Beware entryist banks which woo you with fancy job titles and promises of an exciting future, but don’t deliver. This appears to be the message behind the career peregrinations of David Le Broussois, a former top derivatives trader who’s just joined J.P. Morgan in a risk role.
A graduate of the esteemed Ecole Centrale Paris, Le Broussois spent seven years at Citi, rising to become a director of EMEA stucturing.
In 2012, however, he quit this comfortable life at Citi for a bigger job as a director and overall head of financial engineering at Russia’s Sberbank. 21 months after that, he quit Sberbank for the even more extravagant title of a ‘managing director and head of structuring’ at China’s Haitong Securities, then engaged in a, ‘global expansion drive.’ Nine months later, and he was de-registered from Haitong as the Chinese bank’s global vision blurred and it pulled back from equities. And now? As of this month, Le Broussois is a mere executive director in a risk role at J.P. Morgan.
Ostensibly, this looks like a step backwards for a man who was once an MD and head of a whole team of structurers. Le Broussois’ precise role at J.P. Morgan is unclear. However, as a member of the bank’s ‘Trading Portfolio Review’ team he’s understood to be part of the bank’s model review group. Reviewing models is an important part of the European Central Bank’s attempts to introduce standardisation into the way banks calibrate risk, but it’s not exactly structuring client solutions.
Then again, working in the middle office reviewing risk models at a large global bank might be a safer place to be right now than an ersatz role in the front office at a flighty new entrant. The real question here is whether Le Broussois would have been better off staying at Citi instead of chasing promotions at smaller rivals four years ago. Maybe he’d be an MD in Citi’s EMEA structuring business by now?
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