It’s not turning out to be the best year for RP Martin, the inter-dealer broking firm. First of all, one of its employees was shot in the leg by a masked gunman (allegedly an ex-colleague from a previous firm) at an Essex train station, and now it finds itself at the centre of a new set of allegations regarding Libor fixing.
The allegations, detailed on the website of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, state that RP Martin brokers promised traders at RBS and elsewhere perks including trips to Las Vegas, lunches and pints of beer as a reward for adjusting Libor submissions in their favour. In turn, RP Martin’s brokers allegedly accepted £258k of “corrupt payments” from traders.
However, as the case of the so-called ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Jordan Belfort, suggested, bad publicity can spur a mass of job applications. Following a 1991 Forbes article about nefarious goings on at his firm, Belfort received a surge of applications from interested candidates. Will RP Martin be a beneficiary of the same phenomenon? If you’re thinking of applying speculatively to the London-based broking firm (which has offices in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Dubai), this is what you need to know:
1. You won’t necessarily need a university degree
According to the publicly available resumes of RP Martin’s London employees (which we assume are a representative sample), only 30% of RP Martin’s employees have a university education. Many went into the company directly from school or college, or via another inter-dealer broking firm. Predictably, however, many of RP Martin’s younger staff are indeed university educated.
2. You’ll need to be loyal
Inter-dealing broking firms are renowned for their cutthroat poaching of each other’s staff. However, many of the employees at RP Martin have spent over years – or even decades – at the firm.
3. You can move into RP Martin from recruitment, or even fashion
While many of RP Martin’s staff have experience at rival inter-dealer broking firms, this isn’t the case for all of them. Some went to work there directly from the fashion and recruitment industries.
4. It might help to be privately educated
Inter-dealer broking firms generally have a (possibly ill-deserved) reputation for employing people from Essex. Our research suggests this may be unfounded. Whilst Robin Clark (the man shot at the train station) certainly lives in Essex, fewer than 5% of RP Martin’s employees cite Essex on their online resumes. Less stereotypically, the company also several employees ex-pupils from leading British public schools like Marlborough and Dulwich College.
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