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Three months ago, as head of HSBC’s consumer group for the Americas, Luis Galeano was overseeing 30 investment bankers. Now, having quit banking to lead a New York cookie company, he leads a team of 175 people. And, yes, some of them are bakers.

Galeano left an 18-year investment banking career in June to become president and CEO of Cookies United, a New York-based bakery that makes everything from gourmet cookies to Minion-themed gingerbread houses.

He admits that it’s been a “huge change”. “In banking, your career is fairly narrow in that you interact with very smart and sophisticated colleagues who have very similar skill-sets to yours, and clients who are also very sophisticated and focused,” he says. “Now, I deal with sales, marketing, factory employees and plant operators. It’s much broader reality than investment banking.”

Galeano spent the last seven years at HSBC, as a managing director and head of its global consumer investment banking division in the U.S. He was also previously head of industrials for Macquarie in the Middle East and has worked for Lehman Brothers and J.P. Morgan since starting his banking career in 1999.

He tells us that Cookies United move is not as random as it appears. It came about as a result of meeting a number of people in the bakery sector during his time at HSBC when he was involved in the sale of muffin firm Uncle Wally’s, which was bought by Give & Go in February. This “personal relationship” eventually developed into a job offer.

Nonetheless, heading up a cookie company has meant Galeano has a lot to learn.

“Every day I come home exhausted, because of the amount of mental effort needed to try and understand and process new information,” he says. “The team has been really supportive, but there’s a tremendous amount to learn.”

Still, Galeano is used to handling pressure. Aside from close to 20 years toiling away in the demanding world of investment banking, the 2008 financial crisis threw up a big personal problem.

For much of his banking career, Galeano has worked in the U.S. However, towards the end of his tenure at Lehman Brothers he was offered the chance to move to Dubai. At the time, Lehman was planning on expanding its Middle East footprint, but Galeano arrived in the Gulf in September 2008 – just as the bank was going under.

“I was in a hotel room with my family surrounded by unpacked bags when I heard the news,” he says. “All our possessions were in a shipping container in the middle of the ocean. We had to decide whether to stay in Dubai without a job, or return to the U.S.”

In the end, he decided to make a fist of it in the Middle East, and took a job at Macquarie. He stayed for two years before, he says, former J.P. Morgan colleagues approached him about returning to Wall Street for the role at HSBC.

Whether you’re heading up an investment banking team or leading a company making baked goods, the key to success, says Galeano, is good relationships.

“In banking you’re a little isolated, but now I’m dealing with a variety of people and have an ability to affect change in a very significant way,” he says. “Being able to read people’s personalities and develop a meaningful relationship is the most important thing, whether that’s during an M&A deal or negotiating a contract with a supplier.”

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Deutsche Bank’s retention bonuses from earlier this year aren’t going too well. You will recall that these special bonuses, paid to top DB staff to compensate for the annihilation of 2016 performance bonuses, will only be worth something if Deutsche’s share price hits €23 in the first three weeks of 2021. When they were issued, Deutsche’s stock was trading at over €19. Now, it’s down to €13.3.

Even so, not that many senior DB staff have left. This might be because John Cryan is bringing the fun back. Or it might for some other reason, hitherto unknown. We’d like to suggest a candidate for the latter.

One Deutsche banker in the U.S. who isn’t leaving says he’s sticking around because of his pension. When he joined Deutsche Bank, he says the bank paid one of the most generous pension programs on the street. Although that program closed to new entrants ten years ago, it still covers DB veterans, most of whom are now in very senior roles.

How generous is generous? Deutsche declined to comment on the program, but we understand that it’s based on the highest five-year average salary of the past decade. Bonuses don’t count, but given that Deutsche has hiked salaries and downplayed bonuses for managing directors, this doesn’t really matter.

“I joined the DB pension scheme as a bit of a joke,” says the senior banker in the U.S business. “I didn’t expect to be here longer than five years, but it’s turned out to be like winning the lottery. I get to retire at 62 with a pension based on my salary. It helps that I’ve been getting good salary increases every year for five years.”

Unfortunately, Deutsche’s more recent joiners don’t get the same treatment. We understand the contemporary U.S. pension scheme involves retiring at 65 on far smaller amounts.

The historic pension scheme means Deutsche’s most senior bankers are unlikely to leave unless they’re pushed – in which case the bank will need to pay severance. This is unfortunate for DB, which is still struggling with an unmanageably high cost base in the investment bank and was probably hoping some of its veterans would disappear of their own accord…

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Breaking into private equity isn’t easy. Even if you’re a top-ranked investment banking analyst, only 3% of people applying to PE are ever invited to interview – a gruelling process that weeds out sub-par candidates early on – and even then a handful end up with jobs.

But this doesn’t mean it’s a one-way process. Private equity firms are recruiting for their entry level roles, which pay $200k a year, ever earlier because large buyout firms are paranoid about losing out on talent. Bloomberg suggests that PE recruiters are seeking out junior candidates in January – analysts who started out in August the previous year. If you’re a few months into an investment banks’ graduate training program and are asked out for a coffee – or invited along to a networking cocktail – don’t be surprised. PE firms are interviewing analysts who are still fresh out of college for roles that won’t start for 18 months after the offer is extended.

This is not a new trend – private equity firms rarely wait for two-years industry experience that was typically a pre-requisite, but instead want to lock down the best candidates earlier than ever. This silly season started in 2013 when PE firms stopped cooperating on timing and broke ranks to recruit earlier. This year is a record, however, says Bloomberg. The problem is that PE is no longer the only option for investment banking analysts taking sell-side jobs with one eye on the exit options it provides. As we’ve pointed to previously, tech firms are providing an outlet for juniors – not just the Facebooks and Googles of the world, but smaller start-ups offering regular project management, development or business analyst roles.

“Someone always gets nervous” and starts recruiting first, Josh Grauer, a partner at Dynamics Search Partners told Bloomberg. Then the others quickly follow suit. “Every January, we hold our breath and hope it will start later,” said Susan Levine, the head of private equity recruiting in North America at Bain Capital.

This explains why more private equity firms are starting their own graduate programs. There’s an initial heavy lift developing these schemes, but the benefit is that the PE firms get to mould the new recruit into the type of person they want, and look for character traits that probably wouldn’t be attracted to banking.

Guy Hands, founder of Terra Firma that’s been running a grad scheme for a few years, said earlier this year that they’d scrapped bonuses and cut salaries for new recruits in order to dissuade banker types from applying. “We used to try and pay what Goldman Sachs does, and also give cash bonuses,” he said. “But we decided that it wasn’t attracting the right person – it was attracting people with short-term aims.”

Separately, since former J.P. Morgan investment bank boss Jes Staley moved to become Barclays CEO, the UK bank has poached from his former employer. Tim Throsby, the head of Barclays investment bank, was previously head of equities at J.P. Morgan and joined in January. Its COO came from J.P. Morgan, its chief information officer came from J.P. Morgan, and so did it chief risk officer and chief operating officer. This has not gone unnoticed at Barclays, and both banks have denied in the past that they made an agreement for Barclays to stop poaching from the U.S. bank. But the FT suggests that a leaked email from a Barclays executive showed that the two banks “have agreed to a 1-year ban on hiring any JPMC employee by Barclays”, particularly in corporate and investment banking. This is a potential problem for Barclays – as the FT points out no-poaching agreements can be illegal under U.S. antitrust laws, and the U.S. Department of Justice has already been investigating whether it reached a deal with J.P. Morgan.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs is rolling its retail operations out in the UK, and could hire 35 more people (Financial Times)

Greg Agran, a partner and head of commodities is retiring, after its worst quarter ever in Q2 (Financial Times)

Gary Cohn’s ‘resignation letter’ (Breaking Views)

What Jamie Dimon really did in 2008 (Vanity Fair)

Bob Diamond: Brexit could be worse for London than people think (Bloomberg)

If the UK really wants top fintech talent, it needs to speak up (Financial News)

Cocaine is still a big problem in the City of London (Guardian)

This boutique research firm is growing – but only hires the best analysts (Bloomberg)

The sleep treatment that will tackle depression (New Scientist)

Law firm DLA Piper accidentally releases draft of staff salary data showing “huge differences” on company intranet (Roll on Friday)

How to have successful kids (Independent)

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Compared to other parts of its corporate and investment bank, J.P. Morgan’s global custody business doesn’t get a lot of attention. It’s huge – with $20 trillion in assets under custody – is growing and has been making some major hires.

The latest senior recruit is Richard Gordon, who joined in a newly created role of global head of custody and fund services operations last week. He has spent the previous four years working at Citi in London, where he was global head of securities services operations. Before this, Gordon worked at Deutsche Bank for 12 and a half years in various senior roles including chief operating officer for its risk division, head of risk operations and head of risk IT.

Typically, senior roles in custody are all about smoothing back office operations and making the whole thing more efficient. Gordon’s new role appears to be no exception.

In a memo sent last week by Lawrence Waller head of CIB Operations in EMEA and Teresa Heitsenrether, global head of custody & fund services announcing Gordon’s appointment, said that the hire was part of ensuring “operational excellence and efficiency” that were essential to the “ongoing growth of the business”.

This is the second major hire at J.P. Morgan’s custody business in London over the past few months. It brought in Mike Hughes, who was previously head of fund services at Deutsche Bank, as head of global custody in July.

Revenues in J.P. Morgan’s securities services business were up 6% year on year in the first half to $1.8bn. Competition has been heating up among global custodians over the past few months – earlier this year, BlackRock ditched States Street and moved $1 trillion in assets under custody across to J.P. Morgan.

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If you work in credit sales and trading, Citi is the place to be. While banks like Goldman Sachs rush to strengthen their trading relationships with corporate clients in the credit market, Citi already has plenty of corporate counterparties tied into its “network.” Citi is what Goldman Sachs wants to be. This isn’t stopping senior people from leaving.

Two of Citi’s credit sales managing directors (MDs) have left in the past 18 months; both have now ended up in the same place. John Ream and and Dan Gissendanner both exited Citi after 12 and 17 years respectively. Both men now work for Stifel Nicolaus Europe. a U.S. brokerage firm which is growing in London. Ream joined last November; Gissendanner joined earlier this month.

Stifel isn’t new to London. It’s been present in the City for at least 16 years and acquired Oriel Securities in 2014 as a means of gaining scale. Spencer Harman, head of head of European fixed income at the firm, says Stifel Nicolaus Europe already has 45 people working in credit, making it, “bigger than most banks in the credit space.

“We’ve been doing this since 2009, so are an established platform, not a start-up,” Harman adds.

Even so, Stifel is expanding fast. Its current recruiting intentions don’t stop with the likes of Ream and Gissendanner. This month, it also hired Emanuel Brefin, the former head of trading in supranational, sub-sovereign and agency debt at Barclays, and Paul Man, ex-senior SSA trader at Societe Generale. Harman plans to hire another three people this year plus more next.

“It’s not difficult to hire,” he tells us. “Banks are letting go of some very well qualified people whom they just can’t afford because of their high cost structure. This is where the opportunity is from our perspective: as banks practise juniorization and fill their slots with inexperienced people, we can pick up the experienced people they let go.”

Why do investment banks’ credit MDs want to join Stifel? Harman suggests it’s partly to do with pay and partly to do with politics. Because Stifel is small, it falls outside the Financial Conduct’s Authority’s edicts on pay. It’s therefore free to pay entirely in cash on a monthly basis and to offer packages that are all bonus (no salary) and are solely based upon a percentage of P&L.

“We are an agency business. People here don’t receive salaries, but are paid on a commission only basis,” he says. “Their compensation is entirely variable and is paid monthly, based upon their production. Because people are paid monthly based entirely upon their production, there’s no incentive to ingratiate yourself to senior management. You are simply paid for producing: it’s a meritocracy. People who’ve joined us from big banks have found this a refreshing change.”

If this sounds appealing (particularly after Citi allegedly underpaid last year), the three additional hires Stifel plans to make this year include two in sales and one in sourcing non-performing loans. “We anticipate further selling of NPLs especially in Italy,” Harman says.

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Not many people work for Qatalyst Partners in London. The tech-focused boutique has just seven employees in the UK, and two senior executives, but despite this tiny heacount, it was unusually generous last year.

Qatalyst has just released its 2016 accounts for its European operation on Companies House and it had a very good year. Revenues were £27.6m, up from £3m in 2015, largely thanks to £23.8m being generated in the UK – up from a mere £451.5k the previous year. Qatalyst has passed this success on to its staff – it spent £7.2m (a 242% increase on 2015) on its seven employees last year. In other words, they got over £1m each on an average pay per head basis. This is up from an average of £353.5k the year before.

When we tracked the highest paying M&A boutiques in London, Qatalyst came in fourth last year (based on 2015 figures). The highest paying firm was Robey Warshaw, which shelled out an average of £520k for its employees. These figures suggest that Qatalyst is now head and shoulders above its rivals.

Qatalyst has also hiked pay for its senior employees. Its two directors are Jean Tardy-Joubert, the former head of European technology investment banking at Merrill Lynch who moved across to lead Qatalysts’s London operation in 2009 and Jason DiLullo, the bank’s president. The highest paid director received £4.42m in 2016 – up from £259.7k in 2015.

Last year, despite primarily focusing only on technology deals, Qatalyst Partners was the fifth-ranked boutique investment bank in 2016, advising on 12 deals worth $109.4bn. Among the big ticket deals was a role on the $47bn acquisition of NXP Semiconductors by U.S. mobile chipset firm Qualcomm.

Despite the uptick last year, Qatalyst has not been hiring in London this year. It still has just nine people registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, which is largely flat on the past 18 months.

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If you work for Goldman Sachs, don’t necessarily expect to wear a suit. Goldman these days is more a chinos sort of place than a world of Ferragamo loafers and shirts with your initials embroidered on the cuff. Only 21% of Goldman’s summer interns see themselves working in suits and if you work for Goldman’s tech team you’ll be free to be “totally casual” at all times.

It’s not like this at BNP Paribas, or at least it doesn’t seem to be.

At BNP Paribas, you’ll seemingly still find plenty of bankers wearing suits, ties and silken socks even when they’re not at client meetings. Research by Emolument suggests nearly 40% of BNP bankers are still wedded to formal dress at all times, compared to just 20% at J.P. Morgan. 20% of BNP bankers told Emolument they were also given guidance on the colour of their garments.

Paribas declined to comment on Emolument’s findings. We understand, however, that the bank stipulates that its employees must be dressed in a “smart professional” manner, which is one notch up the “smart casual” favoured by rivals.

BNP insiders say it’s not just that the bank encourages sartorial superiority – it’s also the fact that they often work in the centre of Paris and therefore are under pressure to appear chic. “Our Paris office is located in the heart of Paris, whereas a lot more people at SocGen and Credit Agricole’s corporate and investment bank are out in the suburbs,” says one. “You need to look good here because you come across a lot of fashion people at lunchtime and it can be awkward if you don’t.”

In London, insiders suggest BNP staff are more sharply dressed than the rest because a comparatively high percentage are from France or Italy, where sartorial rectitude is more highly prized than in London or New York. One French trader tells us he always has at least 15 white shirts with his initials embroidered on the cuff, for example.

The smartest dressers at the French bank in London are reportedly in fixed income, with Arne Groes, the (Danish) global co-head of G10 rates and prime services and financing and Giulio Baratta, the (Italian) head of IG finance in EMEA, praised for their look. In Paris, Solveig Bachellery, BNP’s (French) head of innovation in the corporate and investment bank, is reportedly the one to watch for tips on what to wear at work.

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Studying for the CFA exam, while balancing work and social life commitments, can be tough. This is why the Kaplan Financial Early Start Courses are proving so popular, allowing candidates to manage their time and prepare better.

Traditionally, most candidates start their training and revision courses in January, giving them about five months to knuckle down ahead of the CFA exam in June. This equates to about 15 hours of studying a week to reach the magic total figure of 300 revision hours.

But what if things go wrong in that period? There could be greater work commitments or family matters to deal with meaning they miss a couple of weeks’ study. Suddenly their obligation has gone up from 15 to 16, 17 or even 18 hours a week. That can swamp people.

“By starting in October with our Early Start Courses, candidates have nine months to study, which brings the hours down to about eight a week, which is far more manageable,” explains Jonathan Bone, CFA Course Program Director at Kaplan Financial. “They can pace their studies, deal with any bumps in the road, and avoid the mad dash to the exam finish line.”

Most students who fail the CFA exam don’t do so because of a lack of technical knowledge; it’s more to do with running out of study time and therefore being ill prepared with their exam techniques and practice, insists Bone.

By doing the Early Start Courses, students have the time to properly hone their technical and study skills. They are ably supported in this goal by the experienced Kaplan Financial tutors who have invested a lot of time in mastering learning sciences, so they can teach students how to get the most out of their studies.

For example, a great number of candidates recently out of university want to spend about 70% of their time reading and note taking and only 30% on question practice. Kaplan Financial has reversed that percentage.

“Extensive question practice is vital,” says Bone. “It proves whether the students understand the material, but it’s also fantastic for recall. If they get something wrong, they can work out why and it sticks in their minds.”

Kaplan Financial prides itself on having the greatest access to questions of any provider in the market. This is largely thanks to its ownership of Kaplan Schweser, the pre-eminent providers of study materials.

“We have two big volumes of mock examinations and an Online Question Bank [SchweserPro Q Bank Practice Exams], which allows students to do anything from replicate an entire exam to drilling down into specific areas of the syllabus,” says Bone.

Flexibility is also key to the Early Start courses. Candidates can choose to study evenings or weekends, and either in the classroom or online. There are four different packages to choose from, depending on your budget, circumstances and requirements.

The ‘Enhanced Classroom’ option is the most recommended and popular, as it includes both class tuition, across 6 days or 14 evenings, and revision sessions (5 days or 12 evenings). The tuition is all about providing the technical understanding of the syllabus in an interactive classroom environment.

The ‘Enhanced Blended’ package is much the same, only with online tuition instead of in the classroom. Although students can interact with the tutor by sending email questions and queries.

However, where both these packages really stand-out from the competition is with the unique revision sessions in late April to early May.

“These give the candidates a vital period to go over all the material again, drill down into the harder topic areas, do the mock exam questions, and work out a strategy to maximise their results in the exam hall,” says Bone.

“Our candidates have told us that these sessions are vital to not only gather what they know, but also what they don’t know. The course is designed so there is enough time to plug the gaps before the exam.”

They also provide invaluable exam techniques. For example, while the tendency for CFA students is to start at question 1 and work their way through to the end, Kaplan shows candidates how to jump around, pick out particular questions and get the easy marks first.

Alternatively, for those on a tighter budget, there is the ‘Tuition Plus’ option, which offers the class tuition, but not the revision sessions. However, there is always the option of upgrading to the Enhanced packages further down the line, which also helps spread the payments.

Finally, there’s the ‘Distance Learning’ package, which is particularly popular with those who don’t live close to the training centres in London or Edinburgh. This provides both tuition and revision sessions, but online only.

Throughout these courses, the tutors – both in the UK and US – are always on hand to provide support and guidance. All of them are CFA qualified, so know what it takes, and many have had experience in industry, working as fund managers.

“We also cherry pick the best and brightest of the teachers from our world renowned accountancy training, and train them up from the CFA examinations,” explains Bone. “But perhaps more importantly, we make sure all our tutors are effective communicators – entertaining and engaging.”

Ultimately, the Early Start Courses are the perfect preparation for the CFA exam. Staff will guide candidates through their studies at a pace and approach that suits them, so that they are fully ready to maximise their marks.
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While banks and hedge funds battle over the best quants, usually armed with a PhD in either maths or statistics, Desmond Lun, a professor at Rutgers University and the co-founder and chief investment officer of Taaffeite Capital Management, has a different theory – study hard science.

He says that the quantifiable data and mathematical models used to study sciences physics, chemistry, biology and genetics give you a better grounding for working as a quant than degrees in math, statistics, computer science or business administration

“In terms of quantitative trading in particular, get a PhD in a field of science with a strong quantitative component,” Lun says. “When we look to build out our team, to get hired, you have to have passion for the projects you’re working on, a good scientific background and someone who can think critically like a scientist.

“Practical science fields are empirical studies that are fundamentally about predicting the future, which are fundamentally like the problems you’re encountering in financial markets,” he says. “I would say science is even better than math or statistics, because science is about studying the real world, and financial markets are a real-world problem.”

The more abstract parts of mathematics provide you all technical tools you can use, but not the right thinking one needs to have in quantitative trading, Lun says. Computer science is a field that can be very empirical and scientific and on the other hand can be very abstract. Advantage: the hard sciences.

That assertion is all the more noteworthy given that Lun has studied and taught many of those subjects. He got his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He worked as a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and studied advanced bacterial genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory before becoming a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School.

In addition to running Taaffeite, at Rutgers Lun currently teaches applied probability and introduction to programming, which includes instruction in Python and computer science fundamentals – problem-solving using computers, as he describes it. The programming languages that Lun uses for development at Taaffeite include C#, Java, Matlab and some Python scripting.

“[Quantitative trading] was primarily an intellectual interest for me to begin with,” Lun says. “I was working on problems in computational biology, developing learning algorithms and extracting all kinds of information out of all of these very large data sets.

“The problems prevalent throughout modern biology, reconnecting them to a network and analyzing it to predict future behavior – there are clear parallels between that problem and the problems in financial markets,” he says. “Prices are constantly moving up and down, and they affect each other in some sort of complex interaction network – you have to figure it out through observation.”

Lun started developing trading algorithms and testing them with his own capital in 2006. In 2014, he launched Taaffeite together with his partner Howard Siow, who works on all the business aspects of the hedge fund while Lun handles the technical aspects.

They recently hired Ronald Raymond, who has previously worked at Blueshift Capital, Vermillion Asset Management (acquired by The Carlyle Group) and Dreman Value Management, as the COO and CCO of Taaffeite. The fund is up to $21m under management, and the co-founders have identified $100m in AUM as the point at which they would want to make a hiring push to aggressively build out their team.

Lun is currently supervising three PhD students. What he looks for when selecting the students who get the opportunity to work with him are equivalent to what he looks for in candidates for jobs at Taaffeite – the two key components to success are motivation and talent. He defines the latter as possessing the technical skills that are required.

“When I’m looking for talent, I’m primarily looking for mathematical ability, but in the field that I work in, not a mathematical ability that is purely abstract,” he says. “They must be willing and able to do something that is a little dirty in mathematical terms, which means working with real-world data.”

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If you’re a regular reader of eFinancialCareers, you’ll already be familiar with our suggestion that Citi’s markets business is already many of the things that Goldman Sachs aspires to be and looks like an appealing place to work on this basis. At today’s Barclays Global Financial Services Conference, Citi CFO John Gerspach addressed the issue a little more directly: “What makes Goldman Sachs bankers join Citi?”, asked one of the audience members. Gerspach’s was simple: momentum.

Citi has “momentum,” said Gerspach. New hires from Goldman and elsewhere, “are seeing the momentum for themselves. It’s not just that we’re selling the story about where we can get to in the future from a standing start.” Citi’s new hires can already witness Citi’s strong customer base and healthy customer dialogue, added Gerspach. They’re “building on our existing success.”

Based upon the relative performance of Citi and GS so far this year, there might be something in this. As the chart below shows, year-on-year revenue growth at most of the businesses in Citi’s investment bank far exceeds that at Goldman Sachs – with one exception, equities, where Goldman is doing rather well and Citi’s recent big investments have yet to come through.

Of course, it might not last. Gerspach also said that Citi’s fixed income trading revenues are likely to fall 15% year-on-year in the third quarter and that third quarter investment banking revenues are likely to be lower than in Q2.

Whether Goldman bankers really are rushing to join Citi is another question. Despite Gerspach’s suggestion that GS people are being lured by Citi’s momentum, Citi’s best known GS hires happened last year, when it poached two senior Goldman equities sales staff in EMEA and a senior e-FX salesperson in Asia. By comparison, this year’s big Goldman hires at Citi have been mostly restricted to Australia, although Citi did poach Muir Patterson from Goldman to run a new ‘activist shareholder defense group’ in May. Momentum or not, Goldman staff aren’t exactly pouring across to Citi. The U.S. bank might need a few more quarters of far superior growth for that.

The momentum at Citi makes Goldman look moribund

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Photo credit: citi by Pawel Loj is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

When Deutsche Bank opened its office in Jacksonville Florida in 2008, it seemed like a good idea. After all, the state has some great universities, a low cost of living and pay that’s 30% below New York City. It also has, “unusually nice,” people. Unfortunately, it also has storms, and Deutsche’s 2,000 person Jacksonville office is in the advisory area for Irma.

Although the storm’s been downgraded to category two, Jacksonville is in the front-line for the flooding in its aftermath and Deutsche’s office has been closed. The bank didn’t immediately respond to a request for clarification on the situation, but calls are being rerouted to New York and staff confirm that the office is not open.

Jacksonville’s sheriff has been warning this morning of an “unprecedented surge” which is expected to coincide with the high tide at noon. Coming on the back of previous heavy rain, the surge is expected to lead to flooding of up to six feet along river areas and up to four feet further inland. As the map below shows, Deutsche Bank’s office in the Deerwood area of Jacksonville isn’t immediately adjacent to the river, but nor is it that far away. It’s not inconceivable that it could be seriously impacted, not least because any Deutsche employees who live in the areas alongside the river will have been evacuated and the closure of bridges will make it difficult to travel to work.

The problems are likely to be ongoing, with the sheriff warning that flooding will continue throughout the week as tides go in and out.

Deutsche houses middle and back office staff working across its divisions (global markets included) in Jacksonville. Staff there cover everything from operations to information technology, finance, cyber-security, compliance, anti-financial crime, legal, group audit and risk. For the moment, those jobs will need to be done elsewhere.

Deutsche Bank Jacksonville 6

Deutsche Jacksonville 1

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Photo credit: Hurricane Irma Prep in St. Petersburg by CityofStPete is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

When Mark Traudt quit Goldman Sachs for a fintech start-up in 2003, he was something of an exception. Banks might be now battling with Silicon Valley and a raft of disruptive companies for talent, but back then an investment bank was the most well-paid and prestigious place for a technologist to be.

Traudt worked at Sumitomo Bank Capital Markets (SBCM), then ING Barings before spending four years at a software firm called Summit Systems. Eventually, he returned to banking at Goldman Sachs, but after another two years in the financial sector decided that he was better off at a start-up.

By this point, he realised that it was software engineering – rather than the financial sector – that really interested him.

Traudt left Goldman to become the chief technology officer of risk analytics firm Quantifi – the then-startup’s third employee. He recently joined data analytics fintech firm Axioma as a managing director and the head of product engineering.

“It was not an easy decision to leave Goldman Sachs to be the third employee at a startup, especially with two small children at home,” Traudt says. “However, I knew that if I were to stay at Goldman I would have been working on small improvements to a very large and well-established system, whereas at Quantifi I had the opportunity to build a completely new front-office pricing and risk system from the ground up with the last technologies and design patterns.”

Things could have been very different, for both Traudt and Goldman Sachs. Traudt was brought in to work on a project that would create a new common platform across the bank’s equities division, but the bursting of the dotcom bubble – followed by the 9/11 attacks – meant that the project was scaled back.

“Rather than implement a new common platform, it was decided to leverage the existing proprietary SecDB system, used by the FICC division, to support equity derivatives,” he says. “Probably the most challenging aspect of the role was keeping up with the changing priorities during this period, especially as I was a relative newcomer.”

SecDB is Goldman’s secret sauce that allows it to price trades and assess risk for 2.8 million+ trading positions daily. It also allowed it to see exactly how exposed it was to the risky assets that blew up during the 2008 financial crisis, and is credited with ensuring the bank came out better than most of its peers.

Traudt believes that banking is not the best place to be for a developer now, and that any technologist should ensure they’re best positioned at a company at the forefront of the latest technology.

Try to identify firms using the latest technologies and with a proven track record of innovation,” he says. “I know developers who are well paid but unsatisfied in their careers because they are stuck maintaining legacy systems using much older technologies,” he says.

There is always a need for smart, motivated developers in this space, but you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Contributing to open-source projects is one good way to do this.

“There are so many interesting technologies out there that nobody can master them all,” Traudt says. “I think it is better to have deep expertise in a small number of technologies than shallow expertise in a larger number just to pad your resume – one of my pet peeves is when people list every version of .NET or some other technology on their resume.
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The hiring boom may have faded, but relationship managers (RMs) in Asian corporate banking are still in demand right now as banks look to eke out more revenue from corporate clients.

But what’s the best route to getting your first RM job in Singapore or Hong Kong?

The answer is not as straightforward as in investment banking, where internships typically lead to analyst traineeships. While banks in Asia often source new RMs from graduate programmes, they also hire juniors from other banking jobs or even other industries. Here are some of the main ways in.

Graduate training programmes

Some banks in Singapore and Hong Kong offer graduate training tailored to people wanting to become RMs. OCBC’s 2018 Young Bankers Programme, for example, features an option to work in its global corporate bank. DBS’s graduate associate programme for SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) banking offers front-to-back office job rotation, classroom training in core financial skills, and on-the-job training in relationship management.

Among the global firms in Asia, Bank of America, Citi, HSBC, Standard Chartered are currently hiring graduates for corporate banking jobs starting in 2018, but deadlines close soon.

If you don’t get on a corporate banking course, a more generalist graduate programme could also ultimately lead to an RM job, says former ANZ corporate banker Jerald Chen, now a recruiter at Kerry Consulting in Singapore. For example, some of the people who recently completed the one-year graduate rotation at Standard Chartered then went on to become assistant RMs.

A stint as a junior

When your training ends you may not immediately have your own clients or even assume the job title ‘relationship manager’ – most banks will require you to do an intermediate stint as a junior/associate/assistant RM.

“After completing our training, you become a junior RM, guided by a team leader. Then in order to progress, you’re expected to perform on the job, and develop a strong foundation in sales, product knowledge and credit analysis,” says Grace Yip, chief operating officer for group human resources, at DBS.

“Relationship associates at OCBC are assessed on their performance before they’re appointed as junior RMs and given a small portfolio. Only then can they progress to becoming full-fledged RMs, managing their own clients,” says Jacinta Low, head of HR planning at OCBC

Some people can spend up to three years in RM purgatory, says Chen from Kerry. “Building relationships – externally with clients and internally with product partners – takes time. RMs often pitch to clients’ most senior executives, so they need to come across as credible. When dealing with large corporates there’s little margin for error – RMs must be adept at matching their bank’s products to their clients’ needs, while striking a balance between risk appetite and credit policy.”

Other routes into relationship manager jobs in Singapore and Hong Kong

If you’re a young finance professional in Asia and you haven’t done any of the above, it may still be possible to get a corporate banking RM job. Gary Lai, Southeast Asia managing director at recruiters Charterhouse Partnership, says most of the RMs he interviews started out in a different part of banking.

Several junior credit risk professionals with “sales personalities”, for example, have transitioned into RM roles, says Lai. Credit assessment is a vital part of most RM jobs.

Staying at your current bank is the easiest way to make such a move. “Employees up to the rank of assistant vice president who’ve worked for two years in their current role are eligible to apply for positions within the bank,” says Yip from DBS. “We’ve had a case of a credit risk manager who became an RM and was then successfully promoted to a senior management role.”

Chen from Kerry says he’s also seen RMs move from corporate finance, commercial banking, retail banking, pricing analysis, sector research and even compliance.

And because of skill shortages in corporate banking, people from outside the finance sector are sometimes considered. “If the corporate banking RM vacancy covers the telco industry, for example, the candidate may come from a telco sales background,” explains Lai.

Chen adds: “But the journey will be longer for candidates from outside banking, so grads should aim for a banking position as early as possible in their career. Moving from industry is still more exception than norm.”

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Change managers are hot again in Asia, and banks are offering pay rises of up to 30% for the right people. Standard Chartered has rehired one of Asia’s most prominent change managers.

Arnaud Courtin has joined Stan Chart in Hong Kong as a change portfolio director after six years at Barclays in Singapore, according to his online profile. This is Courtin’s second stint at Stan Chart, having led its regulatory reporting change programme between 2010 and 2011. His new remit, by contrast, spans across the bank’s operations in Hong Kong.

During a 22-year career Courtin has led change projects in a several fields, including investment banking, private banking and risk while at Barclays.

There has been a resurgence in change management hiring in Hong Kong and Singapore over the past year, say recruiters. Demand is strong within private banking, for example, as firms try to integrate their operations following a flurry of takeovers in the sector, such as Bank of Singapore and DBS acquiring the Asian wealth units of Barclays and ANZ respectively.

Meanwhile, several global banks have been restructuring their entire Asian operations. Barclays has shuttered business units and refocused on investment banking within four core Asian markets, while Standard Chartered embarked on a programme of senior job losses in late 2015.

“As banks consolidate and streamline in Asia, change management roles are in demand, with SCB among the major banks aggressively hiring,” says Gary Lai, managing director for Southeast Asia at recruiters Charterhouse Partnership.

There are not enough change managers at banks in Hong Kong and Singapore to meet demand, so poaching from rivals is difficult, says Lai. Banks will consider candidates from consultancies or people with more generalist project management experience.

The talent shortage means pay rises can be as high as 30% for senior change managers who move jobs, he adds.

Banks in Asia are also hiring change managers to oversee technology-driven revamps. “There’s more demand this year than previous years for change management professionals in Asia, largely because of the move towards digitisation –encompassing automation, data analytics and machine learning – in the banking sector,” says Christina Ng, executive director of LMA recruitment in Singapore.

Courtin began his career as a technology project manager at Credit Lyonnais in Paris, where he worked between 1995 and 1998, according to his profile. He then did stints of seven and three years (punctuated by a Chicago Booth MBA) at Credit Agricole Suisse, latterly as a senior manager in organisational and financial control change.

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It’s the end of an era. After 21 years and innumerable interviews on getting a job at Goldman Sachs, Edith Cooper, Goldman’s erstwhile head of HR, is leaving the firm.

As the Wall Street Journal points out, Cooper has seen Goldman through all sorts of changes. Under her watch, GS has adopted Hirevue interviews as part of a broader policy of diversifying its intake by gender, ethnicity and social background. It’s ditched end of year appraisals and gone for an appraisal system known as OngoingFeedback360 in which juniors get to rate managers (and vice versa) at the end of every project. It’s also added a lot of staff in “low cost locations” like Mumbai, away from its traditional hubs.

Cooper seemed to like her job. Visibly pally with CEO Lloyd Blankfein, she regularly gave interviews and with the exception of Lazlo Block, the Google head of HR who stepped down in 2016, was one of the highest profile HR people on the planet.

So, why has Cooper gone? The WSJ doesn’t say, although it does note that Cooper’s continuation as a senior director at Goldman Sachs suggests she’s not off to somewhere else for the moment. The reason for her exit might therefore have something more to do with wanting some life back. In a Forbes interview ten years ago, Cooper explained that her standard workday was 12 hours, plus the standard dinners with clients, conference calls from home and answering emails at night and on the weekends. As a result, Cooper said she’d missed a lot of time with her three (then) young children, but tried to even it out at the weekends. “To be exceptional at work, giving 150% of what you’ve got, work will need to be a priority at times,” added Cooper. Maybe she’s simply decided to prioritize non-work instead?

Separately, Citi CFO John Gerspach said yesterday that the bank’s third quarter trading revenues are likely to be down 15% on last year. Bloomberg explains why: last year’s third quarter included all the volatility around the U.S. election in early November. There’s none of that in 2017.