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PJ D’Amelio had wanted to quit the trading floor for a while, but it took being laid off from his job as head of European equities at Canacord Genuity for him to make the leap – into recruitment.

“It was actually a bit of a relief,” said D’Amelio, who started his own headhunting business, Peter Justin Executive Search LLC, in New York late last year. “I hit 40 last year, and realised that I needed to move away from the trading floor. It seemed like the right time.”

With juniorization taking hold of the trading floor, hitting 40 is a much bigger milestone than it would be for most jobs. The majority of traders are under 30, and burnout is a big problem the longer you stick around. What’s more, sales and trading professionals are increasingly seeking alternative career paths as banks cut back their markets businesses.

But, why headhunting? Moving into recruitment was the thing to do for senior bankers post-2008, but a subdued hiring market combined with financial services organisations moving more recruitment in-house makes it a riskier move now.

“There are a lot of good recruiters, but I also found myself frustrated with a lot of spray and play recruiters who didn’t understand the business,” he says. “I had a lot of people asking me whether I knew any good research analysts, or fund managers looking for PMs. There seemed to be an opportunity.”

The theory is that ex-bankers make better headhunters. They understand the minutiae of complex business areas in financial services, they speak the lingo, they have the network.

There’s certainly no shortage of former bankers among the larger search firms. William De Quetteville, a former UBS banker, runs the IBD practice at Armstrong International, Stephane Rombosson, the former head of French ECM at Citi, is managing partner at DHR International and Christian Beatson-Hird, one of the founders of headhunters Sainty Hird, is a former J.P. Morgan banker. In Asia, it’s an increasingly common career path.

D’Amelio says that he joined Deutsche Bank in 1999 when they were “giving jobs away” and spent 17 years in various senior sales and trading roles at KBC Financial Products and Investec Securities. Right now he’s focused on equities, both on the buy-side and sell-side.

“I’m done harassing fund managers trying to convince them to pick my pitches,” he says. “I’m happy harassing candidates instead.”

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In Britain’s home counties there is the wife of a senior American banker who thinks that Brexit is mostly a good thing. “Brexit makes sense,” she says. “When the EU made laws limiting maximum vacuum wattage, everyone I knew scrambled to buy older vaccums. When the EU attempted to limit maximum wattage on kettles, that was the last straw.”

As an expat living in the UK, she didn’t vote in last June’s referendum on the European Union. If she had, she says she would have voted to leave. In this sense, she contravenes the norm: for most U.S. banks and bankers in London, Brexit is a headache they could do without.

J.P. Morgan’s Daniel Pinto said today that he plans to move hundreds of staff to expanded offices in Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg in the “short term” to prepare for Brexit. If there’s no deal on passporting (as seems likely), Pinto added a “substantial portion” of the London business might follow along later. Last week, Goldman Sachs said it will start moving staff next year and intimated that its current London trading business might become uneconomical if it’s split with a new trading base within the EU. In March, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman publicly cautioned prime minister Theresa May against her complacency over U.S. banks’ propensity to stay in London after Brexit.

While European banks like Deutsche and BNP Paribas are currently operating in London as branches of entities licensed in their home countries, U.S. banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have historically preferred to be fully licensed in London and to “passport” into the EU. Their eggs are in the London basket. In 1989, Goldman Sachs employed just 715 people in London. By the end of last year, this had risen to 5,716. In Frankfurt, meanwhile, Goldman’s headcount currently numbers around 200.

The eFinancialCareers CV database suggests just 3% of finance staff in London are American (based on their claims to speak “American English.”) However, U.S. banks still like U.S. citizens to run their businesses in Europe, and there are plenty of senior staff in the UK. London used to be a haven in Europe for venturesome Harvard MBAs pursuing the Anglo Saxon dream. U.S. citizens this side of the Atlantic include Bank of America’s Christian Meissner, who runs corporate and investment banking out of London, Clare Scherrer, a partner in IBD at Goldman Sachs, or Troy Rohrbaugh, J.P. Morgan’s London-based head of macro trading.

For Americans in the City, Brexit presents several difficulties. The falling pound is one. “We’ve thought about moving back to the U.S. because the low valued pound means my husband is underpaid,” laments the banker’s wife. “This reduces our future retirement options. We used to get close to 1.8 dollars to the pound. Now it’s close to one to one and that certainly has an impact.” Assets denominated in pounds (think houses) are affected too. “All those GBP savings once bred for profitable USD conversion (upon repatriation) are now suffering 31-year lows,” says Mark Romeo, a former Credit Suisse AVP who worked in London and is now back in New York pursuing a career as a writer. “People can’t convert.”

More pressing for the future, however, is U.S. bankers’ monolingualism. If Britons are notoriously bad at speaking anything other than English, Americans are worse. “The trickiest things for American expats are the language barriers,” says Romeo. “For monolinguals it’s like a slow descent off a plank.” The issue is complicated by the likelihood that Frankfurt will emerge as the new EU trading center, combined with the fact that German is one of the most challenging languages to master.

Of course, there’s always the possibility of returning to North America. Some long-time London dwellers who voted to remain, like Joseph Mauro, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, have gone back already – although this probably had more to do with an opportunity at a hedge fund than Brexit. Others are biding their time and waiting to see what transpires.

The banker’s wife, meanwhile, says that for the moment Brexit has left her feeling trapped. “Europe is a fun place to visit and I love the French countryside, but working in Europe is not on the table because of the high taxes and high unemployment.” Nor does she want to return to the U.S.: “I no longer can stand the amount of salt in restaurant/processed foods, plus I prefer British weather.” Ultimately, she thinks the furore over Brexit will calm down: “Once clarifications and adjustments have been factored in I feel banks will readjust and be comfortable with hiring here again.” And if it doesn’t? “I’m glad that we have the option to move back to the U.S. if we need it.”

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Internal transfers aside, it isn’t easy to land a banking job in Singapore or Hong Kong if you’re not already based there. Asian client networks are increasingly important to careers in both cities, while the demand for Mandarin skills continues to rise in Hong Kong, and the Singapore government is still encouraging banks to hire more locals.

But recruiters in Asia say that’s not putting off budding expats from applying for roles in Asia, and some of these applicants are getting job interviews.

If you’re an overseas candidate about to interview for an Asian banking job, here are some of the relocation-related questions you can expect. And here’s how to answers them.

1. Why do you want to come to Singapore/Hong Kong?

Sinan Atahan, an executive director at headhunters The Laurus Group in Hong Kong, says there are four common responses to this question: 1) international exposure; 2) strength of the Asian market; 3) friends who love living there; and 4) regional travel and holidays. But what interviewers are really asking is: why should I hire you in Asia? Your response should let them know what you will bring to their bank. For example, you could say you will give them new clients from your home country, or that your compliance skills will help them comply with new international regulations.

2. How long will you stay in the country?

Interviewers in Asia aren’t afraid to ask upfront questions, and this one is among their favourites. “It has to be three years, at the very least,” Sophia Leung, the head of IT risk and security management at J.P. Morgan in Hong Kong, told us previously. “You spend the first year learning and the second year producing and delivering, so by year three you should be very productive to the bank.”

3. Where do you see yourself in five years time?

If interviewers don’t ask question two above, they are still likely to ask this one. Your answer should show your commitment not just to the company, but to the country, too. As well as career reasons, tell the interview why, for example, Singapore is a good place to live, says Finian Toh, an associate director at Kerry Consulting in Singapore. “The best responses usually talk about how Singapore is a safe and family-friendly country and how it would be good to raise a family here because of the excellent infrastructure, amenities and education system.”

4. What are the main culture differences you might face when working in Asia and how will you adapt your working style?

The goal here is to prove that you’ve done your homework, so provide examples from any previous visits to Asia and from talking to people based there, says Mark Enticott, founding partner at search firm Bowen Partners in Hong Kong. Rolling off generic facts from internet research won’t impress interviewers. Once you’ve spoken about Asia, move on to mention how culturally adaptable you are. Overseas experience anywhere in the world is worth shouting about, says Enticott. “A history of working, living or studying in other countries helps demonstrate that you can adapt to different cultures.”

5. What are you communication skills like?

Don’t reel off the same spiel as you would in London or New York – this is a trick question to further test your adaptability to Asia. Your answer shouldn’t be about giving good PowerPoint presentations, it should focus on cross-cultural communication. “Prepare case studies that demonstrate your ability to lead a multiracial team or show how you’ve managed projects that crossed national boundaries,” says Matthieu Imbert-Bouchard, managing director of recruiters Robert Half in Singapore.

6. What is your salary expectation?

Cost-conscious banks love using this question to weed out people who are just moving for the money. Your answer should be based not on your overseas salary but on local rates. “Your willingness to adjust your expectations will be of great help,” says Toh. If possible, ask counterparts in Asia what they’re earning and consult salary surveys to get a more objective idea. “However, it’s not necessary to only benchmark against years of experience. If you point out any unique skills that aren’t so available in Asia, you’re well positioned to command better compensation.”

7. What will your spouse or partner do in Asia?

Don’t like personal questions during job interviews? Don’t apply for a role in Asia. Banks want to ensure that expats aren’t forced home because their family can’t cope in the new country, says Neil Dyball, regional general manager for Singapore and Hong Kong at recruiters Allegis Group. In particular, make sure your partner doesn’t mind a potential period of unemployment while they look for a job.

8. Do you have any questions about the cost of living?

Another reason expats leave Singapore and Hong Kong is because they didn’t budget for the high cost of living. That’s why employers like asking overseas candidates about accommodation and other costs. The best response, says Dyball, is to say you’ve already spoken to friends or family about the practicalities of living in Asia. But it’s also good to ask the interviewer a follow-up question that shows you are already well informed but want additional information. Asking about rental prices in a particular suburb of Hong Kong or Singapore is a good example.

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Image credit: SorinVidis, Getty

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KPMG is stepping up its graduate hiring in Singapore, but if you’re looking to join the firm, you need to ditch your “sense of entitlement”, says a locally-based partner.

“The best way to recruit is to invest in talent early and mentor people, especially in their first two to three years,” says Satya Ramamurthy, who heads KPMG’s management consulting practice in Singapore and also leads its coverage of infrastructure, government and healthcare.

“We have a mandate to hire graduates and we’re also increasingly bringing in people who’ve completed Masters degrees,” he adds. KPMG does not provide campus hiring numbers, but it is recruiting across different academic disciplines – including arts and science – not just accounting and finance.

Ramamurthy advises graduates to “come on board with the right attitude”.

“One of the problems for some people in the current generation of graduates in Singapore is a sense of entitlement,” he explains. “They think ‘I’m entitled to what I get in my career’ as opposed to going the extra mile in their jobs.”

“If you’re asked to do something extra at work, don’t say ‘this isn’t my job’, think of how important it is to help your colleagues and learn from it in the process,” says Ramamurthy.

He also believes Singaporean graduates should take more “risks” in their careers.

“Don’t always go for the easy option. If you’re asked to work in Indonesia, for example, don’t say ‘will I get clean towels and water?’, think seriously about the opportunity it will give you,” he says.

“The majority of us in Singapore are used to a very comfortable standard of living and level of infrastructure. Sometimes young people here find it hard to pack their bags and go work where they’re most needed. So we generally need a change of mindset,” says Ramamurthy.

Away from graduate recruitment, Ramamurthy says KPMG’s management consulting practice in Singapore is “hiring organically, driven by the needs of clients”.

KPMG does not set annual recruitment targets for experienced staff, but Ramamurthy says demand for consulting services in Singapore is particularly strong in sectors such as banking, insurance, healthcare, and supply chain and logistics.

“Cyber security has also become a hugely important field and it’s on the mind of every board. One of the challenges of expanding in cyber security consulting in Singapore is finding the right people – the talent pool is fairly small,” he says.

As well as hiring from banks, technology firms and other consultancies, KPMG also plugs talent gaps in Singapore by relocating its staff from abroad.

“Clients’ problems are increasingly global in nature, so we often put employees on secondment into Singapore and vice versa. If a client has an issue to deal with in Europe and the skills they need are in KPMG in Singapore, we’ll look to move people,” says Ramamurthy.

“Ensuring international mobility means that drops in the local business cycle don’t necessarily mean redundancies. Our staff could be in demand overseas,” he adds.

What’s the one thing that every consultant at KPMG Singapore should be good at?

“It’s important to know how to work in a cross-cultural environment. You can’t rely on your technical knowledge alone – especially if you’re working with a client based in a market like Indonesia – you need cultural understanding and you might need language skills too. There’s no silver bullet for finding people with this combination of skills,” says Ramamurthy.

Careers in the consulting industry are changing rapidly as clients place different demands on Big Four firms.

“Our clients want faster, shorter interventions from us, supported by technology that doesn’t take months or years to implement. All consultants must be tech savvy even if they don’t directly work in digital,” says Ramamurthy.

“There’s also a trend that clients are demanding that consultants come up with a series of small prototype fixes for different aspects of their business, rather than one big overarching solution,” he adds.

Ramamurthy has been at KPMG (which came in joint-equal position as a professional services firm among Asian respondents in the eFinancialCareers Ideal Employer rankings) for 25 years in total.

“I qualified here as a chartered accountant in India, and then worked for Unilever before returning. But while I went out as an auditor, I came back to KPMG as a consultant,” says Ramamurthy.

“I’ve stayed here because of the broad range of careers on offer – I’ve never got stuck doing one thing. I’ve done consulting in government, finance and management, for example,” he adds.

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Thomas Piketty was onto something. The French economist, who published his 2.5m-selling treatise on global inequality in 2014, predicted that the top earners in the 21st century wouldn’t be the senior bankers working 70 hour weeks, but the rentiers living on income derived from their assets. A new study by the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, covered by the Guardian, suggests he could not have been more right.

The LSE spoke to an unnamed City of London banker earning a “few hundred thousand pounds” who said his level of income,” does not feel that great.” The reason is simple: when he looks around him he can see people with a lot more money doing a lot less work.

Those people are the parents of classmates at his children’s school, nine or ten of whom have assets in excess of £100m ($129k). “That to me feels wealthy, ” said the banker. It doesn’t help that these ‘genuinely wealthy’ people also have the most valuable commodity of all: time. “None of them really work,” observes the banker, or if they do they just have a little vanity hedge fund and work “on their own terms.” The upshot is that while he’s slaving away for an employer and rarely seeing his children, the £100m+ brigade get to take their children to school and participate in their lives. Richness should be defined in terms of assets rather than income, he concludes.

Separately, a Credit Suisse trader has demonstrated the art of escaping the Swiss bank. Bloomberg reports that Vivek Kappor, a trader in complex equity products has started a New Jersey hedge fund called Volaris Capital Management with around $1.6bn of assets he oversaw at Credit Suisse. Kapoor’s exit was made possible by Credit Suisse’s decision to close its private bank, which provided him with all his clients.

Meanwhile:

J.P. Morgan will shift 500 to 1,000 jobs out of London soon as the preliminary stage of its Brexit plan. (WSJ)

Standard Chartered’s 6% return on equity is an embarrassing sign that the bank needs to step up the risk. (Gadfly)

Standard Chartered will be moving some staff from London to Frankfurt because of Brexit. This won’t be a problem: the bank already has an office and ‘several staff’ in Frankfurt. (Financial Times)

The big risk to London’s status as a financial center is that banks won’t want to fragment their clearing, particularly in swap derivatives. (Gadfly)

Irrespective of your earning power, if you’re not a British citizen Britain’s Conservative party would like to stop you bringing your spouse to live with you in the UK unless he or she speaks English. (Guardian)

Traders at BNP Paribas did better than traders at other European banks last quarter. (Reuters)

BNP Paribas said it’s in a position to grow its trading business. (Bloomberg)

Credit Suisse hired a San Francisco-based TMT banker from Bank of America. (Reuters)

Avoid hedge fund careers if your personality is that of a neurotic tortoise. (Wharton)

Person wanted to walk energetic tortoise. (NY Post)

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Photo credit: London by Dave Collier is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

HSBC is ejecting senior investment bankers, and they’re not just going off and getting another banking job. Yes, some – like the former head of FIG Ben Leonard – might be going off to sell organic wine, but recent departures are also moving on to a different career path closer to their area of expertise.

One example is Carlos Garibaldi, the head of oil and gas advisory for Americas. He joined HSBC in August 2014, but has just left to join Colombian oil and gas firm Ecopetrol as head of its international new ventures and acquisitions business. This is a return to industry for Garibaldi, who has flitted between senior banking jobs and advisory roles in the oil and gas sector in Houston.

Then there’s Guillaume Marion, a senior financial institutions group investment banker in London, who’s just moved into fintech – in Canada. Marion is now the chief financial officer at Diagram Ventures, which has just 12 employees and describes itself as a ‘launchpad’ for fintech and insurtech start-ups.

Again, Marion joined HSBC in 2014, after completing a Masters in Finance degree from London Business School – one of the few courses post-experience masters courses. Before that he worked for a portfolio company at German fintech firm Rocket Internet.

Meanwhile, James Woodeson, head of multinationals in HSBC’s Swiss operation, left in April and has reinvented himself as an executive coach. Woodeson has been with HSBC his entire career, having joined as a graduate in 2002.

HSBC said in January that it was planning to cut 100 senior investment banking jobs globally, and managing directors have started to seep out of the bank throughout the course of 2017.

Recent departures include Ben Katz, a New York-based managing director – again in its financial institutions group – who left after nearly seven years at the bank. He switched from an MD role at Deutsche Bank in London in August 2010. Mijo Mirkovic, a senior vice president in currency trading, has also left the bank.

HSBC has been doing a bit of hiring, however. Christopher Denruyter, a former managing director in derivatives trading at Credit Suisse who lost his job in May last year as the Swiss bank rolled out its latest rounds of redundancies, has just joined HSBC’s QIS trading group. This is after just five months in business development at hedge fund Incipit Capital Partners.

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First HSBC hired someone from Goldman Sachs to run its global banking division. Then it cut people across investment banking and sales and trading. Now, things seem to be going right.

In the first three months of this year, revenues in HSBC’s sales and trading business soared. Compared to the first quarter of 2016, equities revenues were up 44%, rates revenues were up 53%, and credit revenues were up more than 100%. HSBC’s global markets business is booming. It also seems to be hiring. So should you go and work there?

For some people, the answer already seems to be yes. After a rolling redundancy programme that saw the departure of senior credit traders like Chris Case (who spent spent five months at Mizuho before turning up at Credit Agricole in March) and the exit of high yield traders John Gousias and Claus Jorgensen, HSBC is hiring again.

Greg Sadler, a top credit trader who left hedge fund CQS last year has appeared to run the financials book. Christopher Denruyter has joined as a managing director in funds derivatives trading after leaving Credit Suisse last year. The bank has also strengthened its German-speaking institutional sales team based (curiously) in Dusseldorf. If you’re good, the door may well be open.

How good are HSBC’s traders really though? One banking analyst cautions against irrational exuberance. Firstly – and as the charts below show, it’s in credit trading that HSBC looks particularly fancy. But HSBC’s credit trading business is tiny ($327m in the first quarter compared to $1.8bn at Bank of America, for example), and as such it is extremely prone to revenue volatility.

“HSBC’s credit business is tiny and the volatility is huge,” says Chirantan Barua at Bernstein Research. “The revenue line is extremely volatile and one quarter doesn’t mean anything.” In the first quarter of 2015, for example, Barua points out that HSBC’s credit revenues were $338m, suggesting the latest number is merely a return to form.

If HSBC isn’t big on credit, it is big on macro trading, with combined rates and FX revenues of $1.3bn in the past quarter. Here, HSBC didn’t do quite so well compared to rivals. RBS was the clear winner in the macro space in the past quarter, although it was helped here by its focus on rates trading as opposed to flailing foreign exchange. Even so, HSBC’s macro revenues look comparatively unimpressive.

This leaves equities, where HSBC’s traders achieved a 43% year-on-year revenue increase. This looks unequivocally good and far outshines all other banks. Even here, however, Barua advises caution. “HSBC’s equities business is all in Asia,” he says, “And the first quarter of 2016 in Asia was very bad.” Accordingly, HSBC’s equities trading revenues can be read as a return on the norm, and at $334m for the quarter they were far below the $629m Barua says the bank achieved in Q2 2015.

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Photo credit: HSBC (reflection) by Gordon Joly is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Deloitte is the biggest of the Big Four professional services firm, while it hires thousands of people every year, it’s standards remain high.

“We’re always looking for the best talent, and we’re pretty selective in who we hire,” Heidi Soltis-Berner, managing director for talent evolving workforce at Deloitte in the U.S. “Overall, our applications were very similar to last year – we got around 500k, and in the fiscal year 2016 we hired approximately 18,000 individuals, about 50% to 60% were from a campus setting, which equates to about a 4% hiring rate, pretty close to what it was last year.”

4% seems like good odds when you compare it to the 2% of applicants let through the door at the likes of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, or the less than 1% of people who manage to break into private equity. The best way to get in remains internships. At the junior level, Deloitte hired 3,800 interns for the fiscal year to 31 May 2016, and hired 77% of them. It also added 6,400 graduate hires.

Outside of campus recruitment, Deloitte hired 7,800 people last year. Again, it helps if you’re a known-entity. “To gauge whether someone will fit into our company culture, we rely on referrals – we know our people are typically our best resource for helping us find the right people,” she said. “Looking at experienced hires specifically, about 40% are coming through referrals, from our current population of partners and MDs, who know what types of qualified candidates fit our needs.”

Deloitte topped the professional services rankings among U.S respondents to the 2017 eFinancialCareers Ideal Employer survey. It also broke the top ten in the overall rankings in America.

Embracing the video interview

Like most investment banks and buy-side firms, Deloitte has started embracing video interviews as an initial screening process, and whittled down 12,000 candidates through this method last year.

Soltis-Berner said that it’s “real-time, on-demand and more flexible” and also tests potential candidates’ analytical skills as well as cultural fit. “We seek cognitive diversity of our employees to solve problems for our clients, so we also ask candidates to do an analytical business case to demonstrate their skills and see how they approach it from a structure standpoint in a methodical way.”

More frequent performance reviews to evaluate who gets promotions and raises

Deloitte’s approach to employee performance management has underdone a shift, moving away from a traditional performance review process, either biannual or once a year, to more frequent check-ins, reviews and snapshots.

“We’re providing more frequent feedback, more frequent conversations with professionals, but when we think about adjusting someone’s compensation it’s still on an annual basis,” Soltis-Berner said. “We look at performance snapshots, we look at employees’ contributions throughout the year, depending on the level they’re at, the clients they serve and the work they’re doing, but also other things they’re doing to create the Deloitte culture and community, such as helping with recruiting, pro bono work.

“All of that is taken into account when looking at how we reward someone on the compensation side,” she said.

Promotions and raises are not lockstep.

“Those are looked at based on the skills that someone brings to us, either from a prior employer or even during their college experience,” Soltis-Berner said. “We overlay that with a base pay and annual incentive program, a type of bonus, they can receive in certain businesses and at certain levels.

“We pay for performance based on each individual, the skills they bring, their sustained level of performance and how the business is performing, and one size does not fit all,” she said. “We view candidates for promotion on an annual basis at the same time as we make annual comp adjustments.

“We’ve moved away from a one-time meeting letting you know how you’ve performed for the year – rather, it’s a culmination of snapshots and check-ins as we review who is eligible for promotion based on criteria to evaluate employees’ sustained performance.”
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It’s supposed to be hard to get a banking job if you don’t come from the middle classes. Banks are supposed to love elite students who play high level tennis and have spent a year volunteering in Africa. Research says they’re not going to hire you if you didn’t go to the right school and you don’t wear the right shoes. This isn’t my experience. I’m none of those things, but I’ve got a front office job at a major investment bank, starting soon.

The thing is that getting into an investment bank isn’t just about cognitive smarts. It’s also about people smarts. As Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein likes to say, banks want to hire people who are “complete.” Goldman recruiters say they’re bored with all the impeccably qualified middle class students who apply. This is one reason why they’ve started using digital interviewing systems to broaden the application pool.

My background, which was not upper middle class or even lower middle class has made me different. It makes me stand out and it’s given me the people smarts banks say they want but can’t get.

I’ve been the man in my house for as long as can remember. My father died when I was a toddler and my mother was diagnosed with severe clinical depression 16 years ago and doesn’t work. My family have no business connections: nepotism is out of the question. It’s been up to me to find a way of getting into banking so that I can help my family and live the life I want to live.

Because of my background, I have experience in the real world. Students at elite schools have often started little vanity businesses on the side just to show entrepreneurialism on their CVs. When I was 15 I started my own business selling products locally to support my family. I studied in my local library and I hustled heavily. I was disciplined and determined. Banks responded: I’ve had more than a dozen internships and work experience placements in the past few years.

In my opinion, it’s because I’ve had a “rough time” that banks like me. They look for individuals who will grind but who also understand how to read people, persuade, sell, sympathize and form robust relationships. These are forms of human capital that few, if any, university degree can just hand you on a plate. They’re grown and incubated. A deprived background filled with hardship, grievance. stress and time working in the real world can be the perfect training ground.

Banks have begun recognizing this. In the UK, J.P. Morgan runs an Aspiring Professionals Programme in partnership with the Social Mobility Foundation. This offers high-achieving secondary school students from low-income backgrounds an opportunity to take part in a two-week work placement at the bank’s London offices. It’s not in the back office – these students are exposed to revenue-generating front office jobs.

The thing is, as professional services firms like PWC are recognizing too, there’s more to ability than attending a top school and graduating summa cum laude. These students are the “excellent sheep” written about by ex-Yale professor William Deresiewicz. If banks want fully-rounded individuals they’re going to have to look outside their elite comfort zone. They’re starting to do that more and more, and people like me are the beneficiaries.

Kris Brent is the pseudonym of an incoming analyst at a U.S. bank in London

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Every financial services job has its unique sources of stress and frustration, and HR is no exception. While many discount HR as merely the first hurdle of the interview process, if you’re applying for a job at a bank, private equity firm, hedge fund or management consultant, it pays to stay on their good side.

This is the behavior to avoid if you want HR to keep your application going.

1. Being a cocky braggart

Overachieving candidates have the tendency to walk into an interview expecting to put on a show of what they think HR executives want to hear rather than being themselves. The hiring process isn’t only based on your qualifications, but also how well you fit into the firm. If HR specialists hire someone who put on a show because they said all of the right things, then they could be making the wrong decision but only find that out later on when their true colors start to show.

“Don’t be afraid to be yourself,” says an HR administrator and internal recruiter formerly with Northwestern Mutual who asked to remain anonymous. “Nobody is asking for perfection, and the value that you as an individual can add to a company could be just what an HR exec is looking for.”

These candidates also tend to overshare information that has little-to-no relevance to the job they are interviewing for.

“I have had people talk at me during interviews rather than to me on more than one occasion,” she says.

2. Being inflexible

Work environments are changing and evolving so rapidly. During an interview, financial services HR executives are looking to identify a candidate’s ability to be nimble, agile and willing to work with ambiguity.

“If a candidate seems resistant to change or too stuck in their ways, it’s a huge turn-off to today’s employers,” says Laura Mazzullo, HR recruitment specialist at East Side Staffing.

3. Being overeager, pestering or creepy

Don’t be a stalker. Following-up is one thing, but patience is required. The interview process involves a lot of people conferring on the decision and this can take time.

“Show you’re interested, but also show you are patient and respectful of their time,” Mazzullo says.

There’s also a difference between doing your due diligence and being a private investigator. Don’t tell HR executives things about themselves that only their closest friends and family know. “I understand that in today’s technological world it is very easy to do some sleuthing, but don’t be creepy,” the Northwestern Mutual recruiter says. “If you see a common connection on my LinkedIn that you want to ask me about, find a way to strategically weave it into the conversation.”

4. Being incapable of talking about yourself

Candidates should be able to articulate their own motivations, reasons for changing jobs, passions and philosophies about their field of expertise. HR executives appreciate a level of self-awareness in the candidates they bring onboard

“Self-awareness and articulation indicates someone is confident, passionate and capable of expressing their own frustrations or desires once on the job,” Mazzullo says.

5. Being too confident in your own abilities

A self-entitled candidate will walk into an interview and wonder why you’re even putting them through the interview process. They seem to think that anything and everything they do is golden and the HR executive would be crazy not to hire them.

“The self-entitled candidate is typically defined as a millennial, but I’ve seen plenty of seasoned candidates in this category as well,” the ex-Northwestern Mutual recruiter said. “Don’t get me wrong, confidence is a huge plus and everybody should embody some sort of confidence, but one should also be humble and know that there is always room for professional development.

“No candidate knows everything, especially when starting a new job,” she says. “You need to go into it ready to learn and integrate.”

6. Bringing up compensation too early

Especially early in the process, avoid talking only about money and title. Employers want to know that you are interested more deeply in their organization, your role, a boss who will be a mentor and overall culture.

“They want to hire someone who wants to specifically work for them and want to hear concrete reasons why their firm and that specific role is a fantastic match for you,” Mazzullo says.

7. Poor formatting or exotic font on your resume or cover letter

Resumes with non-traditional fonts and backgrounds are a big pet peeve of HR executives. Don’t try to be different or cute with columns and small text. Make the information as easy to find as possible. Send your resume as a plain Word document or PDF.

8. Canned responses

A common piece of negative feedback from banks’ HR personnel is overly rehearsed responses. There is obviously a lot of preparation that goes into a banking interview, but all that work spent practicing is causing some bad habits, above all talking as if you are reading off of a script. Interviewers want natural conversations, not memorized lines, so know the general direction you are going to take an answer but don’t make it look like you’re going through a routine.

9. Regurgitating your resume

One common question that you’re bound to hear in any interview is “tell me your story” or “walk me through your resume.” The biggest mistake people make when responding is giving them information that they already have. There is no need to regurgitate everything that is on your resume. The question is a prompt to bring a personal touch to your background and explain how your experience showcases your attributes and what makes you unique, along with how it positions you well for the company and role in question.

10. Speaking in generalities rather than being specific

You should think through several specific examples for each strength you want to highlight and each thing that the job description lists as prerequisites or nice-to-have attributes or qualifications. Don’t say, “I am a strong project manager.” Instead, tell the HR exec,”I am proud to have often received feedback that I am particularly good getting project teams aligned and energized, which has meant I have often been selected for project startups and rescues.”
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Has Donald Trump been kind to M&A bankers or hasn’t he?

It’s a moot point: for all the froth about record banking deals in the first 100 days of his presidency, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley all saw their revenues decline year-on-year in the first quarter. Only Bank of America, with its Q1 record fees and 28% revenue uplift seemed to blow the lights out. The big U.S. banks can therefore be forgiven for hesitating before stocking up on new M&A talent.

International banks, who are still struggling to get a foot in the market, are a different matter.

Headhunters say second tier banks – mostly the European and Japanese houses who lack a solid presence in the U.S. market – are competing for senior advisory talent on Wall Street, and bidding up rainmakers in the process.

“They’re looking for people who can get the deal,” says Jeannie Branthover, managing partner in DHR International’s global financial services practice. “For some of these firms – which have had regulatory issues, they’re having to pay 30% to 40% more to get people on board.”

Deutsche Bank has said it wants to “deepen” its penetration of the U.S. market. The German bank hired three senior healthcare bankers since the start of the year, based both in New York and San Francisco as it makes revival of its U.S. business a priority. Nomura is also going for M&A growth in the Americas (again) and has said explicitly that it wants some more bankers to facilitate that. Mitsubishi UFJ is also said to be hiring on Wall Street, as is Jefferies and UBS and Cantor Fitzgerald. The list goes on.

“The second tier banks and the boutiques are active in M&A hiring,” says Michael Karp, CEO of search firm Options Group. “They can be attractive because their base salaries are pretty high.”

The U.S. M&A market is owned by the big U.S. banks. Dealogic says Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America accounted for a combined 38% of the market by revenue in the first quarter, with European banks and international banks (and Citi) vying for the remainder. Deutsche Bank and UBS ranked outside the top 10.

As senior banker hiring picks up, recruitment of juniors is sure to follow. Junior ranks are already depleted by exits to tech firms and private equity, and Branthover says banks are less well to “flex” existing young staff than they used to be. “There’s a lot of pressure not to overwork these young people now,” she says. Because of this, banks may need a bigger-than-usual infusion of new blood into their associate classes later this summer: “You’re going to see more hiring out of MBA programs this year,” Branthover predicts.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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Credit Suisse is doubling the size of its ‘solutions’ technology team in Hong Kong and Singapore this year and it wants candidates from outside of banking to apply.

The unit, which supports Credit Suisse’s derivatives business in Asia, has grown from 30 to 50 people in Hong Kong over the past two years, says Paul Gresham, CIO of APAC solutions IT.

Credit Suisse now plans to increase headcount to 100 by the end of this year – and base some of the 50 new recruits in Singapore and Shenzhen as well as Hong Kong. Fourteen of these vacancies are already open.

“The business has an almost infinite hunger for good engineers,” says Gresham. “Our job descriptions are general in nature – from pricing and execution to automated lifecycle management, all utilising full-stack developers to build our apps.”

Gresham describes the recruitment drive as “tech first”, meaning he’s open to candidates not currently working in finance so long as they are “passionate about technology”. They could come from tech firms or from other parts of the corporate sector, for example.

He admits, however, that banking has traditionally been a less appealing career option for some young developers. “So when we hire from outside of financial services, we have to educate people about who Credit Suisse is and what we do.”

Why would you want to leave Google or Alibaba for Credit Suisse?

“In contrast to many banking-tech jobs, these are agile roles we’re hiring for, bordering on extreme programming. So we need highly technical candidates who are used to working in an agile environment and using their initiative,” says Gresham.

“On a typical project you work in teams of three or four and we give you freedom to choose the technology – whether that’s Java, Groovy, JS, Ruby or others – that’s best to complete it,” he adds.

Gresham says his team operates in a “test-driven development environment” and talks directly to sales and trading, rather than communicating via business analysts.

“And about 95% of the technology we’ve developed for Asian derivatives has been done in Asia. Asia Pacific is one of the three regional divisions at Credit Suisse and our regional management teams are based in Hong Kong and Singapore,” he says.

But why is Credit Suisse hiring techies in Asian derivatives given that first-quarter revenue in its APAC markets business fell 41% year-on-year?

“Our focus right now is on helping the business become more efficient through technology,” says Gresham. “We’re increasing our tech headcount and this must be accompanied by an efficiency drive. So our team is reducing costs by offering new products and delivering them more quickly.”

Gresham’s team is designing a range of customised tools that sit on the desktops of front-office staff and help them automate their work. “For example, tools that help structurers build bespoke financial products quickly for different customers, or which help connect relationship managers in private banking with salespeople in the markets business,” he says.

“This automation is driven by a growing need to get relevant data to the front-office quickly to enable them to come up with good financial ideas. We provide multiple equity-pricing snapshots, with data volumes of over 60 million a day, for example,” adds Gresham.

If your initial application is up to scratch, there are several stages to the recruitment process for jobs in the Credit Suisse solutions technology team in Asia.

You will firstly be given a simple programming problem to solve at home and then face a phone interview to discuss it. “Next there’s a technical chat with a senior member of the team. During this you may be asked to solve a systems-architecture problem on a whiteboard,” says Gresham.

“Then comes a pure programming assignment where you work with one of our programmers. And we also do a final interview with a senior member of the team,” he adds.

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Is the lesson from history that leaders succeed until they fail? You might think fixed-terms presidencies or other forced retirement options help to avoid eventual inevitable failure, allowing leaders such as Nelson Mandela to quit while they’re ahead. His laudable example is an exception; we often face leadership disappointment, even in the most promising people.

Indeed, one might be tempted to wonder if we can just skip the problem altogether and go leaderless. We see this in families, sports clubs, music groups, and even in business. Several companies such as the makers of Gore-Tex have pioneered self-managing teams with fluid sharing of responsibility and the minimal or episodic involvement of leaders.

But on the other hand, history also seems to tell us that bad leaders are sometimes preferable to no leaders. Look at how the Arab Spring removal of despots too often left a legacy of factional anarchy. Might we have an irrational, biologically-based yearning for people to look up to, almost regardless of their misdeeds and flaws?

These are among the themes that were covered in a round table discussion hosted by the Leadership Institute at London Business School. The exchange, which I had the pleasure of leading, featured male and female leaders from government, industry, sports, finance, services, education and commerce. I was supported in leading the conversation by my colleague Vyla Rollins, the Executive Director of the Leadership Institute, who is also a Programme Director of Custom Executive Educational Programmes and Executive Coach at LBS.

A starting point for the group was the need to avoid equating leaders with leadership. Leadership evolved in social species as a way of serving the needs of the group, helping it to adapt to the environment by co-ordinating and directing human effort. Among wolves, the alpha helps the pack to work coherently and function. It is the same for us humans.

Leadership has to be adaptive. As the Nicholson Leadership Formula says, effectiveness involves being the right person, at the right time and place, doing the right thing. This means leadership can take myriad forms for a multitude of situations, and leaders fail when their model, insights or relationships are wrong.

The following five types of failure are commonplace:

1. The pathological leader
There is a disturbing tendency for us to elevate narcissists, bullies and psychopaths to lead us. Perhaps they make us feel safe for a while, but ultimately people like Robert Maxwell, Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap and political despots through history leave us a tattered legacy.

2. The inflexible leader
The world does not stand still, and neither can leaders. Business history is littered with the wreckage of firms whose leaders failed to adapt their style and strategy to changing times, such as Kodak or Lehman Brothers.

3. The over-reaching leader
There have been leaders who have tried to bend the world to their will – stretching their vision to breaking point. There have been plenty of these in political history, from Napoleon to Margaret Thatcher.

4. The lopsided leader
It is OK for leaders to have an unbalanced portfolio of skills, but only if they have re-balancing co-leaders and teams. Those who don’t fail to meet critical challenges of the role, such as Fred Goodwin of RBS, who was all operations and no strategy.

5. The unlucky leader
Louis Pasteur said: “Chance favours the prepared mind”, and leaders have to be able to ride their luck. The financial crisis destroyed many firms, but good leaders hedge against extreme circumstances. Yet even good men and women can go to the wall if the sky falls in on their business.

Discussion turned to the issue of leadership, competence and motivation.

It would nice if the world were just populated by leaders and followers, but we have the uncomfortable reality of people in box B who want to be leaders for all the wrong reasons – status and power being common drivers – and people in box C whom we could really use as leaders, but they just won’t put their heads above the parapet.

Many people in box C are women. The female leaders taking part in the discussion agreed that women are too often demotivated by the games they see being played by male macho aspirants in competitive hierarchies.

The discussion stimulated a spirited debate about what we need more and less of in leadership, and what we can do about it. Some key observations were:

We need more flexible leadership models, where the function is more rationally shared among people.
Organisational structure and culture reform is part of the key to attracting more women into leadership.
Leadership has to have value propositions at its core. We all suffer when leaders are self-serving rather than oriented to their communities.
The role of boards and their chairmen is widely misunderstood and needs to be reconstituted around the fitness of the firm.
The ability to learn is the only way to gain competitive advantage and leaders are central to the process.
Vision is key – leaders with the ability to see what others can’t and make a dream or idea tangible are needed.
We are impeded by our primitive desire for perfect, god-like leaders. We need to shape organisational life to expect and deal with imperfections.

Of course, the purpose of gatherings such as ours is to explore what goes wrong in leadership, the root causes and what we can do about it.

Luckily, as with the news, we tend to hear much more about failure than success. But we should not forget that so much goes right in business and society, because of good men and women stepping up and taking responsibility for making sure that the world works and delivers not just value, but values for our benefit.

Professor Nigel Nicholson is the author of The ‘I’ of Leadership: Strategies for seeing, being and doing (Jossey-Bass, 2013)

Want to land a leadership role where you’ll shine? This is a good place to start. By Randall S Peterson

When the world comes knocking on your door saying, “We need you to do this,” stop and think carefully before saying yes. You see, leadership is situational. It’s never, “I’m going in and I can handle anything.” There are a huge range of leadership challenges and if something is just not you, it’s really okay to say no. It’s very difficult to be world-class when you’re doing something you hate.

You can’t change who you are and you can’t be good at everything. Just accept that. You’ve probably done a Strengthsfinder assessment already. So take a look at your range of strengths and weaknesses.
At one end of the spectrum are things that come naturally to you. Over at the other end is probably something you’ll never be able to do. For everything in between, practise enough and you’ll get to a good standard.

Work from strength

Don’t even try to be “completely new” or to follow a leadership formula. What you need to do is focus on the skills that are within your range. Honestly, don’t waste your energy on trying to build the skills at the bottom of your list. Just avoid that stuff.
Focus on the middle, those things you’re quite good at, and make yourself pretty damn good at them. Aim to increase your range and flexibility, but also be aware that there’s a piece of the range that’s never going to happen for you.

To illustrate this: supposing you’re right-handed, try signing your name using the other hand. It’s hard, right? But after a while you can do it quite well. It’s the same with a set of behaviours. Will it ever be the thing that comes completely naturally to you? Probably not. Practice doesn’t make perfect but it does make better, and often that’s good enough.
If you’ve improved at the things you were quite good at, most of the time you can step up and do the job, look good and succeed, and that will help propel your career.

The 5 dimensions

In every language, across every country and culture, it turns out that there are just five dimensions that define personality. Where are you on the scale, and how does this translate to leadership? Let’s take each in turn.

1. Neuroticism

People high on the neuroticism scale experience a lot of negative emotion, while people low on the scale experience very little. Do I feel stressed and worried all the time, or do I never lose sleep? There are benefits at either end. Anxious people tend to be good individual performers, to persist and persevere. But businesses generally want leaders who are lower than average on neuroticism; stable people who rarely feel anxious, who are good in a crisis and don’t lose their ability to focus. Good leaders are stress-resistant.

2. Extroversion

If you’re high on this scale, you’re socially dominant and the kind of person who likes to tell others what to do. You’re excitement- seeking, you live outside yourself and take energy from other people, not from being alone. Again, there are advantages to people who aren’t like this. Leaders are almost always high on the extroversion scale; they engage with the world, talk to people and they want to be a boss.

3. Openness

This is about liking things to be new and unusual versus liking things to be tried, tested, data-centric and technical. How this dimension translates depends on what you’re doing – businesses have a mix. People who do big-picture strategy score high, while accountants score low. Businesses need both, but people in leadership positions need to be open to what’s new.

4. Agreeableness

Do you go along to get along, trust most people and believe the majority of us are good? Or are you hard, rational, the type who thinks there’s a right answer here and if you don’t like it, tough luck? In flatter hierarchies, agreeableness might matter more but within a traditional company structure, perhaps surprisingly, firms tend to hire leaders somewhat low for this dimension because hard financial decisions have to be made.

5. Conscientiousness

Business leaders tend to score high on this: they like structure and order, to have a strong work ethic and sense of responsibility. But what about people who are more spontaneous, flexible, and go with the flow without caring about deadlines? The world needs them; they make fine artists, nurses and special needs teachers. But businesses? Not so much.

Find the right fit

So now you have some idea what kind of person you are. How do you find your dream job? First rule: never take a job unless you’ve found out what its demands really are: what is the company actually asking you to do? Does it match you?

Don’t go for the high-prestige job: go for the job that fits you – where you can be yourself and where your flaws don’t get you in trouble. Don’t automatically go for the consulting jobs just because they’re highly paid and everyone goes for them. Maybe you’d hate to be away all the time. If it’s not you, you’re going to be unhappy and for that reason you will probably not be very good at it.

You need to be able to adapt, to some extent, to the organisation, the job and the people you’re working with. When someone leaves a role, it’s unlikely the company will find a clone of that person. But the person-job fit has to be right.

Some bosses aren’t always aware of what really creates value in the job. They focus too much on the skills and think, “We need an engineer for this job, let’s ignore their personal style”. But personality is totally relevant. There’s no wrong personality, but someone’s personality might be wrong for this context.

Are you aligned?

Now test how well you know yourself. The key measure is feedback from the people around you. If you’re a good leader, there will be a clear correlation between your self-assessment and the assessment others have of you. It’s not about whether you get straight 5s. It’s about if you get a 3, you understand why.

The reason self-awareness is such a strong predictor is that the skills you need to assess your own ability are the very same skills you need to lead. If you have no idea that you’re a terrible driver, it’s probably because you have no idea what good driving is. So the very best leaders are the most self-aware. They know that honest feedback – even if it’s brutal – is priceless.

Senior executives often need to hear a pretty harsh assessment. Making gentle suggestions doesn’t work because their attitude is, “Look, I’m already a senior executive!” Middle managers tend to be more receptive – their attitude is, “I still want to get there. What’s holding me back?” And people at early stages in their careers are the most open. When you critique them they say, “Oh wow! Thanks!”

Wherever you’re at, if you’re not aligned you’re probably not half as good as you think you are. That might be hard to hear, but it’s better that you hear it. The good news is that the more self-aware you become, the more your performance will start to improve.

After more than five years of painful job cuts, there are signs that many investment banks are actually hiring senior traders again (even those who don’t know how to code).

In response to soaring fixed income revenues, Deutsche Bank and Nomura are said to be among the investment banks investing in trading MDs as the industry prepares to put the era of vicious job cuts in the rearview mirror.

Deutsche Bank achieved a 10% rise in fixed income trading revenues in the first quarter and is actively hiring in its markets business. Recent examples include global credit trader Christopher McCarthy, loan trader Garret Rowan and real estate and commercial mortgage-backed securities trader Bill Moyer, according to Financial News. Nomura’s recent headcount additions include senior EMEA salesman David Ishoo Mirzayoo, who came over from Societe Generale.

Over the last five years, European banks like Deustche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse and Barclays have made savage cuts to trading divisions, shedding thousands of jobs to cut costs.

“The firms who did shrink their businesses as fixed income became squeezed now appear to be tactically trying to fill their gaps, which is hard to do quickly,” Charles Bristow, the co-head of rates trading at J.P. Morgan, told FN. Forget juniorization (briefly), seasoned senior traders are back in fashion.

Separately, have you ever wondered what Patrick Bateman – the investment banker anti-hero of American Psycho, majored in back in his university days?

A new study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences has the likely answer for you: Psychopaths are more likely to study business and economics.

Researchers tested study participants – university students who had not yet picked a major – looking for signs of the “dark triad” of personality traits associated with psychopathy, narcissism and a desire for social dominance and power in the workplace.

Psychology students scored substantially lower than business, economics and law students, meaning “dark triad” students were more likely to major in one of the latter three disciplines. Researchers concluded that personality traits are “at least part” of the decision process of picking a profession, according to the Independent.

Meanwhile:

Wall Street executives are not taking the Trump administration’s threats to break up big banks seriously. (Bloomberg)

Republicans controlling the U.S. House Financial Services Committee voted to approve the first comprehensive congressional plan to undo the Dodd-Frank Act. (WSJ)

If the Trump administration decides to repeal the Volcker rule, it will have a big impact on how banks’ market-making businesses handle the practical details of monitoring risk-taking. (Euromoney)

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan, argued that Trump’s corporate tax cut proposal isn’t about boosting the profits of banks like his; it will also benefit American workers, he said with a straight face. (Bloomberg)

Retaliation against whistle-blowers is endemic, especially in banking, with recent scandals at Wells Fargo, HSBC and UBS case in point. (New York Times)

The European Commission is making a grab for London’s EU clearing business. (New York Times)

London losing the business of euro clearing – worth €930bn ($995bn) a day – after Brexit would massively hurt the rest of Europe, not just the UK. (Business Insider)

HSBC’s U.S. arm is performing better than it has in more than a decade. (WSJ)

Société Générale will pay €963m ($1.1bn) to settle allegations that it paid a middleman bribes to secure business from Libya’s sovereign-wealth fund. (WSJ)

Man Group CEO Luke Ellis predicts a “material” shrinkage of the hedge fund sector down to less than 1,000 profitable hedge fund firms within two years. (HFMWeek)

Wellington Management’s Nick Adams averaged 28% annual returns investing mostly in bank stocks before sinking money into ill-advised venture-capital investments in tech startups, leading to an apology, refunds and soul-searching. (WSJ)

Private equity executives are in a panic after a Swedish court ruled that all PE professionals have to treat income from investments as salary for tax purposes. (Bloomberg)

Family offices, which manage the financial and personal affairs of the wealthy, are increasingly taking direct stakes in companies and committing staff to such efforts rather than investing in PE funds. (Bloomberg)

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Photo credit: Lionsgate
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There’s a popular narrative among former senior bankers – particularly ex-Deutsche Bankers – about going into the industry. You could do better. You’re a smart and entrepreneurial? Banking is not for you. Utilise your talents elsewhere – the work in banking is boring and the big money’s not there anymore.

Rashid Hoosenally, the former global head of FICC structuring at Deutsche Bank who left last year to start investing in early stage fintech firms, has a different theory. Not matter what you want to do eventually, investment banking is the best place you can start out.

“Even if you want to be an entrepreneur later in your career, go into banking first,” he says. “Working in banking is not so much simply learning about the industry, but the other skills you acquire that will serve you throughout your career.”

Most investment banks have made some effort to curtail working hours for their junior bankers, or shake-up working practices to make it less about endless hours in front of Excel models and add in some level of client facing responsibilities. But the actual work is by the by, says Hoosenally. It’s more about equipping yourself with “human skills”.

“You learn how to influence people, how to deal with very successful senior executives and not be intimidated by them,” he says. “It also teaches you how to frame and solve complex problems – it’s incredibly useful outside of banking.”

A report released this week by consultants Accenture suggested that 75% of millennials don’t want a long-term commitment to the job they take on. In investment banking in particular, it says, firms have to accept that young people view their employment as “gigs” that act as a stepping stone to new things.

That view is fine, says, Hoosenally, but don’t under-estimate the value of the training you’ll receive in banking.

“There’s a popular view that if you’re a gifted ambitious student, you should avoid investment banking, which is a waste of your experience when you could be working in a more exciting sector. I still believe there’s no better training ground,” he says.

Hoosenally joined Deutsche Bank in 1995 – having first spent two years in M&A at Credit Suisse First Boston. This is was back when the investment bank at Deutsche Bank was launched.

Anshu Jain, who would later become Deutsche’s CEO, was there at the outset, as were Henry Ritchotte – eventual COO and head of the digital bank who left last year and is now also investing in fintech – Michele Faissola, the former global head of rates who now runs his own hedge fund and Edson Mitchell, the former global head of markets who died in a plane crash in 2000.

Despite Hoosenally’s enthusiasm for investment banking careers, he admits that working in banking is an entirely different experience now.

“I feel like I’ve come full-circle,” he says. “When I joined Deutsche Bank we were literally building an investment bank from scratch – that opportunity will never be there again. The whole environment was incredibly entrepreneurial, ambitious and open to possibilities. Investment banks are not like that now – that attitude has shifted towards fintech.”

In theory, Millennials demand validation, they demand to be included in decision-making and expect to be promoted rapidly based on merit. Part of the problem investment banks face keeping hold of juniors is that they’re just not set up to nurture young talent, says Hoosenally.

“When banking was growing, it was a sensible strategy to engage and nurture young talent,” he says. “But for the past few years, investment banking has been consolidating and headcount has been reduced. If you’re an insecure senior banker, you might start thinking of this young talent as a threat – maybe there are not enough jobs to go around any more, and you start thinking about your own survival more.”

Hoosenally points out, however, that most banks have mentoring programmes, and if you claw your way to the top, you feel compelled to help out young talent.

“This system encourages you to become a good mentor – there’s a moral obligation that if you received help from senior bankers, when you reach the senior ranks you should do the same for young talent,” he says. “I still feel that the current woes of banking are temporary and it will turn around – and banking needs good bosses.”

Nonetheless, Hoosenally left Deutsche Bank in September last year and is currently investing in fintech start ups and considering getting his own fintech venture off the ground.

“I’ve been lucky enough to have varied roles over 25 years in investment banking, but I always knew I wanted a second career. I’ve had little time off during this time – it feels I hit my mid-40’s in the blink of an eye, and now’s the right time to do something different.”

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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Goldman Sachs seemingly has its eye on the disaffected fixed income professionals of Deutsche Bank. The U.S. firm is understood to have hired Miran Serdarevic, Deutsche’s head of real money sales in London.

Serdarevic joined Deutsche in October 2008 according to the Financial Conduct Authority Register. Headhunters say he was a star salesman at the German bank and one of the small proportion of top people who received a retention bonus last year in lieu of a performance bonus. His exit is therefore seen as a shock.”This is one of the good people, the top 10% whom Deutsche trained and promoted and really wanted to stay,” says one headhunter, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Deutsche declined to comment on Serdarevic’s exit and Goldman didn’t respond to a request for comment on his imminent arrival.

Serdarevic isn’t the first Goldman markets professional to go to Goldman this year. In February the U.S. bank also hired David Bodenstein, Deutsche’s head of financials credit trading for Europe. Bodenstein has only just started at Goldman but is already understood to have recruited a former colleague from his time at BNP Paribas.

Goldman’s fixed income trading business performed poorly in the first quarter. The bank has repeatedly blamed this on its business and client mix: it’s less strong in corporate credit trading and securitization than other U.S. banks, and suffered from falling activity in the institutional market. Serdarevic and Bodenstein are unlikely to resolve this: Deutsche too has been primarily focused on institutional clients, although it intends to change this.

Although Deutsche says it’s turned a corner after raising €8n in new capital and announcing a new strategy focused on the corporate market, headhunters say the credit business is riven with discontent. “There’s a bad atmosphere and there’s been friction between sales and trading for a while,” says one.

Serdarevic may not be the last to go. Although Deutsche’s share price has risen 14% since its lows of mid-April, it’s still 35% below the price it needs to hit by 2021 if the retention bonuses it awarded a few months ago are to be worth anything. “Deutsche Bank bonuses were mostly low across the board and other banks are taking advantage of that fact,” says Kumaran Surenthirathas, MD of Rosehill Search.

The exits follow research suggesting Deutsche’s bankers were (unsurprisingly) the most unhappy with 2016’s bonuses. The happiest were at J.P. Morgan.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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First they came for the equities traders and the FX traders. Then they came for the CDS index traders. Now, it seems, the computers are coming for the jobs of people working in M&A and capital markets.

In an effort to cut costs make junior jobs more interesting, U.S. investment banks are busy trying to automate the process of doing deals.

J.P. Morgan has something called the “Emerging Opportunities Engine”, which helps predict which clients might want to do a deal soon. Goldman Sachs CFO Marty Chavez has said he wants to automate the initial public offering (IPO) process and Goldman is already busy hiring London-based Java developers for the purpose of, “automating the wide-ranging workflows and processes that form the execution of an Investment Banking project”.

Junior M&A bankers have long complained about boring and repetitive work. It seems their wish for more interesting tasks will soon be granted – with the corollary that there aren’t many interesting jobs and fewer people will needed to do them.

The automation of ‘workflows’ within big banks isn’t the only threat to analysts and associates in investment banking divisions, though. Lurking on the sidelines are also “digital investment banks” trying to win the big firms’ dinners.

One such is Overbond, a Toronto-based start-up run by a Vuk Magdelinic,a former salesman at CIBC, which aims to “digitize” the process of bond issuance.

“We’re building a cognitive computing algorithm that can predict who is going to be an issuer and is likely to come to market in the short term,” says Magdelinic. “We also have an algorithmic pricing tool which prices securities and we can algorithmically match investor portfolios with industries and issuance opportunities.”

There aren’t many IBD professionals at Overbond. The company employs 30 people, but most of them are “engineers” and most are based in Toronto, which is known for its artificial intelligence community. As Overbond expands this year, Magdelinic says sales and relationship managers will be added globally.

If Overbond doesn’t want archetypal analysts and associates for its digital debt capital markets platform, the same can’t be said of Dealglobe, a self-described “independent digital investment bank” which aims to match European vendors with Chinese investors. Based in London and Shanghai, Dealglobe has been hiring juniors from big banks. They include Robert Cole, who joined from Lazard as an M&A analyst in January and Frédéric Bloquel, a former UBS associate who joined as a VP last November. Dealglobe’s founder, Lin Feng, spent eight months at UBS in London before leaving for private equity in 2012. Its chairman, Andrew Bell, is a former head of global M&A at HSBC, and the head of its UK business Nick Adasi once worked for Goldman Sachs.

Dealglobe didn’t respond to a request to comment for this article, but headhunters said the digital investment bank may not provide a great alternative to traditional careers in M&A. “People there keep calling me up and saying they want to leave,” says one, speaking off the record.

At Overbond, meanwhile, Magdelinic is adamant that AI tools will supplement rather than supplant existing banking jobs: “Bankers in the 1970s didn’t have laptops or cellphones – technology is simply evolving,” he says. “The skillset and the added value of bankers are here to stay, this is just about making people more efficient.”

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Photo credit: machine by Eugen Stoll is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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I’m a quant in an investment bank. Thanks to the rise of “big data”, me and my kind are suddenly popular again. But very few quant jobs in banks are involved with big data and far too many lead to dead ends.

I’ve ridden the quant market for longer than many of the people reading this will have been aware that stochastic calculus exists. When structured credit was all the thing, I worked in structured credit. When quantitative analysis was a thing, I worked in quant analysis. Now that models are a thing, I work in models. Survival in this job is all about adaptation.

If you’re starting as a quant now though, you need to know that there’s not much of a clear career path right now in the quant world. If you’re on the sell-side (ie. in an investment bank), it’s all about working in XVA, calculating the accounting adjustments needed for regulatory purposes, or as a ‘library quant’ (managing the library of existing code and functions) or a model validation quant (checking existing quant models fit with regulatory requirements). These are all fairly low-level and comparatively low paid roles. And they’re roles where banks are trying to save money. – Library quant roles at Morgan Stanley are being off-shored to Hungary, for example. All the general analytics routines, the curve strippers, the root solvers are being coded and maintained in the lower cost regions.

If you’re starting as quant today, you might think you’re going to be a trader. This isn’t that easy: instead of quants becoming traders, traders are becoming quants. It’s the traders who are leaning how to code, rather than the quants who are learning how to trade. While traders move into quant territory, us quants are getting lost in unexciting regulatory work.

Of course, there are some interesting quant jobs in investment banks. – Just not many of them. These jobs are the “desk quant jobs” – the quants who sit next to the traders and develop trading tools whilst interfacing with the core quant library.

In my opinion, the best quanting jobs now are (like most things), on the buy-side. If you’re starting out as a quant today, you should try to get into the quantitative fund space. Quant funds offer far more potential to use your analytical skills to generate revenues than investment banks do. Who knows, you might even get paid?! For me, that’s probably too late. I’m simply improve my AI skills so that I can analyze all the vast amounts of data coming out of banks’ regulatory projects.

Frank Zepper is a pseudonym.

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Photo credit: Intrication by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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Compliance jobs in investment banks are never as sought-after as front office roles, but as someone who’s worked in J.P. Morgan’s middle office for over three years, I’d say that anyone who’s dismissive of these positions is missing out.

Despite the political environment, regulations will continue to play a key role in the financial services industry. There appears to be a push for thoughtful and meaningful regulation as opposed to more regulation. So, it’s not just a case of working in an area banks have to hire for, it’s a part of the business that’s actually becoming more fulfilling as a career.

First and foremost, working in compliance gives juniors the chance to work alongside the front office and senior management in investment banking. This isn’t simply a case of sitting alongside the rock stars as a silent policeman. There are numerous regulatory and compliance issues that arise daily and some of them are recurring over a long period of time. So, you have a fast-track to learning about all the regulations and their impact, while sitting alongside sales and trading professionals and learning about their jobs.

It’s a technical role, but legal and compliance executives also need develop the business and interpersonal skills. For example, while on the trading floor, associates learn to address sensitive issues under difficult time constraints with the most senior individuals involved in the business. It is a great opportunity to build a network, provide solutions to pressing problems and learn about a particular business while understanding the legal and regulatory implications.

As a compliance executive who is directly responsible for the regulatory issues concerning various facets of the business, there is a “seat at the table” for someone in my role. Regulatory issues can be complex, but they need to be solved quickly because it can endanger a business deal. In these circumstances, you have the opportunity to develop a creative solution, pitch the solution to the business and execute it.

Coming up with a creative solution requires a professional to look beyond the rule of the law and understand the business from a financial, risk-management and operational perspective. It is pertinent to understand clients and how they make money, as well as the profit-drivers for the business. There was no magic number that would satisfy the regulatory requirement. When we offer our solution to the business, we illustrate how and why the number reasonably fits the business needs and satisfies the regulatory requirement.

Dealing with the business is not entirely easy. The business has and will continue to see themselves as the “money-makers,” and any individual who is not in a front office role is perceived as “getting in the way” as they try to make money.

Trust is key here. Front-office employees need to believe that, as a compliance professional, you will seek to find alternative and creative solutions as opposed to just saying “No”. The problem is that there are a lot of ‘grey’ areas in trading and if the business can find a short-cut to avoid a certain compliance push-back they will. The issue is that in compliance, like it or not, you are the person who has to say when something can’t be done, but if the business trusts you, then saying ‘no’ is a lot easier.

For example, the trading desk had to set a certain credit threshold limit for their clients in order to comply with a certain SEC rule. The business initially proposed a limit that was set around $X million. Unfortunately, that was a really high limit and ran the risk of regulatory scrutiny. In fact, the business was not entirely able to justify why setting such high credit limits was reasonable to their business. But the real reason they set the high credit limit was because it would give them enough room to conduct their business. As compliance professionals, we had to say no to that credit limit. By pointing to various regulatory cases and the intent of the relevant rule and by running a series of hypotheticals, we finally convinced the business that the number needed to be lowered and we successfully reduced the number to about two-thirds of the original figure.

Some of the drawbacks to working in compliance is that, from a branding perspective, it is not considered “sexy.” But when an individual grows professionally to be a trusted partner in the business, then your expertise is sought-after.

For individuals who are law-school graduates, compliance does not offer the type of legal work that most JDs are looking for. If your interest lies in traditional legal work, then you should consider a traditional law firm. However, if your interest lies in developing an expertise in the banking business, securities law and financial regulations, then a compliance role at a big bank offers that.

Stacey Kelly is the pseudonym of an executive at J.P. Morgan.

Photo credit: utah778/GettyImages
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