Evercore has hired a senior investment banker from Standard Chartered in Singapore

August 18, 2017, 10:26 am

≫ Next: Techies don’t always want to work in Hong Kong banking. Here’s why they should

≪ Previous: UBS’s head of investment bank strategy has jumped to BlackRock

Evercore has hired a senior Standard Chartered banker in Singapore as it continues to build its business there. Samaresh Singh joined the advisory boutique earlier this month as a managing director in mergers and acquisitions.

Singh worked in M&A for Stan Chart for seven years, latterly as an executive director. While at the bank he closed more than 20 Southeast Asian deals, totalling $15bn, across sectors such as metals and mining, consumer and retail, and real estate.

Evercore is a comparative newcomer to Singapore investment banking, having only opened an office there in 2013, under the leadership of former UBS banker Keith Magnus. It now employs about 18 people in the city state.

Magnus, who was promoted to co-chairman of Asia in April, said earlier this year that he wanted to hire more bankers in Singapore. The recruitment of Singh suggests these ambitions are now coming into fruition.

While large investment banks in Asia continue to purge their senior ranks, future hiring at Evercore is likely to be focused on experienced bankers like Singh.

“The better-known boutiques such as Evercore have been making their mark in Asia,” says Hugo Cheng, a consultant at financial services consultancy Quinlan & Associates. “But given their size, they tend to be tempered with their build-outs. Rather than big recruitment drives, they emphasise hiring seniors who can bring in business using established relationships.”

Evercore has advised on several significant Southeast Asian deals recently, including Singtel’s $810m acquisition of cyber security firm Trustwave.

“With boutiques climbing up some regional league tables, they’re becoming a more attractive employment alternative to the major global banks in Asia,” says Cheng. “But the main attraction is compensation. While large banks have various restrictions on their bonuses – such as share-based payments, deferral periods and claw-backs – boutiques tend to pay upfront in cash.”

M&A hiring in Singapore remains stagnant overall, says headhunters. Southeast Asia M&A volume stood at $27.2bn in the first half of 2017, down 32% year on year, and the lowest half-year volume since 2012, according to Dealogic figures.

Prior to Stan Chart, Singh worked in-house for infrastructural company GMR for just over a year. He was a corporate finance associate at Merrill Lynch between 2007 and 2009, based in Singapore and Jakarta.

Unusually for an eventual MD, Singh did not begin his career in banking. He was a consultant at Tata Consultancy Services from 1998 to 2005.

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Image credit: franckreporter, Getty

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Techies don’t always want to work in Hong Kong banking. Here’s why they should

August 20, 2017, 7:40 am

≫ Next: Morning Coffee: The partying 25-year-old college dropout making millions. Bankers sleeping in cubicles is over

≪ Previous: Evercore has hired a senior investment banker from Standard Chartered in Singapore

Employers in the finance sector in Hong Kong increasingly need to hire more technologists. But getting the right tech talent on board is far from straightforward.

This year financial institutions in Hong Kong are repeatedly asking me: “Are the technologists we need even available?” My answer tends to be: “Yes, but many of your competitors also want to recruit them”.

As blockchain, AI and other emerging technologies become ever more prevalent in Hong Kong finance, demand for specialist tech candidates is heating up and firms have to offer more – both financially and in terms of career development – to prospective employees.

Even though Hong Kong is a large city and financial centre, its technology skills shortages feel like they are getting worse – at least for financial services firms.

In technology, in contrast to many other job functions, financial institutions in Hong Kong are competing globally for talent. For starters, they face competition from traditional rivals such as London and New York. But now they are also trying to hire similar people as the Chinese tech firms – led by of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – who are routinely hoovering up experienced techies and top students from domestic universities.

Meanwhile, as in other global cities, there is much work to be done to encourage women, in particular, to enter the financial technology industry in Hong Kong. And as in other parts of Asia, parents often need to be convinced that technology is a viable job for their children. ‘Tiger-moms’ still have a lot of influence over the career choices of their children, and many of them favour professionals like law, medicine and front-office investment banking.

In short, we need to build a larger financial technology talent base in Hong Kong – not just developers and engineers, but also fintech entrepreneurs and creative thinkers.

So, what are the positives that we can emphasise to candidates to bolster their interest in being part of Hong Kong’s financial technology scene?

The government and private sectors in Hong Kong have already made massive strides in making the city an innovation hub for both large banks and fintech start-ups. Incubation and accelerator facilities are encouraging new firms to establish themselves here and test new ideas.

The establishment of alternative financial services – such as peer-to-peer lending, equity crowd-funding and innovative ways of making loans and investment available to small businesses – are creating a viable fintech ecosystem across the city.

This ecosystem is expected to grow significantly in the next five years. Financial services companies in Hong Kong will be able to capitalise on what innovative fintech startups will develop in the regulatory sandbox and the fintech innovation hub, two initiatives being jointly driven by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute.

Significantly, Hong Kong is already the leading asset management and private equity centre in Asia. And as China liberalises its financial markets, Hong Kong-based financial institutions are well placed to take advantage. Growth across the wider financial sector will increase the amount of innovative financial technology jobs available here in Hong Kong and will make the city more attractive to candidates.

What kind of technology jobs are likely to be more in demand in the near future? For starters, there’s data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, algorithms and quantitative finance, regtech, wealthtech, payments, blockchain, insurtech, and crypto-currencies, particularly for remittances.

There will also be continued appetite for professionals within digital development, marketing, analytics, cyber security, access management, telecommunications, connectivity, and technology risk and compliance. And it’s not just buy-side and sell-side firms that are recruiting – consulting companies are also strengthening their expertise across all the above functions.

A crucial next step in Hong Kong’s development as a financial technology centre will be adjusting the regulatory framework here to give greater clarity to businesses looking to set up in the city and to bring rules into line with new business practices, while continuing to offer strong investor and consumer protection.

Hong Kong is perfectly situated, geographically and in terms of market and infrastructure maturity, to capitalise on the opportunities that emerging technologies are generating in the finance sector. The future for fintech here is bright, as long as we can nurture and attract the talent.

Warwick Pearmund is the co-chair of the talent and diversity committee of the FinTech Association of Hong Kong. He is also associate director, financial and emerging technologies APAC, at Pure Search.

Image credit: lesleywang2015, Getty

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Morning Coffee: The partying 25-year-old college dropout making millions. Bankers sleeping in cubicles is over

August 20, 2017, 10:52 pm

≫ Next: Goldman Sachs is doing some big hiring in equities algo trading

≪ Previous: Techies don’t always want to work in Hong Kong banking. Here’s why they should

If you’re inspired by “vest and rest” millionaires – 30-something tech entrepreneurs who have sold their firm to Facebook or Google and are creaming the profits working six-hour days – there is another option for big bucks that allows you to stick closer to banking: bitcoin.

The crypto-currency is much-hyped, but take a little inspiration from Jeremy Gardner, a 25-year-old bitcoin millionaire splitting his time between sourcing investments for a VC firm called Blockchain Capital and…partying. Gardner, who dropped out of college twice, works part-time, is a self-made millionaire and told Business Insider that his biggest expense was “alcohol”.

Gardner is a bitcoin evangelist, and it’s easy to see why. In 2008, returning from a safari holiday, Gardner told Business Insider that he’d checked Twitter to realise that the spiralling value of the cryptocurrency meant that his net worth doubled in five days: “That, to me, was nuts,” he said.

“By dedicating my life to crypto assets and blockchain technology, I’ve made more money than I would have ever expected to make in my entire life — by a long shot,” he said. Gardner now works for the VC firm for no salary but instead gets carry, namely a share of the profits the firm makes on investments he advised on.

Gardner lives in a three-storey house in San Francisco with other technology entrepreneurs known as Crypto Castle. “Over a half-dozen people in the time they’ve lived in my house have become millionaires as a result of crypto,” Gardner said.

And the alcohol spend, he says, is more about helping others have a good time: “As I’ve seen my wealth grow, it’s important to me that I give back to this industry that’s given me so much. So when we go to conferences, I’ll bring a bunch of people out and buy bottles at the club, pay for dinner and stuff.”

Bitcoin is now above $4k. Too late to get in? Gardner, obviously, thinks not: he expects it to reach $10k in five to 10 years.

Separately, the days of Barclays interns attempting to catch a little rest by sleeping in a toilet cubicle are over. Forget facetime in the office, Barclays now wants to know exactly when you’re at your desk. The bank has just installed sensors under the desks of its bankers in London to assess when how long they spend at their desk, according to Bloomberg.

Bank employees were not extensively told about their installation and it appears to have many thinking that Big Brother is watching them. The same thing happened last year when the Telegraph installed them under the desks of its journalists, prompting jokes about the dangers of long toilet breaks. But, like the newspaper, Barclays has insisted its not about productivity, but about efficiency.

“The sensors aren’t monitoring people or their productivity; they are assessing office space usage,” the bank told Bloomberg in an emailed statement. “This sort of analysis helps us to reduce costs, for example, managing energy consumption, or identifying opportunities to further adopt flexible work environments.”

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs in Australia has launched a programme to hire people who applied before and didn’t make it, or spent two years in other industries and decided it wasn’t for them (The Australian)

The difference between working for Goldman and a hedge fund? Politics. (Business Insider)

Frankfurt and Dublin’s red carpet may need to stay out for a while: “Most banks are looking to minimise expense and disruption by relocating as little as possible in the first instance.” (Reuters)

London’s tech firms, and talent, are thinking twice about staying in the UK after Brexit (Guardian)

Dublin might be missing out on Brexit gains (Bloomberg)

Bank of England staff could strike again after being offered just a 1% pay rise (Telegraph)

Investment banking sales jobs – all about corporate clients (Tabb Group)

The SEC has dropped its investigation into Javier Martín-Artajo and Julien Grout, the two J.P. Morgan traders accused of hiding J.P. Morgan’s London Whale losses (Financial Times)

Carl Icahn has quit the White House too because of potential conflicts of interest (Bloomberg)

Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman is proving to be one of Trump’s closest allies in business (NY Times)

The five hour commute of office workers (NY Times)

Women are quitting Google because of racial discrimination (Guardian)

Silicon Valley execs try to defy death: “Rather than dying at age 81, catheterised and demented in your bed, you might die at 106 on the tennis court, while winning. Or, as my co-founder likes to say, maybe killed by a jealous lover at 113.” (The Times)

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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Goldman Sachs is doing some big hiring in equities algo trading

August 21, 2017, 2:48 am

≫ Next: This growing U.S. hedge fund has hired from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in London

≪ Previous: Morning Coffee: The partying 25-year-old college dropout making millions. Bankers sleeping in cubicles is over

Goldman Sachs is building out its algorithmic trading business. As the Financial Times reported last week, the firm has trebled the number of corporate bonds trading on its algorithmic platform to 7,000 in the past year under Konstantin Shakhnovich, head of its fixed income systematic market making group. It’s not just bonds though: Goldman’s also expanding its equities algorithmic trading business – and hiring in the process.

As we reported last month, Goldman’s electronic trading business in Europe is run by Ben Coward Talbot, an ex-Morgan Stanley rising star who joined two years ago. Coward Talbot is understood to be spearheading the expansion of Goldman’s algo trading business in Europe.

In electronic equities, Goldman has a thing for hiring from Barclays. In the past few months, it’s brought on both Timo Tatzel, a program trader from the British bank and Davinder Bedi, a special situations trader, also from Barclays. They follow fellow ex-Barclays electronic traders like Alex Harman, who joined Goldman a few years ago. Goldman’s also boosting its electronic execution sales and marketing capabilities. Since June, it’s hired Pierre Cornet d’Elzius and Tom Groothaert, salesmen from Credit Suisse and Alexandra Marciniak, former head of marketing for Bloomberg’s trade book (who joins as a mere associate). It’s also understood to have recruited Jack Leppard in electronic execution sales from KCG.

These front office hires have been supported by over six new recruits in algo development in the past two months.

Goldman Sachs didn’t respond to a request to comment on its algo hiring activities. Despite the flurry, we understand recruitment in the area will continue in the next few months, with a particularly focus on the strats team that works with the algorithmic traders. Last time we looked however, these strats jobs were appearing in Warsaw rather than London.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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This growing U.S. hedge fund has hired from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in London

August 21, 2017, 2:59 am

≫ Next: Meet the former credit trader who quit the City to bring the fight to brain cancer

≪ Previous: Goldman Sachs is doing some big hiring in equities algo trading

Balyasny Asset Management, the Chicago-based firm aiming to become the “Amazon of hedge funds”, has continued to build out its London operation and is still poaching from investment banks.

The hedge fund has increase its UK headcount by around 20% over the past year, despite most firms pulling back from the UK after Brexit, and it’s still going. Over the past few weeks, it’s hired Fiona Simpson, a VP banks analyst at Morgan Stanley in London who joined the bank in 2009. It’s also taken on Andrey Kustarev, a former Goldman Sachs quant and senior quantitative research at investment management firm WorldQuant.

Balyasny has also shown a willingness to hire from other buy-side firms – Timothy Power, who spent the past seven years working for hedge fund York Capital Management in London, joined as an equities trader in July.

Balyasny is a big player – it doubled its assets under management last year to $12.1bn and has been increasing pay and headcount in London. It paid an average of £624k in 2016 – up 23% from a mean payout of £508k a year earlier. More to the point, it’s been defying Brexit and hiring in London. Last year, its UK employee numbers increased by 86%, to 69 people, and it’s continued to hire throughout 2017, with Financial Conduct Authority registered staff going from 48 to 56 since the Brexit vote last June.

The hedge fund has been hiring from banks. Last month it brought in J.P. Morgan luxury good analyst, Xiao Lu, as an equity analyst and recruits in 2017 include Simon Mangin, a former associate in Citi’s TMT team, Daryl Lee, a former FX and rates trader from Morgan Stanley, Mukhtar Garadaghi, a Citi researcher, and Jeremy Andre, a Goldman fund derivatives trader.

Balyasny was founded in 2001 by Dmitry Balyasny. Balyasny said in its first quarter letter in April that it was taking an ‘Amazon’ approach in its build out of staff, hiring portfolio managers and analysts across a diverse range of strategies to ensure that it’s not over-exposed to any one investment trend.

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Meet the former credit trader who quit the City to bring the fight to brain cancer

August 21, 2017, 4:58 am

≫ Next: I’m an equity researcher. Someone asked me to work for free

≪ Previous: This growing U.S. hedge fund has hired from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in London

Greg Jarzabek had been handed a new job building a credit trading desk from scratch at an investment bank in the City when his mother was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2011. She was given three months to live, so he paused his banking career to do what he could to help.

“I travelled all over the world with her seeing leading consultants in Frankfurt, the U.S, and elsewhere and they all helped me to find the right treatment,” he says. “By meeting these specialists, my mother survived for 10 months rather than the predicted three months.”

Jarzabek did not simply sit back and accept whatever treatment was immediately and locally available to his mother. But most people who fall seriously ill are subject to a lottery of location, he says. It may be that there’s an expert who could provide essential help to your condition – but they might be on the other side of the world.

“Throughout my time in the City I knew people who had died of cancer, or colleagues whose loved ones were diagnosed,” he says. “The reaction was more or less universal – a sense of helplessness and a lack of knowledge on where to find the best care. I decided I wanted to do something to change this.”

Jarzabek’s experience with his mother planted a seed of an idea, but he initially went back to his role as head of corporate credit trading at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities. He built a team of 13 sales and trading staff at the bank during his eight years there, but decided to quit banking in November last year.

“I was building a team from scratch at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities, which was a great experience and rare in the current banking environment, but I couldn’t get this idea out of my head. It seemed like the right time to pursue a new career, and to give something back,” he says.

Jarzabek launched Trustedoctor in December, an online platform that aims to connect a community of medical specialists with patients seeking the best care. Specific needs are matched with doctors with niche expertise and a consultation is offered online “in the interests of time and travel”, he says.

Jarzabek, who spent close to 13 years in trading roles in the City at Merrill Lynch, Calyon and MUFG, said he decided to jump out of banking after completing an executive education leadership course at Harvard University last year.

“I expanded the idea during my post-graduate degree at Harvard – interviewing doctors and a lot of patients,” he says. “I realised that a lot of people were having the same problems connecting to the right people to give them the best medical care. It seemed like a universal issue and a massive opportunity.”

Covering every possible ailment is obviously a huge task, so Jarzabek and his team have decided to focus on one condition – brain cancer – for the website’s initial launch. One British neurology expert, Dr Colin Watts, has already been offering consultations via webcam to patients around the world to trial Trustedoctor. This is just the start, says Jarzabek.

“The brain cancer survival rate is incredibly low and there are 120 different tumour types with various complications,” he says “There are also different clinical needs, so we have 35 specialists around the world, from surgeons to radiologists to clinical nurses. The plan is to expand across other cancers and total of 20 conditions in two years.”

Trustedoctor is supported by 15 cancer charities around the world, and Jarzabek says that “everyone diagnosed with a life-threatening disease should have an immediate feel of control over the treatment”.

One of Jarzabek’s partners on the project is Lukasz Rzeczkowski, who works as a director in structured credit at Banca IMI in London. If this seems like a divergence away from finance, Jarzabek says that working on the trading floor set him up well for getting the business off the ground.

“My trading career has actually been very helpful getting the business off the ground. Trading helps you learn how to have confidence taking complex decisions, but I also built a desk, so worked with various divisions across the bank, worked with regulators, marketing and universities for recruitment. This all helps when you’re going it alone.”

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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I’m an equity researcher. Someone asked me to work for free

August 21, 2017, 5:35 am

≫ Next: Student from questionable video interview gets job at Goldman Sachs

≪ Previous: Meet the former credit trader who quit the City to bring the fight to brain cancer

You know when the job you’re doing in financial services is falling out of fashion – people around you start disappearing, you’re paid less, the head of your department stops doing deep throaty laughs in your presence and looks at you like you’re a huge cost base. But however crappy it gets you’re usually paid something if you’re in work. Except in equity research.

As an equity researcher, I attended a job interview where they were offering to pay me nothing at all.

The interview wasn’t with a major bank. Although banks’ research teams are being squeezed by MIFID II, banks still know better than to pay nothing. It’s the ‘equity research boutiques’ you want to watch for.

I interviewed with one of these boutiques. It was founded by a bunch of senior equity researchers from a mid-sized bank who’d been dinged and decided to monetize their research by selling directly to clients. Great idea – except they didn’t have the cash flow to cover my salary as a new hire, and so they asked me to work for free.

The idea was that I would do six months for no pay. The rest of them drew salaries for a commission sharing agreement where they got a proportion of the research they sold. They figured it would take me three to six months to get up speed – first I’d have to produce something, then I’d have to sell something, then someone would actually have to pay for that. After six months they assumed I’d be a fully functioning member of the team.

The worst part of this story isn’t actually the fact that I was asked to work for nothing though. The worst part is that I accepted, and then they rejected me after having second thoughts about the fact that I wasn’t ranked in the top 10 by Extel. They wouldn’t even give me a job if I worked for free.

I can’t help but feel that this should be a warning to equity researchers everywhere. Ok, I’m not a top ranked equity researcher. But nor am I bad equity researcher. I’ve made some good calls and if I’m not ranked, that’s as much to do with the market and to the difficulty finding a good equity research seat now as anything else. Equity research is the worst job in finance: I could earn more on a building site. The situation is already bad and can only get worse under MiFID II. Personally, I’m trying to leave research behind and make it in Fintech – although that seems to involve a lot of free labour too….

Owen Morgan is the pseudonym of an equity researcher in London.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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Photo credit: the anchor chain gang by Natalie Greco is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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Student from questionable video interview gets job at Goldman Sachs

August 21, 2017, 7:21 am

≫ Next: I hustled to a banking job at the height of the crisis, but I was always going to leave to start my own firm

≪ Previous: I’m an equity researcher. Someone asked me to work for free

Goldman Sachs is doing video interviews. You should know this because we’ve written a lot about Hirevue, the digital interviewing system Goldman uses to sift its junior candidates. But what if, before you even reach the Hirevue stage, you were to make a little video about why you want to work for Goldman Sachs and why the firm should hire you, and then upload it to the internet? This is what Robert Du Val, a student at the University of Southern California did last summer.

Du Val’s effort, shown below, was met with derision on forums like Wall Street Oasis, but it seems that he may have had the last laugh. Despite speaking like an automaton, despite having an large tie knot and slicked back hair, despite stressing the word “me” and saying things like, “If I’m going to go into banking I need to be one of the best bankers …I need to be successful in every aspect of the game…. I want to succeed up to the point where I’m a managing director and making seven figures as a base salary and then possibly seven to eight figures in bonus depending on how many deals I’m able to close,” Du Val joined Goldman Sachs’ U.S. analyst class last month.

Goldman didn’t respond to a request to comment on Du Val’s arrival. Nor did Du Val himself respond to our overtures. However, Du Val is present on Goldman’s U.S. switchboard, although his division is unclear. On LinkedIn, he says he’s joined Goldman’s natural resources group as an analyst.

This being the case, maybe Goldman likes people who interview like Du Val? Maybe you should study the recording below for some tips? In it, Du Val says his “tactical skills” are “unmatched,” that he is “very persistent” with “great critical and analytical skills,” and that he will, “constantly find ways to move up and advance and ways to add value to the firm which means I will never stop being useful.”

Du Val also says he aspires to make partner within ten years and is enthusiastic about hard work. In his previous internship at a Los Angeles boutique, he says he met some of the “wealthiest and most successful people” around, each of whom pushed themselves very hard “on a daily basis.” They arrived before him and left after him – even though he was working long hours as an intern. “The idea that you can keep willing yourself to do more and more and accomplish things you never thought you originally could is what drives me today, and has set the bar so high for me personally,” Du Val enthuses. Goldman clearly likes this stuff.

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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I hustled to a banking job at the height of the crisis, but I was always going to leave to start my own firm

August 21, 2017, 7:46 am

≫ Next: These six senior bankers left global firms to join BOCI in Hong Kong

≪ Previous: Student from questionable video interview gets job at Goldman Sachs

Even though Derrick Fung says he gave investment banking his all – not even the financial crisis could prevent him from landing an analyst position – he knew all along that, when the time was right, he’s start his own company. Now he’s the CEO of Drop, a venture-backed tech startup.

Fung was on track to graduate at the worst possible time – the height of panic during the financial crisis in 2008 when no banks were hiring – so he smartly decided to delay his graduation until he was able to land an investment banking role, a summer analyst position at Merrill Lynch.

“My senior year I delayed graduation eight months because of the financial collapse, because it was tough to find the sales and trading jobs that I wanted,” Fung says. “When I was recruiting, all of the banks stopped hiring or only rehired past summer analysts, so I delayed graduation and hustled.

“My old boss at BNP Paribas called around and gave me a good recommendation, and I was one of two people Merrill Lynch hired on the trading floor in Toronto, but the training was in New York while acquisition rumors were swirling, he says. “I was following the news and watching the stock price go lower and lower and lower and then they got bailed out.

From there Fung landed an associate position at CIBC World Markets, where he started as a market-maker in the foreign exchange spot trading group, covering G10 and emerging market currencies. He then switched desks, working in the institutional equity derivative sales group, mainly selling equity forwards and swaps to mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds and ultra-high-net-worth clients. After less than two years at that bank, though, Fund left to start his own company, Tunezy – a music startup that landed him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

“While working at the bank, I had to moonlight a lot to get the startup off the ground – I often had to be on calls at midnight or later with developers in India,” he says. “Some of my bosses at CIBC became some of the first investors.”

Eventually, Tunezy was acquired by SFX Entertainment, which was rebranded as Live Nation and is now known as LiveStyle.

Fung stayed on for a year, but he got an idea for a new startup. However, rather than jump right in, he joined a New York-based venture-capital firm White Star Capital while he was incubating the idea for Drop, a consumer loyalty rewards app with offers from various brands and retailers.

“I joined White Star with the idea, ‘I’m going to start something else,’” Fung says. “I told them, ‘I won’t join the firm unless there’s a large probability that you’ll back it’ – I developed the idea during my time there, and they ended up investing.”

So far he’s raised about $5.5m in a seed round. In addition to White Star Capital, Drop is backed by Sierra Ventures, ff Venture Capital, Portag3 Ventures and HOF Capital. The soft launch attracted 250k customers across Canada and the U.S., and Fung says the company is on pace to hit 1m users by early 2018.

Fung believes that the best time to start a company – or at least start thinking about it – is when you’re in school, because you’ll still have a something to fall back on if it doesn’t work out. Technological advances help, making it cheaper than ever before to start a company.

“Many entrepreneurs dropped out of school, and while there’s no necessity to jump into the world of finance and banking, I don’t regret my time trading at banks,” Fung says. “I developed thick skin, learned to move quickly and gained applicable skills.

“When you’re recruiting talent for your startup, having well-known banks on your own resume provides good credibility when you’re hiring people,” he says. “Get some experience [working in banking] – you don’t want to stay too long and get comfortable, but it’s great training for fintech.”

entrepreneur, Drop, Tunezy, SFX Entertainment

Derrick Fung

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Photo credit: stockstudioX/GettyImages
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These six senior bankers left global firms to join BOCI in Hong Kong

August 21, 2017, 10:29 am

≫ Next: UOB has hired a DBS veteran for a senior director role in Singapore

≪ Previous: I hustled to a banking job at the height of the crisis, but I was always going to leave to start my own firm

Large Chinese banks have traditionally grown their own talent and found it difficult to lure senior bankers away from US and European institutions. But this is now changing, at least in Hong Kong, as global banks continue to trim their senior Asian ranks.

Bank of China International (BOCI) in Hong Kong is a case in point. We looked through senior online public profiles of BOCI staff in Hong Kong and found numerous employees hired from major Western banks.

Here’s a selection of high-profile BOCI managers who worked at foreign firms earlier in their careers.

Raymond Yin, managing director, head of East China

Yin, who has been in his post since 2015, has a long work history at global banks. After starting out at Schroders in 1996, he worked for Citi for six years, latterly as a director in China investment banking, according to his public profile. He then headed up China industrials at J.P. Morgan, before joining RBS in 2009 as co-head of China investment banking. Prior to BOCI, Yin spent almost four years at Daiwa Capital Markets in Hong Kong as chairman of China and head of China investment banking.

Wei Wang, managing director, deputy head of research

Wang was promoted to his current job in May, having previously run fixed income research at BOCI. His first banking job, as a fixed income analyst for Merrill Lynch in New York, was in 1998. He joined Salomon Brothers (now part of Citi) just over a year later and worked there until 2008 in Hong Kong and on Wall Street. Wang combines his BOCI job with being an adjunct senior researcher at Renmin University of China and an adjunct professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Raymond Leung, managing director, executive head of investment banking division

Leung is somewhat of a trendsetter, having joined BOCI back in 2005. Previously a VP at BNP Paribas, the status of Leung’s current position suggests his move away from a foreign bank has paid off. His career began at HSBC in 1992 and he moved to UBS in 1997 for a four-year stint in its investment bank, according to his online profile.

Sebastian Ha, head of debt syndicate

Bank of China doesn’t just recruit from the Hong Kong offices of global banks. Australian Ha had never been based in Asia until he joined the bank in 2013 from Citi in Sydney, where he had worked for three years as a treasury consultant. He spent 2007 to 2009 at ANZ in Sydney.

Roger Teow, regional market head, mainland China and Southeast Asia, wealth management

Bank of China has also hired elite private bankers from Western firms. Teow, who joined last year, previously worked for UBS in Hong Kong for eight years, latterly as Greater China head for ultra-high net worth clients. He was head of the investment advisory group, Malaysia desk, at HSBC in Singapore from 2003 to 2005, before moving to Malaysia’s AmInvestment Bank to run investments and product advisory.

Philip Chung, director, equity derivatives structuring

Chung worked for HSBC after graduating and then joined Bank of America in 2003 as an assistant vice president in global FX strategy. Prior to joining BOCI last year he was a director, equity derivatives structuring and trading, at Daiwa Capital Markets in Hong Kong, according to his profile.

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UOB has hired a DBS veteran for a senior director role in Singapore

August 21, 2017, 10:31 am

≫ Next: Morning Coffee: Jes Staley’s latest novel method of cutting costs at Barclays. Where to achieve rapid promotion at GS

≪ Previous: These six senior bankers left global firms to join BOCI in Hong Kong

UOB has hired one of Singapore’s most experienced structured finance specialists from rival DBS. Simon Tan has joined UOB as a senior director and head of structured finance in its global financial institutions group, according to his online profile.

When hiring for senior positions, Singapore’s three local banks – UOB, DBS and OCBC – often “look to each other” before considering staff from the likes of Standard Chartered and Citi, says a headhunter in the Republic.

Tan was at DBS from October 2009 to June this year, latterly as an executive director and second in charge in the structured debt solutions unit, responsible for overseeing the team’s performance objectives. He specialised in transactions such as covered bonds, asset-backed and synthetic securitisation, and collateralised debt and loan obligations.

Prior to DBS, Tan headed the Asian business of the financial structuring group at RBS for almost two years, based in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Tan’s first dedicated structured finance job was a Rabobank, where he worked between 2001 and 2004, spearheading new product development. He then moved to Macquarie as a vice president in Asia financial products, eventually heading up his team.

He started his career as a tax associate at PwC in 1993 and broke into banking two years later at Westpac in Singapore, working in corporate finance.

While the job market in Singapore structured finance remains generally subdued this year, Tan is not the only senior person to have moved jobs in the sector recently. In April, as we reported at the time, Standard Chartered hired Soon Huat Tng from ANZ as a senior transactor covering ASEAN markets.

UOB has also been hiring in corporate finance. It recruited the well-connected banker (and wine-bar owner) Elizabeth Lin from One North Capital in June.

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Morning Coffee: Jes Staley’s latest novel method of cutting costs at Barclays. Where to achieve rapid promotion at GS

August 21, 2017, 11:44 pm

≫ Next: Goldman Sachs re-hires senior quant after four years at a hedge fund

≪ Previous: UOB has hired a DBS veteran for a senior director role in Singapore

Barclays’ CEO Jes Staley is the master when it comes to cost cutting. This is the man who managed to trim headcount at Barclays’ investment bank by 6,000 people in the space of four months simply by refusing to hire anyone new. This too is the man who is saving £35m ($45m) a year by subletting 540,000 square feet at Barclays’ Canary Wharf office to the British civil service. And now, this is the man who is installing heat and motion detecting sensors below bankers’ desks to determine whether they’re at their work stations or not.

Staley’s latest innovation has unnerved some at Barclays who are balking at having the temperature and movement of their upper thigh monitored. The understandable fear is that Staley is up to something akin to the activities of Matthew Westerman at HSBC, who caused upset after introducing a system to track exactly what his bankers do each day. Is Staley checking who’s sitting at the desk? – How long they go for lunch? How many toilet breaks they take?

Fortunately it’s nothing so Orwellian. The below-desk monitors are simply part of Staley’s plan to cut the cost of premises and are there to establish how much space Barclays really needs. If the monitors reveal that only 75% of Barclays’ desks are used regularly, Staley will be able to sublet the other 25% to more civil servants. There will be no attempt to keep track of individuals. There will no attempt to link desk-time with productivity.

So says Barclays. But Staley’s staff may remain skeptical. When the Telegraph tried introducing similar devices to monitor the desk use of its journalists they were removed the same day following staff complaints about “Big Brother-style surveillance.”

Separately, if you want to get ahead at Goldman you should get yourself to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is considered the place to be by the likes of Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Citi, all of whom have been beefing up there. – Goldman gained a licence to trade equities in the kingdom two days ago. Now, Goldman is strengthening its investment banking presence in Saudi too. It’s just hired Eyas AlDossari as the new head of its Saudi investment banking business from HSBC.

What’s remarkable isn’t that Goldman hired AlDossari, whose credentials were burnished by working on the c$2 trillion IPO of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company. – It’s that AlDossari, who will now be running Goldman’s Saudi investment banking business, was pretty junior at HSBC. Bloomberg says he was an associate director at the British bank – just one step up from associate. It’s therefore like Goldman’s Saudi IBD business is being run by a VP. – Hard to imagine that kind of advancement in London or New York.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs thinks it cut its FICC business too aggressively. It’s going to hire in some experienced commodities traders and salespeople. (Bloomberg)

Deutsche Bank wants to hire 20 private bankers in London. (CityAm)

After moving to Switzerland for “personal reasons”, hedge fund manager Alan Howard is moving back to London again. (Bloomberg)

Citi hired a Goldman banker specializing in takeovers by activist shareholders. (Reuters)

Stop trying to find your ideal job all at once: you need to move step by step. (Medium)

Blankfein keeps trolling Trump. (Business Insider)

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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Photo credit: Barclays by Gideon Benari is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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Goldman Sachs re-hires senior quant after four years at a hedge fund

August 22, 2017, 3:02 am

≫ Next: Investment banks turn to hedge funds and out of the market traders as FICC hiring suddenly surges

≪ Previous: Morning Coffee: Jes Staley’s latest novel method of cutting costs at Barclays. Where to achieve rapid promotion at GS

Call it a novel way of making it to managing director, or part of the broader trend of traders quitting hedge funds for investment banks, but Goldman Sachs has just re-hired a top quant who has spent the past four years on the buy-side.

Kevin Miu has just joined Goldman Sachs as a managing director in New York after close to four years working as a partner and head of research at QTrade Capital, a quantitative-driven market maker. This is Miu’s second stint at Goldman Sachs, having previously worked as a vice president in quant cash trading for four years from 2009.

Goldman is reputed to value loyalty among its employees, so leaving for a new venture is generally considered a way of severing ties with the firm. More recently, however, the bank appears to have softened this stance and has re-hired former staff who have moved elsewhere.

A recent example is Scott Weinstein, who spent over 20 years at Goldman Sachs in various senior quant and technology roles within its commodities division before leaving for J.P. Morgan in 2009. Weinstein was head of electronic trading for J.P. Morgan’s commodities business, as well as spending a stint leading its quantitative research division for commodities. He returned to Goldman Sachs as a managing director in operations engineering securities in May.

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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Investment banks turn to hedge funds and out of the market traders as FICC hiring suddenly surges

August 22, 2017, 4:38 am

≫ Next: Bank-by-bank graduate and internship application deadlines in the U.S.

≪ Previous: Goldman Sachs re-hires senior quant after four years at a hedge fund

Fixed income recruitment is back, and juniorisation is over. Investment banks on Wall Street are hiring more effusively for their fixed income currencies and commodities (FICC) divisions than at any point since the financial crisis, and banks are eyeing long-term growth rather than looking at quarterly fluctuations in revenues.

“Virtually every prominent bank has recently made several key hires for its fixed income business,” says James Borger, managing director and head of fixed income at Greenwich Associates. “They’re not thinking about quarterly changes to revenues when signing off on hiring – they’ve made a conscious decision to build their business for the medium- and long-term.”

“It is as busy now as it has been any time since 2010,” agrees Canice Hogan, the former head of interest rate/FX/ EM and credit sales at Nomura who now runs headhunters Shadowhound. “Distressed European banks who can’t afford to lose any more senior people have been aggressively buying back. But hiring is across the board from associate to MDs.”

The timing of the hiring push is strange. Most large investment banks have released second quarter earnings results with double digit year on year declines in fixed income currencies and commodities. Goldman Sachs was bottom of the pile with a near 40% decline in fixed income revenues, while the top performing U.S. investment bank – Morgan Stanley, down 4.5% – continues to espouse the notion of doing more with less after chopping 25% of its fixed income team at the tail end of 2015.

But Borger insists this is about getting back in the game over the long-term. Goldman is an example of doing just that – despite calling out commodities as being a particularly weak area of the business in Q2, the bank is reportedly making a renewed hiring push in the division with a focus on senior people. This is the approach at most banks, says Borger.

“These are senior hires. The recent hiring we’ve seen has not been about filling a few junior seats or replacing experienced people with a cheaper hire,” he says. “We’ve seen numerous banks poach senior sales, trading, and research professionals, which then of course creates a hole for the original bank to fill.”

Greenwich, which interviewed over 1,000 people at 500 institutions for its latest fixed income survey, says that banks have stopped cutting costs in fixed income and are anticipating an increase in revenues after recent interest rate rises by the Fed and an expected increase in volatility. Investment banks also have significant wounds to lick – figures from consultancy Coalition suggest that the top investment banks have cut 14,700 front office jobs in fixed income since the beginning of 2012.

This stripping out of the ranks, combined with investment banks’ tendency to replace senior traders with cheaper juniors, has resulted in slim pickings at the senior end of the market, headhunters suggest. As well as buybacks – Deutsche Bank is reportedly offering 35% pay increases to stop senior people leaving – investment banks are rehiring people who have left the industry, or luring back traders from the buy-side.

Deutsche Bank, for example, has just rehired Eric Zijdenbos, who headed up its rates sales division for the Netherlands and Northern Europe but left in 2014. He’s since been working as a consultant for Scotia Bank and running his own real estate development business, but returned to Deutsche Bank earlier this month as a managing director in its rates business.

Barclays, meanwhile, hired Chris Leonard as managing director and head of U.S. rates trading from his own hedge fund, Arcem Capital, in June. Sources also suggest that Ian Dai, who left Barclays to join hedge fund Bluecrest Capital Management, is returning to the bank in a senior role, while former J.P. Morgan managing director Eric Childs – who joined Bluecrest as a portfolio manager in its rates and FX team in New York – is set to join Barclays to run US$ swaps trading.

Standard Chartered is also said to be hiring extensively across its fixed income division following the appointment of former Brevan Howard partner, Roberto Hoornweg, as global head of financial markets late last year. This month it brought in Jens Andersen and Molly Duffy as co-heads, financial markets in the Americas.

BNP Paribas hired Robert Boeheim and Eusta Qin, a former Goldman sterling corporate bond trader and investment grade financials trader respectively, in June and has also been building its emerging markets credit trading business this year. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, is also building a cash credit business.

Unusually, new hires have been landing in the summer months. Credit Suisse has just hired Peter Schmidt, the global head of high yield sales at Nordea Markets in Copenhagen, as a director in its rates business in London. Chris Heffernan, a credit trader at Nomura, has moved across to HSBC, while Jiaxi Chen, an associate in interest rates options trading at Deutsche Bank, joined Goldman Sachs and Silvia Borsetti, who worked in FX sales at Morgan Stanley, has just landed at Credit Suisse.

FX is the one area that remains relatively quiet, however, suggest headhunters.

“In the U.S. there’s a big focus on hiring in trading, especially US treasuries, mortgages and swaps – most large investment banks are active in this area,” says Hogan. “In Europe, the big focus for a lot of banks has been on recruiting for rates sales and trading.”

Not all recruiters are so enthusiastic about the level of recruitment, particularly in London where banks are more reticent to sign off on new hires until they’ve started to implement Brexit-related moves out of London.

“Virtually every bank has been hiring this year, but it’s more a case of replacement and upgrading rather than significant expansion,” says Kumaran Surenthirathas, managing director at Rosehill Executive Search. “Across the FICC space in London, all 12 of the top banks have been hiring, but only 10% of those have added more than one person net to their teams over the course of the year. It’s more of a reshuffling of the deck.”

But Borger suggests that growth is back on the cards, with banks who retreated from FICC business areas in the past returning to the market.

“It used to be that fixed income dealers had the knives out for the competition, but there’s been so much reduction of headcount, or wholesale pulling back from various products, that a lot of people we speak to on the sell-side want to see a healthy number of competitors actively trading in their space,” he says. “You don’t want to have just a handful of banks doing most of the trading in a particular product – that’s not a great market.”

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Photo: Getty Images

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Bank-by-bank graduate and internship application deadlines in the U.S.

August 22, 2017, 5:30 am

≫ Next: This top tech analyst has just quit banking for a CFO role at social media monitoring firm

≪ Previous: Investment banks turn to hedge funds and out of the market traders as FICC hiring suddenly surges

The clock is ticking: Investment banks have opened applications for full-time graduate programs in the U.S. and – assuming you want to be one of the 2% or 3% of applicants who make the cut – it pays to start now. Most investment banks on Wall Street are already pretty far along in the recruitment process for 2018, but don’t despair, because they do recruit on a rolling basis as well.

More importantly, they’ve also opened to applications for their summer internship programs in the U.S., which is where most of the full-time recruits come from these days.

We’ve compiled the 2018 application deadlines, based on a combination of publicly announced dates and information provided by investment banks themselves. Application deadlines are getting earlier – notably at Morgan Stanley, which closed its 2018 analyst program to applications before the end of August, while Evercore and Wells Fargo closed full-time analyst applications in July.

The following deadlines are this year (2017) unless otherwise specified. The list will continue to be updated over the coming weeks as more investment banks provide us with their deadlines, so keep checking!

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Compliance, corporate audit, global banking and markets wholesale credit, global corporate and investment banking, global human resources, global loan products, global markets, global research, global transaction services, market risk, quantitative management and technology.

Deadlines: The recruiting process for these roles typically takes place from August to November for full-time positions.

Investment banking roles: October 27 2017

Technology program: November 24 2017

Internships

Applications open: August 15 2017

Deadline: November 24 2017 (for most roles), although it may vary by university. The recruiting process for these positions typically takes place from September to March for summer internships.

Where to apply: BAML campus recruiting site

Barclays

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Portfolio management, investment banking, trading, compliance, sales, structuring and technology.

Deadlines: September 15 2017 (for the banking analyst program). The recruiting process for these roles typically takes place from August to November.

Internships

Recruiting for: Investment banking, markets and research, technology, corporate banking, compliance, finance, HR, internal audit and market risk.

Deadlines: The deadline for the majority of analyst- and associate-level summer internships is September 30 2017, but certain roles may have a deadline as early as August or as late as November.

Where to apply: Barclays careers portal

BNP Paribas

Internships

Deadline: Varies by university

University of Chicago: October 4 2017
University of Michigan: September 27 2017
University of Wisconsin: October 9 2017
Emory University: September 17 2017
Texas A&M University: October 16 2017
Cornell University: September 13 2017
New York University: September 20 2017
Columbia University: September 18 2017
Howard University (TBD)

For students at other universities who would like to apply for a summer analyst or summer associate position, they must come in through the referral process by September 22 2017. Referred students must have an overall GPA of 3.0 or above, graduation status (with a date no earlier than December of the year in which the internship takes place) and send an email with an attached resume and area of interest.

Where to apply: campusrecruiting@us.bnpparibas.com or BNP Paribas careers portal

Citigroup

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Investment banking, corporate banking, commercial banking, capital markets origination, markets and securities services, Treasury and trade solutions (TTS), private bank, compliance, risk management, internal audit, cards, finance, human resources and technology.

Applications open: July 11 2017

Deadline: November 112017 for many, but deadlines vary by program.

Internships

Recruiting for: Investment banking, corporate banking, commercial banking, capital markets origination, markets and securities services, Treasury and trade solutions (TTS), sophomore leadership program, private bank, risk management, internal audit, finance, cards, human resources and technology.

Applications open: July 11 2017

Deadline: December 92017 (summer), January 13 2018 (Spring) for many, but deadlines vary by program.

Where to apply: Citi’s graduate website

Credit Suisse

Analyst Internships

Recruiting for: Asset management, capital markets, sales & trading, equity research, internal audit, investment banking, risk and information technology (IT)

Deadline: October 1

Associate Internships

Recruiting for: Equity research, investment banking

Deadline: December 2

Where to apply: Credit Suisse portal for students and graduates

Deutsche Bank

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Global markets, global transaction banking, asset management, risk, technology, compliance, group audit, human resources, research, wealth management, corporate finance and finance.

Applications open: September 1 2017

Deadline: October 31 2017 (although target schools may have different deadlines)

Internships

Recruiting for: Corporate finance, global markets, global transaction banking, research, asset management, wealth management, risk, human resources, infrastructure, compliance, group audit, finance, human resources and technology.

Applications open: August 1 2017

Deadline: November 30 2017(although a spokesperson said most summer analyst slots fill up by October; target schools may have different deadlines)

Where to apply: Deutsche Bank graduate recruitment website

Evercore

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Investment banking

Applications open: July 10 2017

Deadline: July 30 2017

Summer analyst programs

Recruiting for: Investment banking, equity research

Applications open: August 28 2017

Deadline: October 15 2017

Summer associate programs

Recruiting for: Investment banking, equity research

Applications open: October 30 2017

Deadline: December 10 2017

Where to apply: Evercore graduate website

Goldman Sachs

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Investment banking division, markets, wealth and asset management, operations, compliance, risk management, technology/engineering, human resources, realty management, investment research, consumer banking and digital finance.

Applications open: July 1 2017

Deadlines:

Analyst-level: November 10 2017

Associate-level: The end of the year

Internships

Deadline: November 10 2017

Where to apply: Goldman Sachs graduate site

J.P. Morgan

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Investment banking, audit, risk, finance, operations, technology and human resources.

Deadlines: October 15 2017

Internships

Recruiting for: Investment banking, corporate banking, global treasury, risk, investor services, wealth and asset management, operations, technology, human resources, finance, markets

Deadlines: September 15 2017

Analyst-level internships in asset/wealth/investment management, commercial banking and consumer & community banking (a.k.a. the Chase Leaders program): October 1 2017

Internships across corporate functions: November 15 2017

Associate-level investment bank, global wealth management and management associate program internships: November 19 2017

Associate-level Chase Leaders and quantitative research (within the corporate & investment bank) internships: December 1 2017

Where to apply: J.P. Morgan careers portal for students

Lazard

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Financial (M&A) advisory and asset management

Deadlines: October 312017 (October 15, 2018)

Internships

Recruiting for: Financial (M&A) advisory and asset management

Deadlines: November 14 2017(October 15, 2018)

Where to apply: Lazard graduate website

Morgan Stanley

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Equity research, fixed income research, economics research, bank resource management fixed income and commodities, institutional equity and prime brokerage, global capital markets, investment banking.

Deadlines: August 26 2017

Internships

Deadlines: December 1 2017

Where to apply: Morgan Stanley graduate site

UBS

Full-time analyst programs

Recruiting for: Investment banking, corporate client solutions, sales & trading (investor client services), research, securities, human resources, compliance, technology, risk, operations, wealth management, asset management and finance.

Deadline: October 1 2017 for most roles. Consult online job descriptions for specific deadlines.

Internships

Recruiting for: Investment banking, corporate client solutions, sales & trading (investor client services), research, securities, human resources, compliance, finance, technology, risk, operations, wealth management and asset management.

Deadline: September 15 2017 for most roles. Consult online job descriptions for updates.

Where to apply: UBS graduate site

Wells Fargo

Undergraduate full-time analyst programs

Investment banking/sales & trading: July 12 2017

Operations: September 8 2017

Capital markets technology: September 8 2017

Business banking credit and relationship management: September 8 2017

Corporate and commercial banking: September 8 2017

Leadership pipeline: September 8 2017

Undergraduate summer internship programs

Investment banking/sales & trading: August 25 2017

Leadership pipeline: September 8 2017

Business banking: September 8 2017

Capital markets technology: October 13 2017

Operations: October 13 2017

Corporate and commercial banking: January 12, 2018

MBA candidates and graduates summer internship programs

Investment banking : October 6 2017

Full-time associate programs

Investment banking: TBD

Treasury management: September 8 2017

Operations – MBA: September 8 2017

Quantitative – Ph.D.: November 18 2017

How to apply: Wells Fargo portal for MBAs and undergraduates

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Photo credit: anyaberkut/GettyImages
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This top tech analyst has just quit banking for a CFO role at social media monitoring firm

August 22, 2017, 6:40 am

≫ Next: This former Jefferies analyst is offering a back door into investment banking

≪ Previous: Bank-by-bank graduate and internship application deadlines in the U.S.

If you work in equity research now, you need to be creative. MiFID II is shrinking job options on the sell-side, and an increasing number of analysts are switching to fund managers – potentially to avoid awkward conversations about working for free at an independent research provider.

Another option is to switch into the industry you cover. The latest example of this is David Reynolds, who headed up Jefferies media and internet equity research team in London.

Reynolds has just left the U.S. bank, according to filings on the Financial Conduct Authority register. His public profile suggests that he’s just taken a role as chief financial officer at Brandwatch, an analytics platform that uses social media as a source for research.

Brandwatch, which has around 300 employees, recently concluded that companies that avoid taking a stance on U.S. President Donald Trump on social media tend to get a boost in perception. Its research also suggested that women were more likely than men to use emojis with tears.

Reynolds joined Jefferies in 2011 after seven years out of the industry, having previously worked at both J.P. Morgan and Dresdner Kleinwort.

He has had no shortage of accolades since returning to banking – he was named number one ranked stock picker by the Reuters Starmine Awards, in the non-food retail sector in 2017 and in media in the 2016 awards.

He’s the second senior analyst at Jefferies to depart for the sector they cover in the past 12 months. Edward Plank, Jefferies’ lead analyst for footwear and athletic apparel, joined Footlocker as a senior director in business development in December.

Tech analysts are more likely to move across to the sectors they cover than other researchers, however. In May, Edward Hill-Wood, managing director and head of European internet research at Morgan Stanley in London left for a role as investor relations director at pay-TV and e-commerce company Naspers in Hong Kong.

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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This former Jefferies analyst is offering a back door into investment banking

August 22, 2017, 7:53 am

≫ Next: Goldman Sachs’ head of recruitment condemns “troubling and grotesque” events in Charlottesville

≪ Previous: This top tech analyst has just quit banking for a CFO role at social media monitoring firm

There’s a clear path into an investment banking graduate job now. Study at a top university, secure a position on a Spring insight week, convert that into a summer analyst program and then merely impress enough senior bankers to secure a full-time role. Simple, right? Except that only a tiny proportion of applicants ever make it on to an internship, and investment banks are being increasingly selective about which interns they offer a job to.

Now, though, two former investment bankers and current Columbia Business School MBAs are offering a chance to get in through the back door.

“A lot of people are interested in finance, but they don’t know what it is – they don’t have access to good information,” says Jason Fan, a former Jefferies and Morgan Stanley analyst who left banking last year to start a two-year MBA program at Columbia. “Maybe they’ve read books or articles, but it’s hard to know what you’re getting yourself into and what it’s really like.”

“You know it’s going to be a fast-paced environment, but you can’t know how it feels, that type of stress, the fire drills that need to be put out in an hour, grinding things out until midnight, but until it actually happens…once you experience it, it gets real,” he says.

Fan and fellow MBA Soonkang Soh launched BrainCeek, in-person investment banking simulations to let university students get a feel for banking, prepare them for an internship and ultimately a full-time analyst position. Winners are recommended to banks for an internship â Barclays’s startup incubator Rise New York has partnered with the scheme so far and Fan says other investment banks are likely to come on board soon.

The idea of getting a ‘taster’ for investment banking and then a potential advantage over other intern applicants is growing in popularity. UBS has its investment banking challenge where students present a case study to senior bankers with a chance to get a guaranteed interview for its internship. Goldman Sachs offers a spring internship and £9,000 in scholarship fees to the winner of its student challenge. George-Mihail Mandres, who won in 2015, has just started on the bank’s trading floor.

UK Investment Banking Series (UIBS), where students create a pitchbook judged by senior bankers and run by the finance societies of universities like the London School of Economics, University College London, Imperial College London, Kings College London and Oxford University, offers an internship at a top bank to the winner.

While approximately one-third of BrainCeek participants have been from Columbia, plus a few other Ivy League universities such as Cornell, the rest are from non-target schools that are not typically on banks’ radar. Currently, most BrainCeek participants come from New York-area universities such as Rutgers and various City University of New York (CUNY) branches, including Baruch College. In addition, there are pre-MBA fellows that the Toigo Foundation sponsors who fly from all across the country to New York to participate in the program.

The program includes many students studying engineering or liberal arts, and there are event Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) students who have participated. Most are undergraduate sophomores and rising juniors, with some first-year Master’s students, who are looking for a summer internship and eventually a full-time job at a major bank.

Philip Walsh is a rising junior in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management (AEM), a department within the Johnson College of Business at Cornell, where he’s a member of the Alpha Fund and the finance club. He participated in a BrainCeek workshop earlier this year and is currently an investment banking summer analyst at BCMS North America in New York.

“One of the most impactful parts of the workshop for me was the opportunity to see what makes a good presentation, what makes a good PowerPoint deck or company evaluation, and Jason let us know what the life of an analyst is like, because he would critique or nitpick as a manager at an investment bank might do,” he says. “We were looking around wide-eyed, realizing wow, every little detail matters.

“If you’re trying to get into investment banking, then the devil is in the details, so the experiential learning was very helpful, because it brought to life what we keep hearing as we prepare for interviews, and while I was familiar with some of it on a topical level, I picked up some skills that I wouldn’t have been able to until doing an internship.”

You hear about the type of stress you’ll experience and the long hours you’ll have to work as an investment banker, but it’s hard to know whether or not it’s a fit for you until you’ve actually done it, Fan says.
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Photo credit: shironosov/GettyImages
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Goldman Sachs’ head of recruitment condemns “troubling and grotesque” events in Charlottesville

August 22, 2017, 8:40 am

≫ Next: Standard Chartered has hired from PayPal for a Hong Kong director role

≪ Previous: This former Jefferies analyst is offering a back door into investment banking

Edith Cooper is Goldman Sachs’ global head of human capital and one of just 2.6% black executives at the firm. She’s been outspoken about the need to attract more women and ethnic minorities into the banking sector and about the prejudices she’s faced throughout her career.

“I am frequently asked ‘what country are you from’ (I grew up in Brooklyn),” she wrote in a LinkedIn post last year. “I’ve been questioned about whether I really went to Harvard (I did) or how I got in (I applied). I’ve been asked to serve the coffee at a client meeting (despite being there to ‘run’ the meeting).”

Cooper has now joined a growing list of senior finance professionals to speak out on the violence that unfolded at a protest by white supremacists in Charlottesville last week. So far, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink both sent memos to staff condemning the violence.

Cooper has posted a LinkedIn message on the Charlottesville incident that has just appeared on Goldman Sachs’ blog. It’s yet to be reported elsewhere, so here’s the note in full:

“A year ago, I wrote on LinkedIn that in order for us to effect positive change with regards to race relations we needed to engage in open and honest dialogue. I had hoped that through conversation we could begin to address the divisiveness tearing apart our communities. The responses I received to the article were encouraging and constructive. People shared their own experiences and noted the resilience needed to navigate through challenging times. These stories of individual strength and self-reliance confirmed to me the importance of seeking and finding common ground with one another.

This week, we took a major step backwards. The events that have unfolded have been deeply troubling and grotesque. Organizations and individuals that have operated at the fringe of our society, espousing hatred and bigotry have overtaken the basic principles of individual freedom and tolerance. Symbols of repression, genocide and violence have been unfurled in furtherance of a narcissistic and destructive agenda. We know there cannot be two sides to a conversation about hate. If you stand in any context with people who project disturbing views of discrimination then you are a part of this hate.

Like many of you, these are issues that I feel passionately about – because of my heritage, my experiences and the people in my life. I stand against hate and bigotry. I am outraged and frightened by what took place in Charlottesville and by President Trump’s response. However, I have been bolstered by the passionate response of citizens all across our country and around the world as well as by the many leaders who have stood up and spoken out against this distortion of free speech.

I have drawn strength from the actions and words of great civil rights leaders who, decades ago, led the movement to break down institutionalized racism. Since that time, we have made meaningful progress – but there is clearly much more work to be done. In the words of Vernon Jordan, “Thanks to the thousands of men and women — black and white — who suffered beatings, bombings and jail in quiet dignity and resolve, we have knocked down what Martin Luther King called ‘the sagging walls of segregation’. What we are dealing with now, what defines the issue of race in the twenty-first century, is the rubble: less imposing perhaps, but no less critical to clear away. And if you have ever seen a wrecking ball demolish a building you will understand that tearing down a wall takes a matter of minutes, but clearing the debris — the rubble — takes far longer.”

We cannot allow the rubble to be resurrected into a wall. Together, we must continue to be vigilant and resist any attempts to undermine the value of mutual respect that is key to a strong and vibrant society.”

Follow @paultclarke

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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Standard Chartered has hired from PayPal for a Hong Kong director role

August 22, 2017, 10:14 am

≫ Next: A quarter of vacancies at Singapore banks are now in this single job sector

≪ Previous: Goldman Sachs’ head of recruitment condemns “troubling and grotesque” events in Charlottesville

Banks in Hong Kong don’t just lose staff to technology companies – sometimes they hire from them. Standard Chartered has recruited Gabriel Lo, a senior team head from PayPal, as its new director of digital usage and experience in Hong Kong.

Lo was most recently head of integration for Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan at PayPal, according to his public profile. He joined the US firm in Hong Kong in 2010 as an integration manager, before being promoted in 2013.

Despite his senior rank at Stan Chart, this is Lo’s first job at a bank. He spent the first five years of his career at Hewlett-Packard and Funmobile Technology, according to his profile.

Lo’s hiring runs counter to a two-year trend that has seen both bankers and technologists leave banks in Hong Kong to join large tech firms, including mainland players such as Alibaba and Tencent.

But it chimes with banks’ increasing desire to staff their digital teams with both outsiders and experienced hands. “The skills we need are primarily digital ones. In each team we look to have a balance of people with and without prior banking experience,” Tamara van den Ban, head of digital products for Asia Pacific at HSBC, told us last week.

“Banks in Hong Kong love to hire people who’ve worked for a Silicon Valley-type firm, where they’ve lived and breathed technology,” says Vince Natteri, managing director of IT recruiters Pinpoint Asia.

The more banks hire candidates from tech firms, the easier it will become to attract more of their kind, says Natteri. “It’s a way for banks to tell the world that they also have a ‘cool’ culture.”

Money helps as well. In Hong Kong, banks typically pay 15% to 20% higher base salaries than tech firms do for similar jobs, says Natteri.

Lo is not the only major digital hire that Stan Chart has made recently. As we reported last week, the bank has just taken on Pedro Sousa Cardoso as global head of digital commerce, based in Singapore.

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: franckreporter, Getty

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A quarter of vacancies at Singapore banks are now in this single job sector

August 22, 2017, 10:16 am

≫ Next: Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs’ quest to be great again. Peak worklife misery

≪ Previous: Standard Chartered has hired from PayPal for a Hong Kong director role

Singapore’s three local banks – DBS, OCBC and UOB – may not being adding headcount as aggressively as last year, but they still have a combined total of almost 400 open vacancies.

But which type of jobs are they recruiting for right now?

To find out, we examined their careers websites and categorised their roles into 13 broad functions. These job sectors are shown in the table below as a percentage of total vacancies at each firm.

Close to a quarter (24%) of available positions across the three banks are in technology and digital banking.

Singapore banks are investing heavily in new mobile platforms for customers – such as UOB’s Mighty e-wallet app – and internal systems for client-facing staff, especially in consumer banking and wealth management. This is triggering recruitment of project-management, design and other digital-banking professionals.

Technology vacancies for developers, engineers and architects have also increased over the past two years, say IT recruiters in Singapore. Both DBS and OCBC are moving more development roles in-house instead of using technology vendors.

DBS currently has a “huge pipeline of digital transformation projects” and needs to hire 200 people, mainly developers and architects, over the next year to meet its technology objectives, Soh Siew Choo, head of core systems technology, told us recently.

At 17% of total roles at the three firms, operations is the next largest sector. Singapore-headquartered banks are not offshoring back-office roles away from the Republic to the same extent as their global rivals are.

While risk jobs remain in demand, compliance only accounts for 4% of openings as the recruitment boom in the function draws to a close. Singapore banks have largely reached their desired headcounts in compliance and are now mainly hiring to replace staff who leave.

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: JannHuizenga, Getty

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