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Do you work for Deutsche Bank? Are you among the 61% of Deutsche Bank staff unhappy with last year’s (absent) bonus? Did you receive the DB retention bonus which is on track to be worth nothing at all? Do you want to do something about this?

Resign. And then be bought back.

Headhunters say Deutsche does have money to spend on its existing staff (alongside alleged guarantees for new hires), it’s just being very careful about how it spends it. If someone strategically important resigns for a role elsewhere, Deutsche has been known to better the new offer and maybe make a promotion along with it. In this way we understand that exits have been thwarted.

Nowhere is Deutsche’s need for sticky staff greater than in its U.S. investment banking business. The German bank has repeatedly declared its intention of “deepening” its relationships in M&A and equity capital markets this year and is making North America a priority. At the end of last week, Deutsche ranked 15th for U.S. M&A, down from 14th last year, from 10th in 2015 and from eighth three years ago. The trend is clear, and it’s moving in the wrong direction.

Deutsche declined to comment for this article, but buybacks or not, insiders say Deutsche’s whole U.S. investment banking business has been losing senior staff. Exits so far this year include Craig Molson, a senior leveraged finance banker who left for Barclays in March, Marc Habert, the head of restructuring who went to RBC, Greg Rinsky and Michael Siano from Deutsche’s gaming and healthcare banking groups respectively, who went to Houlihan Lokey, Marc Cohen, who also went to RBC, Lee Counselman, a senior software banker who went to Moelis, plus a handful of other exits from associate to director level.

Deutsche has also been hiring to bolster its U.S. M&A operation. U.S. recruits this year include Adora Whitaker, a managing director in FIG from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Philip Pucciarelli and Robert Verdier from BMO Capital Markets for healthcare, along with Glenn Rewick for healthcare from UBS. They follow at least seven managing director or director level hires for the U.S. M&A business in the final months of last year.

Rather than new hires, what Deutsche’s U.S. investment banking business really needs though, is stability. Deutsche has been investing in the U.S. for years but has little to show for it, possibly because the people it recruits have a tendency to leave again two or three years later. The U.S. healthcare team is a case in point. In 2014 Deutsche appointed two new co-heads of healthcare from Morgan Stanley; a year later they left for J.P. Morgan. Twelve months on, Deutsche’s new-new heads of healthcare (one of whom had been hired from Goldman Sachs four years earlier) quit for Barclays.

This matters, because M&A bankers are like a ripe cheese. They don’t reach maturity overnight. As Andrea Orcel said in February, building an M&A business takes time: “You need to attract the right people, give them time to embed with the culture and the place, give them time with the client to get them to agree they can deliver for them, and then get them to deliver.” Bank of America’s Christian Meissner was more specific a few years’ ago: he told the Financial Times that building an M&A business takes three to five years once the right people are in place. This is why Goldman Sachs, for example, is happy to leave its relationship bankers alone to schmooze.

It’s no good if you quit before the schmoozing comes to anything, though. Nor is it any good if you’re unreachable while it’s taking place. This being an alleged failing of Jeff Urwin, the former head of corporate and investment banking who joined Deutsche from J.P. Morgan in 2015 and left again earlier this year. “Nobody could ever get hold of him, not even John [Cryan],” says one ex-Deutsche MD.

With Urwin out the way, Cryan himself is now in charge of Deutsche’s U.S. business, aided by Mark Fedorcik who heads corporate finance for the Americas. As the two men try building Deutsche’s market share, they won’t want to see any more talent walking out the door – especially when it was hired at a premium from rival banks.

If you’re good at Deutsche Bank, you should therefore be able to threaten to leave and get a pay rise. And if you’re not? You can take your chances and move. The only problem with this strategy is that rival banks are reportedly making subpar offers in the knowledge that Deutsche didn’t pay performance bonuses last year. In the worst case scenario then, you’ll jump out of Deutsche only to be underpaid elsewhere anyway. This is another reason to stay put.

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Photo credit: exit by Jerome Olivier is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Hong Kong is constantly ranked among the world’s most expensive cities and banking jobs there generally still pay well.

If you want to be well rewarded in Hong Kong in the years after you graduate, it makes sense to go into a career in the finance sector.

Or does it? Front-office investment banking and to a lesser extent wealth management remain highly compensated, while compliance and even some risk and accounting roles also pay well.

However, if you’re a graduate looking for a career that will help you stay solvent over the long-term in costly Hong Kong, some parts of banking sector are best avoided.

We’ve looked through 2017 pay surveys from four finance recruiters in Hong Kong and identified the (non-technology) roles that pay the worst average salaries to people with about five years’ experience (i.e. those who are at, or around, associate level in investment banks).

If you’re rotating across different departments on an analyst programme, don’t get stuck in one of the jobs in the table below (which averages out salary numbers from the four surveys) when your training ends.

People in all 10 of these functions – including even sought-after roles like credit risk, internal audit, and onboarding – are still earning HK$500k (US$64k) or less five years after they graduate.

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Like most European investment banks, Credit Suisse continues to hire in the U.S. even as it reshapes it London operation. Senior bankers take time to bed in, and just about every European bank – including Rothschild, which has just poached from Credit Suisse in California, and Deutsche Bank – are competing for talent as they seek to grab more market share from domestic firms.

But while Credit Suisse has been hiring front office bankers in New York and San Francisco, it’s also tapping into another Wall Street trend – moving jobs out of New York. Credit Suisse is creating 1,200 new jobs in Raleigh, North Carolina. Some people will be hired locally, others in technology, finance and operations will be asked to transfer from New York.

Big banks are offered tax breaks to create jobs in locations not readily associated with financial services, and it’s decidedly cheaper to house employees outside of New York. Goldman has been rapidly building its office in Salt Lake City, which includes tech, operations and, now, even some investment banking roles. Morgan Stanley has an office in Maryland, while J.P. Morgan has tech hubs in Tampa, Dallas, Delaware and shifted over 2,000 jobs from New York to New Jersey back in 2015.

Credit Suisse already has around 1,500 staff in North Carolina, and will invest $70.5m as part of the expansion. However, it’s also eligible for a $40.2m in reimbursements as part of a government grant programme. Credit Suisse said in December that it was cutting $1bn in costs, so this is a drop in the ocean. But perhaps it’s also part of its stated aim to “protect” its full-time staff even if they have to work in cheaper locations.

Separately, if you think crowd-funding your own business at university is the way to impress banking recruiters, stand back and admire the story of Ismail Ahmed, CEO of London fintech firm WorldRemit, which has 300 staff in the capital. Ahmed fled war-torn Somalia in 1991 for the UK and had to provide for his family back home while also studying for an economics degree at the University of London. He worked three jobs at once during this time, including picking strawberries outside of London, so he could send money back home.

“My family had lost everything,” he told Bloomberg. “So now I became the one who sent money back.”

After studying for a PhD, he started a job in the UN helping money transfer firms with counter-terrorism finance rules, but soon discovered that his boss dodgy – awarding contracts to firms where he had a business interest. He blew the whistle and eventually landed a $200k settlement with the UN, which he then used to get WorldRemit off the ground.

Meanwhile:

U.S fund managers are setting up in London even after Brexit (Financial News)

Lloyd Blankfein would like to roll back Volcker (Bloomberg)

The problem with never ending assessments: “We would kind of start to sit down…and not really know what the check-ins were meant for.” (WSJ)

“The more complex the organisation, the longer it is going to take to create workable contingency options, and so investment banks in particular are putting their plans on record.” (Financial Times)

How the City works: 800 Aberdeen and Standard Life staff lose jobs post-merger, while advisers take £97m in fees pic.twitter.com/ef9KMaksyP

— Harry Wilson (@harrynwilson) May 9, 2017

More bankers coming to a government near you (Dealbreaker)

Time to join a family office (Finalternatives)

Credit Suisse has hired Tim Joyce as head of FX options trading in London. He comes from Deutsche Bank (Finance Magnates)

Canadian investment banks want to crack the U.S. (Bloomberg)

Jes Staley needs to rein it in: “He has a highly developed level of moral outrage . . . he’s got to take a cold shower when that happens” (Financial Times)

Five words in a chatroom got a Citi FX trader fired. He’s claiming unfair dismissal (Bloomberg)

Compliments and attention, how to handle narcissists at work (Quartz)

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If you’re looking for a banking job and are persistently unsuccessful, either at the interview of the application stage, you might want to adopt some different tactics. Yes, you can redo your CV. Yes, you can use the STAR interview technique. You could also set out to actively ‘reframe’ the way the way you’re perceived.

This latter technique is called ‘impression management’. Fundamentally, it means dropping explicit markers to steer how people think of you. According to a recent academic study, it really works. – Especially if you happen to be someone subject to age discrimination.

“Impression management means contradicting stereotypes,” says Franciska Kings, one of the study’s authors at the University of Lausanne. “The challenge for older workers is that they’re perceived as less competent – even though this has been proven not to be the case. The assumption is that they’re more rigid, lower in flexibility, and less adaptable. The challenge is to counteract that.”

King and her colleagues asked 515 undergraduates to evaluate transcripts from fabricated interviews involving older and younger candidates. Sometimes the older candidates used impression management and sometimes they didn’t. In all cases the older candidates were ranked lower for hireability than the younger ones, but in the scripts where impression management was used the discrepancy between the two was reduced by as much as 80%.

We’ve included some examples of the academics’ use of impression management below. They don’t concern banking directly, but the finance industry is notoriously youthful (at PwC, a professional services firm, the average age is just 28), and the generic tactics used by the researchers apply as much to an application for a job in M&A as to a job in retailing or technology.

The fundamental formula is simple: first you identify why the person hiring you might be prejudiced against you; then you set about to actively contradict that. This can be done multifariously. For example, you can avoid behaviours associated with the “devalued social identify”. You can emphasize how similar you are to other groups who are identified with more positively. You can communicate the more favourable attributes associated with your stereotype (for example, older workers might be perceived as more knowledgeable.) Or you can explicitly negate likely prejudices with language that contradicts them.

In the study, the academics set about to refute five proven negative stereotypes of older candidates: the perception that they can’t handle pressure as well as younger ones; the perception that they don’t learn as quickly; the perception that they’re less achievement oriented; the perception that they’re less adaptable, and the perception that they have fewer technology skills. Impression management had a positive impact on all dimensions but technology skills – here, there was nothing that could be done to disprove the stereotype. If you’re older, you may just have to accept your perceived technical inadequacy, fair or not.

Technological bias aside, the examples below demonstrate what works according to the academics. Impression management is simple, but effective. You might want to try it next time you write an application letter or attend a finance interview.

When you’re asked: “How well do you deal with stress and working under pressure?”

You can answer: “I believe I can manage pressure well. In my previous job, I often had to finish tasks under short deadlines, so I am used to working under pressure. As a travel you constantly deal with customers and there is a lot of pressure to address customers’ queries while also completing administrative tasks. While I generally prefer to take my time and do the task thoroughly to avoid mistakes, I understand pressure is sometimes necessary.”

Or, you can use an impression management response: “I believe I manage pressure very well. In my previous job, I often had to finish tasks under short deadlines and actually I have to say I prefer it in several ways. As a travel agent you constantly deal with customers and there was a lot of pressure to address customers’ queries while also completing administrative tasks. When I work under pressure I tend to be more focused and motivated. It keeps me alert and helps me complete my tasks on time and effectively. I must say this kind of drive, keeps me going.”

When you’re asked: “How open are you to learning applications and procedures? Can you give me an example of a situation when you learned something new?”

You can answer: “Sure. I am open to learning new things and I think I’m good at it. One example? Yeah, in my last job I had to learn how to use the company’s in-house web application to track the status of my sales and the best travel deals for the region of the world I was acting as an agent for. It was very difficult at first because the application was not very user friendly and I had to invest a lot of time familiarising myself with it. It was a challenge but after a while I was able to use it as well as the rest of my colleagues.”

Or, you can use an impression management response: “Actually, I’m quite open, learning new things comes easily to me. For example, in my last job I had to learn how to use the company’s in-house web application to track the status of my sales and the best travel deals for the region of the world I was acting as an agent for. It was hard at first because the application was not very user friendly but I enjoyed the challenge and soon I found I was able to use the application’s algorithms to do tracking that even my colleagues weren’t sure how to do.”

When you’re asked: “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

You can answer: : “Hmm…I see myself five years from now being in a good position, where people can recognise me as a good employee and as an asset of their organisation. Although the future is unpredictable, what I can say for sure is that the day I will join the firm, I will try to understand my role in the company, and will give my 100% to make my work productive and whenever to contribute fully to the development of the organisation.”

Or, you can use an impression management response: “Hmm…I see myself five years from now being in a managerial position. Though it is quite ambitious I believe that with hard work and a well set plan, it can be achieved. I see myself progressing, learning new skills, and having more responsibilities. My goal is to improve clients’ experiences while contributing to the development of the company. I can see many challenges lying ahead of me, but I am eager to experience them.”

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Are you looking for an investment banking job in the U.S.? Here’s a roundup of the open roles in New York and across the country at the heaviest hitters among Wall Street banks.

Goldman Sachs

While Goldman Sachs’s commercial mortgage platform is based in Irving, Texas, the firm is currently looking to add headcount to its real estate financing group in its New York headquarters. Open roles include commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) specialists, origination professionals, commercial real estate (CRE) warehouse specialists and structurers.

The broader financing group, which is part of the investment banking division, is looking for an industrials specialist for its leveraged finance team.

In addition, the bank is seeking IBD financing group and knowledge management analysts; merchant banking division (MBD) finance and fund & operations team associates; securities division equities management associates and VPs; and data investment research VPs.

Goldman is also hiring finance associates in both New York and San Francisco, as well as Salt Lake City-based IBD analysts for its data resources group and knowledge management (KM) team.

It is also hiring developers, including Java programmers, for its Jersey City, New Jersey, office.

J.P. Morgan

J.P. Morgan is hiring for its corporate and investment bank (CIB), primarily in its Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York, offices, but also in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Newark and San Francisco.

Focusing on open jobs based in its New York City headquarters, J.P. Morgan is hiring VP-level M&A investment bankers; associates and vice presidents with Treasury experience in its global clearing division; investment banking senior associates and junior VPs to bolster its financial sponsors coverage; equity financing analysts in its prime brokerage; associate- and VP-level data specialists for its custody and fund services group; business analytics digital intelligence VPs for its markets execution team; and liquidity product management VPs for its custody fund services (CFS) Americas team.

Open positions at the bank’s global HQ also include derivatives clearing client services VPs for its investor services team; strategy senior associates and VPs; experienced real estate IB analysts and associates; diversified industries IB associates; power and utilities associates for its energy investment banking team; and media and communications IB associates.

Morgan Stanley

The vast majority of the roles that Morgan Stanley is currently looking to hire for are based in its New York HQ, with a notable exception being investment banking associates for its Los Angeles office.

In New York, the bank is seeking to hire salespeople for its Morgan Stanley Electronic Trading (MSET) quant coverage team; equity research quant associate with financials experience; associate- and VP-level investment banking salespeople, traders and researchers; middle-market loan analysts; quantitative researchers and developers for electronic market making; equities electronic trading risk associates and VPs; U.S. Treasury and agency MBS trading and portfolio management associates; and securitized product group (SPG) salespeople.

In addition, the bank wants to hire associate-level product specialists and equity researchers with hardlines retail experience, as well as for its analyst solutions team; and product development associates for its fund services group, although the majority of the latter roles are based in Purchase, New York.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

In addition to actively recruiting for its relationship manager and financial advisor development programs and global wealth & investment management (GWIM) team, Bank of America Merrill Lynch is doing quite a bit of recruitment for investment banking and markets roles at its New York HQ.

The bank is hiring technology, media & telecom (TMT) and financial institutions IB VPs; investment analysts, quantitative finance analysts, including some with pre-provision net revenue (PPNR) modelling experience, and senior quantitative financial analysts with fair-lending experience; global principal investments (GPI), family office and quantitative strategies group (QSG) associates, as well as financial sponsors IB associates for its transaction development group; alternative investments salespeople; and various product specialists.

Citigroup

In addition to recruiting for its New York HQ, Citi is looking to fill investment banking roles in Chicago, Houston and San Francisco, primarily analysts and associates, but also industrials IB VPs.

Focusing on its open jobs in New York, the bank wants to bring in senior assistants to its financial institutions group (FIG); relationship associates for its Global Capital Network & Management team; corporate and investment banking relationship analysts; senior analysts for the Latin America IB team; and healthcare IB associates.
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Once upon a time, the City couldn’t get enough of graduates of Nicole Karoui’s Masters in Probability and Finance at Paris’s at University Paris-VI. Back in the day, Karoui’s students were pursued to be derivatives structurers and quantitative risk managers by banks in London. Many of them still occupy senior positions in the City today. However, Karoui retired in 2004 and top French quants say her course has been displaced by contenders more suited to banks’ needs of contemporary mathematicians. .

Today’s Karouis are Nizar Touzi, professor of applied mathematics at Paris’s École Polytechnique and Nicolas Vayatis, director of the, ‘Centre de mathématiques et de leurs applications (CMLA)’ at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (formerly known as ENS Cachan). The course in question is the masters in applied maths (MVA). Its appeal? It equips France’s new best mathematicians with the techniques necessary to work in data science or artificial intelligence.

“The best mathematicians don’t want to do derivatives any more.” says Edouard D’Archimbaud head of the data and artificial intelligence lab at BNP Paribas in Paris. “The MVA at Cachan is becoming the most famous preparation of a career in machine learning.”

D’Archimbaud should know. A graduate from École Polytechnique with an MVA in applied maths, he runs BNP Paribas’ data and artificial intelligence (AI) lab. While banks like Citi have comparatively small AI teams, BNP Paribas is ambitious to grow. Right now, the French has 25 people in its lab, spread between Paris and Lisbon in Portugal, ultimately it expects to have 100. D’Archimbaud is therefore hiring – slowly. “We’re recruiting around 10 people a year,” he says. “We’re very careful and only like to hire the right people.”

In Paris, those people are highly likely to be students of Touzi and Vayatis. Thanks to their endeavours, French graduates looks likely to retain their position at the helm of quantitative finance as the sector embraces machine learning. “There’s a saying that the English are good at law, the Americans are good at history and the French are good at maths,” jokes D’Archimbaud’s colleague.

In Portugal, D’Archimbaud’s unit is more likely to hire from the Universities of Lisbon or Porto. While banks like Morgan Stanley are building quant units in Hungary, D’Archimbaud says Portugal suits BNP Paribas best: “We find great profiles there, it’s close to Paris, and it’s cheap.”

Speaking at this week’s AI summit in London, D’Archimbaud said his unit is developing new interfaces between clients at the bank. So far, it’s worked on a translation program for finance which he says is more accurate than Google’s own.

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Photo credit: Mortar Board Sea by rawdonfox is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

You might think that J.P. Morgan has no problem in attracting exemplary talent in artificial intelligence (AI). After all, the U.S. bank successfully hired Geoffrey Zweig, a top natural language processing (NLP) scientist from Microsoft as head of global machine learning in February. One month later it also recruited Jeffrey De Jong, a specialist in experimental particle physics who’d been working for King, the games development company behind the Candy Crush Saga. But for all the Zweigs and De Jongs who come in-house, it seems there are plenty of other top technologists who want to remain unfettered by a big corporation.

“Some of the best technology talent doesn’t want to work in banks,” said Daniel Drummer, a VP in fintech strategy and partnerships for J.P. Morgan’s corporate and investment bank. A lot of people want to be entrepreneurs, he added.

J.P. Morgan hasn’t given up. It’s still working with the world’s top AI professionals – on their terms. Rather than assimilating them into its investment bank, it’s inviting them into its offices and helping to develop their start-ups as much as it can and – notably – not necessarily investing or demanding anything in return.

“Our objective is not necessarily to acquire or invest in [a company we work with], but to make it industry-ready,” said Drummer, speaking at the AI Summit in London today. Instead of investment, Drummer said machine learning start-ups in the wholesale banking space often need access to data and knowledge about how the finance industry works, along with an enterprise to test their ideas out on. This is what J.P. Morgan offers (although it’s not averse to investing too if appropriate).

Skittish machine learning technologists seem to like this deal. J.P. Morgan launched its “In Residence” program for fintech start-ups in June 2016. Since then, Drummer says it’s met with around 150 companies in machine learning and AI. Of those, it’s chosen to work with around 10.

Drummer didn’t say who those firms are, or exactly what they’re up to at J.P. Morgan. The bank has said publicly, however, that it’s using artificial intelligence to automate tasks done by its lawyers and to identify opportunities for its investment banking business.

Some of the forthcoming AI initiatives coming out of J.P. Morgan might therefore originate with interesting companies brought under the bank’s wing on a relatively informal basis.

What if the AI companies J.P. Morgan nurtures go on to become successful and to tout their wares to competitor banks? Drummer suggested this is just anachronistic thinking: “It’s not about being isolated and hoping that no one will found out what you’re doing.” The future is about companies working collaboratively on AI projects said, Drummer, pointing to Google’s approach with TensorFlow.

This may be so, but it also seems that J.P. Morgan’s In Residence programme gives it the best of both worlds. It gets to pick top machine learning talent with no commitments either way, and if things work out, JPM can be the first to invest.

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Photo credit: JP Morgan by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The sudden addition of scores of expensive Barclays bankers to its ranks has helped increase staff costs at OCBC and pushed up pay per head.

OCBC-owned Bank of Singapore acquired Barclays’ Asian wealth unit in November and more than 60 Barclays relationship managers (as well as other staff) joined OCBC’s headcount as a result.

Operating expenses at OCBC for the first quarter rose 5% year-on-year, according to the bank’s Q1 financial results. This was “driven by an increase in staff costs partly associated with the consolidation of Barclays”.

Staff costs rose 4%, “largely from higher base salaries”. And staff costs per head – total employee expenses (such as salaries and bonuses) divided by total headcount – went up by 5.2% year-on-year (or S$1,010), as the first table below shows.

Barclays RMs got about 10% to 15% more base pay when they moved to BoS, according to a headhunter with knowledge of the deal.

BoS is paying competitively in part to prevent its newly acquired bankers from joining Standard Chartered, the firm which poached several Barclays RMs before the takeover.

RMs at Bank of Singapore are earning their keep for their parent company. OCBC’s 14% rise in quarterly profit was largely led by growth in its wealth management business.

Despite the Barclays acquisition, however, overall headcount at OCBC fell by 312 year-on-year.

Fellow Singapore bank UOB has also cut its workforce since Q1 2016, as the second table shows. DBS bucked the trend by taking on 249 people over the same period, but the increase was purely driven by its decision to hire technology staff who had previously worked for its IT vendors.

The hiring spree that saw Singapore’s three local banks increase their combined headcount by 1,272 people in 2015 appears to have ended.

While Singapore banks haven’t made large-scale layoffs over the past year, they have reduced their recruitment rates in response to deteriorating economic conditions and they haven’t always replaced staff who’ve left of their own accord, say recruiters.

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Anna Vanessa Haotanto set her sights on a finance career even earlier that most aspiring bankers do. And one of her main motivations for joining the sector was also different from the norm: she wanted to earn enough money to buy her family a property.

“During the Asian Financial Crisis my parents’ business struggled and they made some financial mistakes,” says Haotanto, a former UOB banker who now runs The New Savvy, a Singapore fintech firm targeting female investors.

“So when I was at school I was determined to get out of the cycle of living pay cheque to pay cheque. I even started reading Warren Buffett as a teenager,” she adds.

Haotanto decided to study finance instead of law at Singapore Management University. “And the more I learnt, the more I loved it. I would even sit in on some finance classes that I wasn’t getting a credit for, just because I was interested in the topic.”

At university it soon became clear to Haotanto that she didn’t want to work in operations. “I wanted to be in the front-office. I’d become fascinated with how to generate greater rates of return.”

After graduating in 2008 Haotanto received offers from three banks, but instead joined BMI Research as an Asia Pacific account manager. “I was only 24 and I already had a regional role involving lots of travelling and meeting senior executives,” she says.

Haotanto joined UOB in 2010 as a client advisor in wealth management, dealing with offshore clients – from Indonesia and Malaysia to Europe. “I had no bank-sales experience and was thrown into the deep end. I often worked from 8am to 11pm and did a lot of cold calls. But I developed sales, product and relationship management skills.”

The UOB job also helped Haotanto achieve the objective she’d set at university: purchase a property for her family. “With that goal in mind, I became one of the top client advisors at the bank and I saved enough to buy one before I was 30.”

She then turned her attention to what she perceived as a wider problem in Singapore: a shortage of accessible financial advice to meet the needs of women. “There are women’s magazines – which have hardly any financial content – and at the other extreme there’s a site like Bloomberg, which is very technical.”

Haotanto decided to do something about this problem when she was in between jobs in 2015. Rather than return to banking, she set up fintech company The New Savvy, which provides content to help women make better informed investment decisions.

“Women in Singapore are earning more money, but most of them don’t invest it – they put it in the bank,” she adds. “And financial services is also a male-dominated industry.”

The New Savvy now has about 30,000 subscribers and five full-time staff. But it would be “premature” for the firm to start managing people’s money, says Haotanto. “Instead of investing in robo-advisory technology, we want to focus first on educating female consumers and building our brand.”

“The main challenge for me personally over the past two years has been learning SEO, and digital and content marketing as I had no prior knowledge,” she adds. “In a fintech start-up, every day is a struggle because there are no limits on what you can do – you don’t have a tight job description like at a bank.”

Haotanto now wants to help more female entrepreneurs enter the local fintech sector.

She’s the head of the women in fintech group at the Singapore FinTech Association, a non-profit organisation that encourages industry collaboration. “We have a clear objective of increasing the visibility of women in fintech, whether they’re entrepreneurs, or work for banks or regulators.”

But Haotanto admits that there’s a lot of work to be done. “I grew up in an environment where not many women got involved in technology. And even today, there are only three women in a list of the top-30 influencers in Singapore fintech. That makes me upset.”

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Image credit: The New Savvy

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After the first quarter, Wall Street compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates is projecting mixed incentive pay across financial services, with a generally more upbeat business environment and compensation outlook compared to recent years. There’s a long way to go until the end of the year, though, with political and regulatory uncertainty, rising interest rates and ongoing challenges in global markets keeping full-year pay projections cloudy. That said, in general stronger performance has led to optimism that pay will be higher this year compared to 2016.

Johnson Associates expects asset managers’ incentive compensation to be flat, with private equity professionals riding record assets under management to 5% to 15% comp increases.

Major investment and commercial banking firms have achieved better results overall so far this year but with disparities in bonus outlook based on the business unit in which you work.

Investment banking incentives are up substantially, most significantly in debt and equity underwriting, which Johnson projects to earn bonuses at least 10% to 20% bigger than last year. That good news is dampened somewhat by a decline in advisory revenues, leading to a projected bonus shrinkage in the -5% to -10% range for that business unit.

Fixed income trading incentives are trending up moderately on stronger performance, leading to expectations of a 10% to 15% bonus increase, whereas equities trading incentives down slightly – perhaps -5% or so – due to lower levels of activity.

Banks continue to focus on cost cutting by making strategy shifts to realize technology efficiencies, keeping a conservative hiring outlook and moving headcount to lower-cost locations. They continue to increase staff in their regulatory and cyber-security departments.

Johnson Associates noted that shareholder advisory groups are stifling incentive design at the executive level by calling out instances where prescriptive mandates may not align with business strategies.

Banks have made considerable improvements in performance management using data analytics and technology, but that has led them to hire a smaller number of better-qualified professionals.

In addition, the industry has demonstrated a more nuanced use of market data to benchmark compensation for key positions.

Johnson Associates expects wider differentials in pay for banks to retain top talent, with broad turnover accepted and generally considered healthy.

Banks have increased their focus on cost-of-living differences between New York and California and the rest of the country, leading many to move headcount to lower-cost locations.

Taking into consideration the cash-flow needs of mid- and junior-level professionals, some banks, including many of the elite boutiques, are offering bonuses with more cash up front and less deferred.
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Now that it’s got €8bn in new capital and another strategy reconfiguration, Deutsche Bank has supposedly turned a corner. The second half of 2017 is the new dawn in which the German bank will be skipping after corporate clients and rebuilding its market share in fixed income trading.

This may be so, but a dark uncertainty lingers in the wings. Its name is Brexit, and it threatens to cause particular problems for Deutsche – recapitalization or not.

Brexit’s potency for Deutsche Bank comes from the fact that DB’s London business is presently operated on a branch basis only. As things stand, Deutsche’s fully regulated – and fully capitalized European head office – is to be found in Frankfurt. This is fine, so long as the UK is a member of the European Union, but clearly this is about to change.

Post-Brexit, Reuters points out that it’s likely that Deutsche will either need to set up a fully capitalized UK subsidiary, or to ship a large proportion of its London activities off to Frankfurt.

The first option could be costly. A report from Boston Consulting Group suggests the European banks currently operating branch structures in London would need to raise a combined €40bn in capital if they’re to switch to fully-capitalized post-Brexit UK subsidiaries. “If Carney (BoE governor) decides to make EU banks create subsidiaries … I will buy a one way train ticket out of London and take everyone with me,” one senior executive at a European bank tells Reuters, ominously.

Deutsche isn’t the only bank with this issue: BNP Paribas and Societe Generale are fellow sufferers. Deutsche is, though, the bank with the biggest problem and with the greatest number of London staff at risk of upheaval. It has 9,000 staff in the UK (of which 7,000 are in London), compared to 6,400 at BNP Paribas and 4,000 at SocGen.

The reminder of Deutsche’s precarity follows a recent warning by Sylvie Matherat, its chief regulatory officer, that the bank could be compelled to move 4,000 jobs including 2,000 front office sales and trading jobs out of the UK post-Brexit. Unless some kind of unlikely “back-to-back” arrangement can be arrived at whereby trades continue taking place in London whilst being mirrored and booked in Frankfurt , Deutsche’s traders might want to start learning German.

Separately, 8,000 Hours, an organization that encourages recent graduates into careers where they can have a positive social impact, has been conducting some detailed analysis into how much you can earn working for a hedge fund. While everyone knows about the hedge fund billionaires, 8,000 Hours’ analysis is interesting for its examination of the lifetime earnings of more median performers in the hedge fund industry. Some of the assumptions are questionable (eg. a 10% hurdle on returns before bonuses are paid), but the analysis is full of interesting points. Over a 20 year career, the suggestion is that a successful hedge fund trader earns $20m. 8,000 Hours suggests that half of this is donated to charity.

Meanwhile:

Lloyd Blankfein is complaining about the persistent low volatility. Does this mean Goldman’s Q2 results will be poor too? (CNBC)

Meet Wall Street’s new regulator: “Mr. Noreika is an unvetted attorney who lacks the experience to serve as an independent Wall Street watchdog.” (Bloomberg)

Reasons not to quit M&A for a boutique: ‘Free from the regulatory pressures piled on big banks, he said he nonetheless felt “a little naked” not being able to turn to colleagues in a markets business for advice on financing transactions.’ (Financial News)

RBS is outsourcing 92 UK technology jobs to India. (Register)

Jes Staley as protector: “I was trying to protect a vulnerable colleague.” (Financial Times)

Jerry Del Missier keeps hiring for his new fund above a plumbing shop called Flush Gordon. (Reuters)

A former special forces soldier who became a banker and joined Credit Suisse has defected to Rothschild. (FiNews)

Students from these elite schools dominate top UK companies’ graduate recruitment programmes.(Telegraph)

Five methods of getting noticed at work. (HBR)

A Deutsche Bank spokesman has written a novel titled “Murderous Menu.” (Facebook)

Descartes had a bulging frontal cortex. (Sciencemag)

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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Photo credit:Winchester Street, Deutsche Bank, – 4 by Gideon Benari is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s a tough job market for finance professionals right now, which means your chances of getting called back by recruiters deluged by resumes are diminished, but there are other reasons why you keep striking out.

Sometimes a talented individual with great experience just isn’t a good fit for a particular role. On the other hand, sometimes it is you – something you said, did or failed to do could have disqualified you from the process.

“The most common reasons you aren’t called in for an interview are GPA not above a 3.6, caliber of school, too many jobs without significant deal experience, the firm you are at has a reputation for doing deals that aren’t solid investments,” said Ahmad Popalyar, executive senior partner at Lucas Group. “Or they have already hired someone or put the job on hold.”

If none of those apply to you then bear in mind that many financial services firms get 250 to 300 resumes or more at a time per search and sometimes hiring managers miss a qualified candidate’s profile.

Here are some dos and don’ts ensure you get over the first hurdle:

1. Make sure your resume isn’t ‘weird’

While it’s obvious that you can’t have any typos, misspelled words or incorrect grammar in your resume and cover letter, sometimes something relatively minor like a formatting error, strange or tiny font, or overuse of all capital letters can annoy a hiring manager.

“Formatting errors or illegible font on your resume shows a lack of attention to details,” says Brianne Toole, principal consultant for the investment banking team, Americas, at Selby Jennings. “I’ve seen hiring managers not want to bring a candidate in because the formatting or font made the resume difficult to read.”

2. Make sure your job titles hit the right note

It might seem obvious, but getting the right job title is key. If you have a funky job title, say your company has something quirky for your role, in parentheses say the more common job title, thinking about what people would search for.

3. Ensure that you’ve provided enough details about deals

Make sure that your resume fits the job that you’re applying for, highlighting the skills that are in the job description that you have. It has to be clear that you’re proficient in the requisite areas.

On the investment banking side, that means highlighting the M&A deals that you’ve worked on.

“Hiring managers need to know what deals you’ve actually worked on – from research and due diligence to negotiations and close – to make sure you have the skills necessary to succeed in the role,” Toole said.

4. But keep your cover letter concise

Length is the first thing recruiters and hiring managers mention when it comes to cover letter errors. Decision-makers don’t have the time or patience to read a novel.

A good cover letter should be made up of three fairly short paragraphs containing between 300 and 500 words.

5. Don’t stretch the truth

If there was a particular deal that you were a part of and you list on your resume, it’s natural to want to make yourself sound good. However, if you claim an important role in a transaction but can’t talk through the strategy or many specifics, then you will be found out in the phone screening or in-person interview, if you do eventually make it that far. Recruiters serious about hiring a candidate will always do a thorough background check that will expose any egregious truth-stretching.

“Be honest in the level of involvement in each deal,” Toole said. “What did you do in the pitch phase, how heavily involved were you involved in the financial modeling, did you see it through to close?

“Recruiters want candidates who have worked on at least a handful of deals from start to close,” she says. “They don’t want candidates who have worked on deals in bits and pieces.”

If you were involved in a huge transaction that would be a huge resume booster, by all means list it on your resume, but acknowledge that you were only involved in the pitch phase, for example.

“When it comes to third-tier skills and experience, if you’re honest, ‘I included it on there but put it lower down because I didn’t see it through to close,’ they might look past it, if you show enthusiasm and have other good experience,” Toole said. “They don’t want people who aren’t up front.”

6. Do demonstrate your tech-savviness

Turning to the technology and operations sides of the business, it is important to demonstrate fluency in various in-demand programming languages. Having knowledge of C++, Java and Python, among others, will help you get a call back from recruiters and hiring managers.

“Hiring managers are looking for candidates with strong programming experience,” said Ryan Mazza, senior consultant in the quantitative analytics team, at Phaidon International. “It’s harder for banks to teach them the skills they need, so they want candidates to walk through the door with experience in particular programming languages.”

7. But don’t fake it

Make sure you can talk the talk on the screening call. If the hiring manager asks a question about one of the programming languages that the candidate has listed, you better be able to demonstrate your mastery of it.

“If you list C++ but can’t really speak to it, that’s frustrating,” Mazza said. “It’s a pet peeve of managers, because it’s a waste of time.”

8. Context matters

When presenting their on-the-job accomplishments, people often throw in numbers and feel that takes care of quantification, but you have to provide context and include results so people understand what you’re talking about. Saying that you grew revenue by 250% is great, but anytime there is a percentage increase, the questions are “From what base number?” and “Over what period of time?”

9. Project the right personality

Researchers found that perceived personality, as inferred from your resume and cover letter, influences your likelihood of getting hired. Be aware how recruiters might make personality judgments based upon your résumé and seek to balance these out.

For example, if you have mediocre academic grades, you will need to project conscientiousness through consistent work experience and supervisory roles. If you describe a lot of managerial roles, you need to make yourself seem more agreeable with some interesting team-based extra-curricular activities.

10. Never draw attention to your shortfalls

There’s never a perfect candidate. While you may be missing some elements of what the recruiter is looking for, the chances are that other applicants will also have gaps in their experience. However, employers do want someone who can slot in immediately. Explain why you’ll be able to get up to speed right away without relying on cliches like “I’m a quick learner.”

11. Do follow up

While you don’t want to pester, being proactive in following up – within reason – typically doesn’t hurt and can get you back on the radar screen.

“My suggestion to you is resubmit your information, and try to contact a hiring manager to introduce yourself,” Popalyar says. “HR teams sometimes don’t know the technical aspects of the investments you did, and being able to sell yourself to a hiring manager that actually does the investments increases your chances quite a bit.”
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The theory goes that the young these days aren’t very bothered about money. Millennials and Generation Y are supposed to be more interested in flexibility, coaching and culture than in cold hard cash. This may well the case. However, it doesn’t seem to apply to students who want to work in financial services: they’re still after the money.

eFinancialCareers’ research into the ‘Ideal Employers‘ of the students who come to this site suggests the standard Millennial preoccupations don’t hold with students who want to work in finance. Their preferred employers aren’t known for short working hours, corporate social responsibility and a touchy-feely work environment. – They’re known for paying well and offering challenging work.

This is why Goldman Sachs tops our 2017 ranking of the companies our students want to work for. Goldman ranked above the likes of Google and PWC, even though the latter were rated more highly for manageable working hours. For finance-oriented students, a lack of flexibility doesn’t seem to be a turn off. What finance-oriented students want is pay: big salaries, big bonuses. And it’s here that Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley – the top three banks in our ranking – excel.

Students’ preoccupation with pay may not come as surprise to banks themselves. Goldman Sachs surveyed its own summer interns last year and found that they were steady, thrifty, types whose priority was saving a deposit for a house and getting lots of exercise. The portrait painted was of a group of students who worked hard and looked after their health. A flexible job and participation in corporate social responsibility programs was not the priority. Similarly, research by the UK Resolution Foundation in February found that Millennials are primarily interested in security. For a generation facing high house prices and with high debts from education, this is hardly surprising.

Young people’s perception that Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are the big payers in banking may not be mistaken. The most recent figures for top staff in the City of London suggests the two banks are far more generous than the rest. During the first three years of an investment banking career, however, the Dartmouth Partners bonus survey suggests that Bank of America Merrill Lynch also looks like a good bet.

So, does students’ overwhelming interest in money mean that banks can drop their initiatives for reducing working hours and return to the bad old ways of working juniors day and night, irrespective of the risks to their health? Does it also mean that all those trips to muck-out urban farms and paint local schools can be dispensed with? Almost certainly not. Students who aspire to work in finance may be primarily interested in pay and challenging work, but banks still need to compete with funky technology firms and the lure of entrepreneurialism. All students who want to work in finance may be in it for the money, but the best will have other options and want a good life as well.

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Investment banks’ employees simply don’t have enough “digital savoir faire”. So says Boston Consulting Group, which believes technology should be seamlessly integrated into banks business models and that scarce technologists should be carefully recruited and nurtured.

There’s just one problem – investment banks are lagging hedge funds, mutual funds and other capital markets players when it comes hiring the best technologists and are losing market share as a result.

The new skills needed across investment banking, hedge funds, mutual funds, information providers and exchanges are, says BCG, machine learning, predictive analytics, cloud computing, robotics and automation.

Investment banks like to say that they’re now technology companies. Goldman Sachs says that 25% of its staff work in technology and J.P. Morgan has 10,000 IT staff attached to its investment bank. But, as a group banks have just 5% of people with ‘digital skills’, says BCG. This includes developers, data analytics and ‘emerging’ technologies. This is by far the smallest proportion of any capital markets firms in BCG’s study.

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This is a problem. Digital skills are the key to increasing shareholder returns, believes BCG, which points to a positive correlation between talented technologists and returns. Investment banks’ revenues shrunk by just 1% last year, but buy-side firms are still generating more revenues. Banks now account for 34% of industry revenues, down from 47% in 2006, the study suggests, whereas buy-side firms comprise 46% – up from 40% before the financial crisis.

Investment banks need to ensure that compensation is “compelling when compared to packages offered by competitors” to attract more tech talent, but they should also ensure “seamless integration among business and IT functions”, it says.

J.P. Morgan has technology ‘hubs’ in 14 lower cost destinations like Dallas, Delaware and Mumbai. Morgan Stanley’s centres of excellence include Glasgow and Budapest. Even tech teams in New York and London are often housed in separate offices to encourage more collaboration between the IT professionals.

In other words, this arrangement doesn’t exactly scream ‘integration’, and this is another challenge for banks hoping to hire and retain scarce technology talent.

A new study from academics at Washington State University and University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh – featured in the HBR – suggests that employee satisfaction stems from being a ‘lynchpin’ in the organisation. In other words, programmers want to work for an organisation where technology is the product.

Even if they’re considered a core employee – namely, banks calling themselves technology companies and talking up IT publicly – they’re still considered to be peripheral to the organisation.

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Deutsche Bank could do without people leaving its U.S. business. America is the priority for the German bank this year: so much so that CEO John Cryan has taken personal control of the U.S. business himself. Even so, one of Deutsche’s up-and-coming rates strategists has quit for a hot new hedge fund.

Jérôme Saragoussi is joining Light Sky Macro, the New York-based hedge fund set up by ex-Brevan Howard star trader Ben Melkman last year. Light Sky launched March 1st and has already assembled some big names, including Joe Mauro, a former Goldman Sachs partner, as head of markets, and Alberto Ades from Bank of America as chief economist. Investors include Steven Cohen, Louis Bacon and Dan Loeb.

Saragoussi’s exit will leave a hole in Deutsche’s U.S. rates team. Institutional Investor ranked him the top analyst in America for Treasury inflation-protected securities last year, and he rose up Deutsche’s ranks after joining in 2002 following graduation from the London School of Economics.

Deutsche Bank, of course, neglected to pay any staff above associate level performance-related bonuses for 2016. It did offer retention bonuses to top staff, but they only become worth anything if the stock hits €23 during the first three trading weeks of 2021. Deutsche stock is currently trading at €17.

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With its AGM safely out of the way, Barclays appears to be making some big changes to its under-performing trading business.

Sources say that Joe Corcoran, global head of markets and head of markets Americas is stepping down and becoming vice chairman. Tim Throsby, the head of the investment bank whom Barclays hired from J.P. Morgan in September 2016 is taking personal control of global markets himself.

At the same time, Barclays is understood to have hired Kristen Macleod, a Goldman Sachs MD in U.S. FX sales, and Filippo Zorzoli, the EMEA head of rates sales at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Corcoran declined to comment on the changes and Barclays didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The moves follow a miserable quarter for Barclays’ fixed income and equities trading businesses. In the first three months of this year, the bank’s fixed income revenues fell 1% and its equities trading revenues fell 10% compared to the opening quarter of 2016. During the bank’s investor call CEO Jes Staley identified the U.S. rates business as a notably poor performer, saying “it didn’t do as well as I’d liked.”

A markets veteran, Corcoran joined Barclays from Lehman in 2008 according to FINRA. He was formerly head of global equities trading at Barclays and was promoted to run the markets business in 2015 after former head Eric Felder left within a year of being appointed. Throsby himself is also an ex-equities banker who needs to affect a fast turnaround of Barclays’ trading operation.

Both Macleod and Zorzoli look like big hires. Macleod spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs and made managing director in 2015. She’s understood to be on gardening leave. Zorzoli was also a former Goldman Sachs managing director and joined Bank of America from Goldman in June 2011 after being hired by fellow ex-Goldmanite Sanaz Zaimi. Zorzoli will be based in London.

Sources said Barclays is keen to improve the performance of its U.S. fixed income business after the dismal first quarter. Rates is understood to be a particular focus, with further senior hires expected in the coming weeks. A spokesman for the bank said it would be wrong to read too much into Barclays’ first quarter, which is being compared to an exceptionally strong start to 2016, ““No business is run based the results of a single quarter. These changes illustrate how we are positively investing and growing our business.”

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Photo credit: Barclays by Insider Monkey is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

UBS will need to recruit from Hong Kong and mainland banks – not just global ones – if it’s to meet its “ambitious” new goal of hiring 100 private bankers in Hong Kong in just the next two years, say headhunters.

The new bankers will target high-net-worth (HNW) clients (those with $2m to $50m to invest), Jean-Claude Humair, regional market manager for Hong Kong at UBS, told Reuters.

“These are ambitious plans because Hong Kong has no hinterland to hire from, so there has to be considerable poaching from rival banks,” says former Merrill Lynch private banker Rahul Sen, now head of wealth management at search firm The Omerta Group.

Unsurprisingly, UBS will first look to hire from the likes of Credit Suisse and Julius Baer because of similarities in their bankers’ “experience, expectations and working culture”, says Sean Kang, director of wealth management at consultancy McLagan.

But these banks are also growing their workforces in Asia, which will making poaching from them far from straightforward. Credit Suisse needs to recruit 180 relationship managers to meet its target, announced by CEO Tidjane Thiam in 2015, of having 800 RMs in APAC by the end of next year.

The scale of the hiring at UBS means the bank will consider candidates currently based in mainland China as well as RMs from local banks in Hong Kong, despite their firms having less sophisticated product platforms.

These bankers are also more likely to serve the middle-ranking millionaires that UBS now wants to focus on. About 90% of Hong Kong’s ultra-high-net-worth billionaires already bank with UBS and several of its rivals, most prominently Standard Chartered, are trying to expand in UHNW.

“UBS is very strong in UHNW, so HNW is where it can grow its business,” says Kang. “All banks want to serve UHNW, but actually people in the middle group can generate a lot of business as they’re not as well banked.”

If you want to become a HNW client advisor (as the bank calls its relationship managers) at UBS, you will need to manage at least $150m to $200m at you current bank, says Sen.

UBS is likely to want candidates with at least eight years’ experiences, adds Kang.

Your clients should not be too thinly spread across Asia – UBS likes its bankers to have 70% to 80% of their clients based in one market, says Sen. The 100 new hires at UBS will likely be Hong Kong, China or Taiwan specialists.

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Many of us in banking will work at least five, 10, or 15 years before we retire or move to another sector. And as bankers we will – from time to time – experience burnout, frustration or even pain.

I joined the industry in 1994 at DBS in Singapore and then moved to Standard Chartered, Citi, ANZ and UBS, where I was a Hong Kong-based MD and advised clients across capital markets, FX, and financing.

With 23 years in banking (I left the sector this year to set up a career training company), I’m well aware of the stresses that come with being a banker.

But I also believe that it’s possible to alleviate some of these anxieties and make your work a little more interesting and bearable. Here’s how:

Incorporate your interests into your work

I enjoy photography. When working for Citi, I volunteered to be the photographer for a client offsite event and I immediately became doubly useful – not only did I teach derivatives, I also took photos of the event participants.

Next thing I knew, respective country sales heads at the bank started inviting me to teach derivatives and take pictures at their offsites. It gave me opportunities to travel to destinations like Phuket, Urumqi and Dubai, get to know overseas clients and colleagues, and put my photography skills to good use.

Teaching is my also passion (it’s what I’m doing full-time now). Without being asked, I often conducted classes at the banks I worked for to share my knowledge with other departments. I didn’t get paid or receive praise from my bosses, but I did get a lot of satisfaction from appreciative colleagues.

I’ve been an Apple fan since 2001. Instead of using PowerPoint to present to clients, I used Keynote on my MacBook. The design and animation impressed clients and made my presentations more memorable. I’ve always been an early adopter of Apple products. When clients asked about my new gadgets, it was a great opportunity to build rapport with them.

Think of yourself as CEO of your own consulting company

As a banker I sometimes thought of myself as the CEO of the Eric Sim Consulting Company. I counted Stan Chart, Citi, ANZ and UBS as my customers, not my employers. I thought of my earnings as a consulting fee, not a salary. My company had only one employee – Eric Sim.

When rendering the services of Eric to Citi, I constantly looked out for services that Citi needed. When Citi required Eric to cover Thai clients, I immediately sent him for Thai language classes at my own expense. When Citi used Eric’s services in China, I forced him to memorise the Chinese expressions for hundreds of financial terms – from hedge accounting to cross-currency swaps – in just a week.

As CEO, I wanted to build long-term relationship with customers, so I asked Eric to sometimes accept work not within his job scope, such as organising events and cross-selling other departments’ products. It might have taken him away from his own revenue-generating activities but in the long run, it was good for customer relationships. “Give and take!” I said to him.

Don’t resign, ask for a transfer

Based on the many CVs I’ve seen, I think the average tenure in a banking job is only about three years. Of course, there are people who do the same job in the same bank for 10 years or more, but they’re as rare as black swans these days. Most bankers seem to get bored or frustrated after three years.

But before you think of quitting for another bank, try for an internal transfer. Since you’ve already built some credibility and networks within your bank, you have a good chance of getting one. It will give you the opportunity to develop new skills, whereas a job with another bank requires you to use your old skills just to prove yourself.

When I was at Citi, I got bored or frustrated every two to three years myself, so I talked to my bosses about potential moves to different roles or locations. They were very happy to oblige. I worked in three different jobs in three cities over eight very interesting years.

Bring your own….chair

Most banking jobs these day are deskbound, we spend 10 to 12 hours a day in the office, but the human body is not designed to sit for long hours. Sitting is the new smoking.

To keep our spines healthy, standing up regularly isn’t sufficient – we need a chair that actually fits us properly. Your office chair is most likely oversized because it was designed to fit the biggest and heaviest person in the office.

As a banker, I brought my own chair to each new office I worked in. Work is already stressful enough; we don’t need a bad-fitting chair to make it worse. My favourite chair followed me from Singapore to Shanghai to Hong Kong.

Eric Sim is a former UBS MD who is now the chief trainer at the Institute of Life in Hong Kong and is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Finance at HKUST.

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The London financial services industry used to operate according to the rules of a gentleman’s code that enabled City bankers to live a much less stressful lifestyle than their Wall Street counterparts. Some look back wistfully at a time they see as a golden age of deal-making over drinks and shorter working hours.

“I used to catch the 5-to-9 tube,” Robert Leitão, who spent the ’80s at Morgan, Grenfell & Company, one of the oldest banks in the City, and who now counsels clients on mergers for Rothschild, told the New York Times. “We were reliably in a bar by 5 o’clock.”

Alas, that was not destined to last. As hard-charging investment banks like J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley sent more manpower overseas and began poaching clients from their European competitors, Leitão said he and his fellow City bankers had to start getting up earlier and working later.

He first came into direct contact with American bankers during a telecommunications merger in the early ’90s.

“We’d go in with our little black-and-white documents and Goldman Sachs came in with what was the first landscape-color presentation we’d ever seen,” he told the Times. “I remember one of my colleagues saying to me as we came out of that meeting, ‘Oh my God, the world’s changed.’”

Even millennial investment bankers fresh out of university who never experienced those good old days in the City probably wouldn’t mind going back to that schedule: a spot of work in the afternoon sandwiched in between a long boozy lunch and happy hour at 5 o’clock sharp.

Separately, most banks want to strengthen their electronic trading footprint across asset classes, and many are hiring – and promoting from within – to achieve that objective.

The latest is Deutsche Bank, which has given various traders promotions to bring more asset classes onto electronic platforms.

David Wayne, head of the German bank’s foreign exchange desk, will now lead the corporate and investment bank’s new technology and operations team with a mandate to work with the bank’s fixed income and equities teams to “bring together” Deutsche’s “electronic trading capabilities across all asset classes,” according to Financial News. He will also assume responsibility for Deutsche Bank’s strategic analytics teams.

Deutsche also promoted Sam Wisnia – previously the head of its fixed income and currencies structuring group and later the head of its rates business in Europe and the Americas – to oversee a combined rates and FX business. Prior to that, he was a partner and the head of the global strats and structuring team at Goldman Sachs before leaving to help launch the private equity firm DMC Partners.

In addition, Deutsche promoted Kemal Askar as the head of rates and Russell Lascala and Jonathan Tinker as the co-heads of FX, who will both report to Wisnia, per FN.

Meanwhile:

Barclays reshuffled its senior global investment bank management under new interim head of the bank’s markets division Tim Throsby and is seeking to hire up to 100 people to boost the division. (Reuters)

Traders of all types are waiting for the period of low market volatility to end. (Bloomberg)

Survey says: 80% of respondents predict a shrinkage of profit-making hedge fund firms. (HFMWeek)

Five operational trends reshaping hedge funds and private equity firms. (HFMWeek)

A fund manager, the founding partner at 1167 Capital, participated in an unnamed “tax avoidance scheme,” allegedly shorting the U.K. government by about ₤650k ($836k), but he may not have to pay it back because of a typo. (Bloomberg)

The investments of mutual funds, hedge funds and private equity shops – which Silicon Valley insiders refer to as “tourist investors” – helped to fuel the technology sector’s growth, but they have started to pull back their spending. (Bloomberg)

The co-founder and CEO of Aberdeen Asset Management reveals the background to the merger with Standard Life, why it went ahead and how many job cuts there will be. (Business Insider)

Global perception of Trump’s “less inclusive and less diverse” America is dissuading international students seeking MBAs from applying to U.S. business schools. (Bloomberg)

The price of an MBA isn’t worth it for most entrepreneurs, as only 3% of graduates go on to start their own business soon after graduating from a U.S. program, and graduates of the more entrepreneur-oriented MBA programs are not as appealing to banks, hedge funds and PE firms. (Bloomberg)

However, business schools do help alumni over career bumps by offering coaching to former students who hit problems or want to make a change. (FT)

The students who dominated trading competitions recently aren’t Ivy Leaguers; they go to Baruch, a public college in New York. (WSJ)

The highest-paid women in America work in technology, not financial services. (Bloomberg)
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Jean-Philippe Jabre, son of hedge fund legend Philippe Jabre, is on the look out for a new job.

Jean-Philippe followed in the footsteps of his dad by joining CQS, the $13bn multi-strategy hedge fund set up by Sir Michael Hintze, as an analyst on its European banks and insurers credit fund in March 2015.

He left around two years later and landed at Mitheridge Capital Management, which manages real estate investments for institutional investors and family offices, as an investment associate.

Eight months later and he’s back on the market, according to his LinkedIn profile. Having left the firm in February, he’s yet to secure a new role.

He could be about to jump into a hot new area, however. Again, his profile suggests that he’s currently on ‘Data Science Immersive’, a 12-week data science course at coding bootcamp General Assembly, which claims to offer both practical training and career help.

Maybe a change could be on the cards for Princeton economics graduate, Jean-Philippe, or perhaps he’s just getting in on the emerging trend of hedge funds demanding that their employees possess both quantitative and traditional investment skills.

His father, Philippe Jabre is a high profile hedge fund manager who is currently chief investment officer of his own hedge fund, Jabre Capital Partners in Geneva. Before this, he was a managing director at GLG Partners.

Following in the footsteps of a legendary finance figure is not easy, but it can certainly open doors.

Alex Blankfein, Harvard MBA and oldest son of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, joined Goldman Sachs in cross asset sales before switching to consultancy Bain & Co and then quietly moving to Carlyle Group late last year. Lloyd is close to David Rubenstein, Carlyle’s founder, which may have greased the wheels for his entrance into the notoriously competitive world of PE.

Louis Dillon Ingraham Bacon, son of Moore Capital founder Louis Bacon, also joined Goldman Sachs last year. Giacomo Draghi, son of European Central Bank president Mario, spent 13 years working in interest rates trading at Morgan Stanley before leaving in February to join hedge fund LMR Partners.

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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When you’re asked: “How well do you deal with stress and working under pressure?”

When you’re asked: “How open are you to learning applications and procedures? Can you give me an example of a situation when you learned something new?”

When you’re asked: “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

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Goldman Sachs

J.P. Morgan

Morgan Stanley

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Citigroup

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1. Make sure your resume isn’t ‘weird’

2. Make sure your job titles hit the right note

3. Ensure that you’ve provided enough details about deals

4. But keep your cover letter concise

5. Don’t stretch the truth

6. Do demonstrate your tech-savviness

7. But don’t fake it

8. Context matters

9. Project the right personality

10. Never draw attention to your shortfalls

11. Do follow up

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Incorporate your interests into your work

Think of yourself as CEO of your own consulting company

Don’t resign, ask for a transfer

Bring your own….chair

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