its top algorithmic trading strat you never heard of

How afraid should bankers be of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn?

Former Credit Suisse exec joins BofA’s scandal-laden prime brokerage unit

“I’m a managing director in an investment bank. Young people think I’m deeply uncool”

Want to work at Facebook? London pay is rising, along with headcount and tax

Morning Coffee: The retired Goldman Sachs bankers for whom relaxation is not possible. Competitive Pret a Manger missions

Meanwhile:

The best and worst times to have a baby when you work in banking

Backstabbing and Brexit: Leaving the EU is making banks more political places then ever

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