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With fixed income currencies and commodities recruitment picking up to pre-crisis heights on Wall Street, UBS is getting in on the rush for top rates traders. Daniel Brierley, who has spent the past six years in a senior trading role at Jefferies, has just joined UBS in New York.

Brierley was a managing director within Jefferies’ rates trading business before joined UBS’s rates trading division. He joined Jefferies as a senior vice president in 2011, when the U.S. bank was bolstering its 120-strong rates sales and trading business.

After graduating with a B.A. from Yale, Brierley got his start on the government trading team in the capital markets division at Credit Suisse in New York, where he ascended from analyst to associate to vice president and eventually rates-trading director over 12 years at the bank. From there, Brierley joined Jefferies as a senior VP on the U.S. rates-trading desk. After six and a half years, he earned a promotion to MD.

A recent survey by consultants Greenwich Associates, which spoke to 1,000 people at 500 institutions, suggested that banks are back on the fixed income hiring wagon. The top banks are hiring more people in FICC within the U.S. market than at any point since the financial crisis. While most banks are building their credit desks, rates sales and trading is also a growth area again with some key senior hires being given the go ahead.

Barclays, for example, hired Chris Leonard as managing director and head of U.S. rates trading from his own hedge fund, Arcem Capital, in June, and also brought in Robert Tzucker has just joined Barclays as head of USD inflation trading after just over three years in a similar role at BNP Paribas.
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When Goldman CFO Harvey Schwartz made his presentation at the Barclays’ Financial Services Conference today, he said the firm plans to increase equities sales and trading revenues by $500m over the next three years. Although this will be largely achieved through increased algorithmic and electronic trading, it probably won’t help that Goldman just lost one of its top NYC equities traders to rival J.P. Morgan.

Insiders say Glenn Kujawski was one of Goldman’s most senior traders of international equities in NYC. As of yesterday, Kujawski’s FINRA page shows him joining JPM after quitting Goldman in August.

J.P. Morgan didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment on Kujawksi’s arrival, but he’s undoubtedly arrived as a managing director. Given the proximity to bonuses, J.P.M. also almost certainly gave him a big inducement to move across.

Kujawski joined Goldman in 2005 after working for Deutsche Bank and ABN AMRO Securities. He was made managing director at the firm in 2009.

J.P. Morgan has been building its cash equities business this year, along with Credit Suisse and Barclays. In April, J.P.M hired Matt Mallgrave from Credit Suisse to head Americas cash equities trading.

J.P. Morgan has, however, also developed a machine learning algorithm, LOXM, which is about to be rolled out in the U.S. and Asia. LOXM is expected to render some human trading talent surplus to requirement. Top traders like Kujawski are clearly immune to its effects.

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Most of us, if asked, would opt for a harmonious office environment. Few of us regularly display anger or suspicion in the workplace, choosing instead to hide any negative feelings lest they damage our reputation or relationships. But, according to new research by a London Business School behavioural expert, too many firms have not counted the true cost of keeping the peace at work.

Michael Parke, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour, London Business School, made the remarks in a London Business School podcast. Parke argues that firms are missing out on some surprising benefits by suppressing negative emotions at work.

“The usual preference is to display the positive side of our emotions,” says Parke. “But there are consequences. When someone can’t express their true emotion, it prevents them from being their authentic self and can lead to frustration which demotivates them. If politeness and a fake sense of happiness prevail, it can actually create greater social distance between colleagues.”

Negative emotions have certain benefits, says Parke. Anxiety, stress, frustration, anger can help signal and prioritise problems.

“A healthy sense of danger, worry or suspicion in small doses can keep people vigilant, particularly useful for organisations that regularly encounter risk, such as the police and security firms.”

Frustration can be helpful in an organisation that seeks to motivate change, and can translate into more candid feedback between colleagues.

“Honest expression of negative emotion can encourage creativity and innovation, improve work productivity and even boost growth through conflict,” says Parke. “Frustration signals to others that there is a problem, which can attract more resources, for instance, which can spur on innovation.”

But it doesn’t come easily. Parke says that the key is in managing negative emotions effectively, at both the individual level and organisational level. In order to do this, however, leaders need to work hard to foster a climate of openness and empower teams to be more honest.

“Leaders should try to create an authentic, experiential climate, whether it skews to the positive or negative side,” says Parke. “This requires a long-term commitment. They need to set the parameters for how and when people open up at work.

“Importantly, leaders should be ready to deal with these emotions when colleagues start opening up. Candid feedback sessions are a great opportunity to practice sharing authentic feelings,” explains Parke.

If leaders are willing to commit to the challenge of creating an effective and authentic emotional environment, the pay-off can be considerable. Harnessing both positive and negative emotions can significantly boost creativity and productivity.

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Cover letters need to do three things: prove you can do the job, differentiate you from other candidates and not attach a red flag to your application. Sadly, the third component is just as critical as the first two.

When it comes to cover letters, there are catastrophic errors, like the student who spent his few paragraphs quantifying his ability to bench press while applying to the wrong firm, and then there are your smaller mistakes, which won’t embarrass you publicly but will still not earn you an interview. These are the ones we’ve detailed below. Avoid them and you’ve bettered your chances.

1. It’s too long

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

One hiring manager at Barclays said that he spends between 15 and 30 seconds reviewing a cover letter, and will completely ignore those that look are too long. Mostly, he spends the time scanning for obvious errors that help him shorten his stack of applicants.

A good cover letter should be made up of three fairly short paragraphs containing between 300 and 500 words, according to experts we talked to.

2. It’s littered with typos

It’s doubtful that the position to which you’re applying will place an emphasis on optimal sentence structure and superior grammar, but avoiding typos and mistakes are something on which every recruiter and hiring manager focuses.

“If your cover letter has mistakes, then it shows that you may not care how you present yourself and therefore may not care how you present yourself when representing the investment bank, PE firm, hedge fund, family office or insurance company either,” said Alyssa Gelbard, the founder and president of Resume Strategists.

3. You’re too egotistical

Conceivably the most difficult part of crafting a good cover letter is touting your own accomplishments while not appearing arrogant and narcissistic.

“Typically, it’s guys, and that is a major turn-off to investment banks,” said Heather Katsonga-Woodward, a former banker and author of To Become an Investment Banker. “Banks love themselves and people that stroke their ego by showing they have read their annual report and found out how well they are doing,” she said.

So, summarize your competencies but also direct attention to the bank and the division and explain how you’d fit in.

4. It’s too generic

A boilerplate cover letter filled with clichéd language – like “hardworking,” “self-starter” and “dedicated” – is another sure way to limit your chances of a callback.

A cover letter shouldn’t talk about you and your background – that’s what a resume is for. Rather, it should focus on why you fit the job in question, with specific examples of how you can provide unique value to the firm in question, said Jesse Marrus, founder of search firm StreetID.

Mention the company in the cover letter and include a tidbit of recent news that affects them, showing you pay attention to the market, Marrus added. Focus on results and outcomes as much as possible.

While you may have customized your letter for a particular role, it’s also important to state why you’re interested in that specific bank, PE firm or hedge fund, Gelbard said. Why that firm specifically – how do you connect with the person who’s interviewing you?

“This goes beyond saying you like their mission, philosophy, overall business or investment strategy, Gelbard said.

A cookie-cutter cover letter may cause hiring managers to assume that this job wasn’t even important enough for you to take the time to write a personalized note.

5. Not having a name

“To Whom it May Concern” and “Dear Sir or Madam” are lazy greetings, experts say.

“In this digital age, a minimal amount of research can tell you who to address your letter to – use this information and what you can gather about the resume reviewer to garner interest,” said Suzanne Havranek, senior recruiter at headhunter Wall Street Services.

6. You fail to mention a referral in the beginning of the letter

Referrals get you noticed and can help you stand out. Omitting the name of the contact who led you to the position, and whose name can be helpful and influential, can result in a lost opportunity to get your resume to the top of the pile, Gelbard said.

Plus, if your contact is in touch with the hiring manager, either at your request or on their own, you can appear ungrateful if you haven’t acknowledged their role in bringing the position to your attention or recommending you. Worse, you may blindside the hiring manager that a third party is involved, Gelbard said.

7. Your claims aren’t backed up on your resume

Few recruiters would recommend purely functional resumes, but spinning it to prominently display your skills over experience is a good tactic.

If you claim an important role in a transaction but can’t talk through the strategy or many specifics, then you will be found out in the phone screening or in-person interview, if you do eventually make it that far.

“No one cares about unverified skills,” said Katsonga-Woodward. “If you say you’re great at something, you have to identify something on your CV that validates the claim.”

There’s a delicate balance though. While you shouldn’t talk about your valuation skills if there’s nothing pertinent on your resume, you also don’t want your cover letter to be a carbon copy of your CV. Refine the information in your resume and explain how it fits their job, at their company.

It’s great that you designed a new cost model for a project or structured a specific deal, but it’s important to start with relevant overall contributions and value first, Gelbard said. For example, mention that you drove market share growth], increased profitability, streamlined trading processes and spearheaded entrée into new sectors or geographies – and include figures.

“Hiring managers in most areas of financial services first want to know about your overall attention to the bottom line and relevant experience driving revenue growth, profit, risk mitigation and cost reduction,” Gelbard said. “Then they’d like to know some specifics that contribute to the value you bring to the role.”

8. You sent it via snail mail

This one is actually up for debate, so you’ll have to make your own choice, depending on the situation. Recruiters say that formal cover letters aimed at specific jobs should always be sent via email. But the Barclays banker believes a hard copy cover letter can be beneficial when it comes to networking.

He and his colleagues have mailed signed cover letters to smaller companies – newly launch hedge funds or private equity firms – to stay on their radar.

“Do some research, tell them you’re interested in what they’re doing and toss in a business card,” he said.
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Senior UOB interest rates trader Lawrence Lee has joined Taiwan’s CTBC Bank in Singapore as a director. The move is part of a growing trend of Singapore traders from large banks being poached by firms with smaller operations in the Republic.

Lee spent nine years at UOB, latterly as a director and interest rate trader focused on short-term interest rate management, according to his online profile. He also ran an FX basis arbitrage book across several currencies and actively traded FX forwards, bonds and interest rate derivatives.

Singapore remains an Asian hub for rates trading, but major banks there are not hiring traders in great numbers, providing more scope for emerging players like CTBC to poach senior staff.

“There’s demand for interest rate traders, but mostly from the mid-sized banks,” says a Singapore-based front-office recruiter. “They’re looking to grow their global markets businesses by building up their rates desks, hence they’re hiring senior people who already have the necessary skills and experience.”

While traders in Singapore typically change banks every two to three years, Lee’s UOB career is a textbook example of how to move up the ranks at one firm and still get to senior level fairly quickly.

Lee became an AVP just 18 months after graduating from NUS and landing a place on UOB’s management associate programme, according to his profile. A promotion to VP followed only a year later. While at UOB he also found time to complete both the CFA and FRM qualifications.

CTBC is one of Taiwan’s largest privately-owned banks, but it is a niche player in Singapore. “Traders usually join a firm like this for a substantial uplift in pay and more trading autonomy,” says another Singapore recruiter.

Still, CTBC is expanding in Singapore and across Southeast Asia this year – and it is not alone among Taiwanese institutions. Bank of Taiwan, Chang Hwa Bank, First Commercial Bank, Taiwan Business Bank, Taiwan Cooperative Bank, and Yuanta Commercial Bank Taiwan are all growing their operations in the region.

Taiwanese banks are targeting Southeast Asia because of their government’s ‘New Southbound Policy’, aimed at reducing Taiwan’s economic reliance on mainland China.

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It’s a quiet time of the year for the banking job market in Asia. Front-office hiring has been generally sluggish in 2017 and recruitment across all jobs is set to suffer from a seasonal slowdown in Q4.

In this environment, if you are about to meet a recruiter in Singapore or Hong Kong they will typically hold the upper hand. You will need to impress them.

Here’s how to make the most of your first meeting.

1. Lift your language

“I find quite often that in Hong Kong people who don’t speak English as a first language really struggle to write a compelling resume, but when I first meet them in person the quality of their spoken English and personality often make up for the fact that they can’t sell themselves on paper,” say Sarah Sellers, Hong Kong country manager at iKas International.

2. Don’t curb your enthusiasm

It pays to be positive about your ambitions, including plans for further study. The Asian job market is competitive and recruiters like referring people who they think can add value to their client’s business over the long term. “We recently received a CV which was of borderline quality, but we were blown away when we met the candidate. When discussing their background and aspirations, they seemed very motivated and willing to study to learn more,” says Vince Natteri, director of Pinpoint Asia in Hong Kong.

3. Pepper recruiters with questions

Singapore and Hong Kong’s business districts are comparatively small and recruiters will often agree to meet you for a coffee in Raffles Place or Central. But that doesn’t mean the conversation should be a casual one. The best candidates come prepared with a list of insightful questions about the job – just as they would when meeting a hiring manager at a bank. “This also lets you keep up a high level of engagement,” says Evelyn Lee, manager of financial services at Robert Walters in Singapore.

4. Shout about what you can contribute to their client

It’s tempting to view an agency recruiter as your confidant, but always keep in mind that they are working for the bank, not for you. They want you to frame your success stories in terms of how you benefited your employer. “When speaking about past job responsibilities, always highlight the key points in which you contributed to the organisation,” says Lee.

5. Show off your soft skills

Recruiters say finance professionals in Asia often talk for too long about their technical skills. The best candidates will also focus on demonstrating their cultural fit for the company. “If you’ve researched the organisation and can demonstrate how your softer skills will ensure you’re the right match for the company’s values and the team, you’re more likely to be shortlisted,” explains Lynne Roeder, managing director of Hays in Singapore.

6. Answer the question before it’s asked

Recruiters don’t like having to prise out information or run through a check-list of questions. If there are key requirements in the job description, work these into the conversation before you’re hit with a direct question about them. “For example, if you have to fit into a strong team-working culture, talking about working well with others and previous team achievements is likely to make the right impression,” says Roeder.

7. Mention your mistakes

“They key to a successful interview is to engage with the recruiter by not only highlighting your greatest achievements, but also explaining the mistakes you’ve made along the way and how you’ve learnt from them,” says recruiter Adam Jeffes.

8. Be open about money

Recruiters love it when you tell them your base pay and previous bonus down to the last dollar. “While this is never an easy topic to discuss with a stranger, recruiters need to be very measured about the information they give to clients about current and expected compensation. It is highly frustrating to interview a candidate who point blank refuses to give this information away,” says Sellers from iKas.

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You can’t move for bitcoin millionaires these days, or 20-somethings aching to tell you how they made a fortune with the cryptocurrency simply by sitting in their dorm – and how you can do the same.

If you want to work at J.P. Morgan, however, stay away from it. Jamie Dimon says that he’d fire “in a second” any trader employed by the bank who traded bitcoin. Speaking at the Barclays Financial Services Conference yesterday, he described it as a “fraud”, “worse than tulips” and only a better option than U.S. dollars if you’re a “drug dealer, a murderer stuff like that”.

“If we had a trader who traded bitcoin I’d fire him in a second for two reasons. One, it’s against our rules. Two, it’s stupid. And both are dangerous,” said Dimon.

“You can’t have a business where people are going to invent a currency out of thin air,” he added. “It won’t end well… someone is going to get killed and then the government is going to come down on it.”

Dimon said he wasn’t going to short the currency because it’s so hard to predict when it will drop. “It could be at $20,000 before this happens but it will eventually blow up. It’s a fraud and honestly I’m just shocked anyone can’t see it for what it is.”

Bitcoin entrepreneurs talking it up is one thing, but Dimon’s words have an impact. As Bloomberg points out, it dropped by 2.1% in the immediate aftermath of his comments.

Separately, Goldman’s plans to build out its fixed income currency and commodities unit have dominated COO Harvey Schwartz’s presentation to see “what’s happening under the hood” at the bank. But beyond the build out of new sales, trading and strats staff at Goldman Sachs, it’s also hiring investment bankers.

However, Goldman isn’t building on Wall Street – it’s hiring in Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle, and Toronto. If this seems a little obscure, it’s not the only bank hiring in the U.S. outside of the traditional financial services mainstay. As Business Insider points out, JPMorgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have employed a similar strategy – capturing lucrative middle-market deals in the U.S. and Canada that paid $8.2 billion in deal fees in 2015. This is more than Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America combined.

Meanwhile:

Trading revenue will fall by 20% at J.P. Morgan in the third quarter, says Jamie Dimon (WSJ)

Goldman’s co-head of investment banking Gregg Lemkau says clarity needed from Washington before M&A will take off (Bloomberg)

Goldman’s big problem with trying to win more business in FICC – its rivals (Gadfly)

Ray Dalio doesn’t want Gary Cohn to quit (Business Insider)

Why voice traders should fear MiFID II (Bloomberg)

“Overzealous” MiFID II regulation could see trading firms head elsewhere (Financial Times)

It’s a risk for fund managers to force clients to pay for research (Financial News)

Morgan Stanley’s head of emerging markets, Kay Haigh, who came back to banking after starting his own hedge fund, has left again to work for a hedge fund (HFM Week)

Banks’ 50-year-old IT problem: “Clearly we make all of our money from the systems we have today, not from systems of the future. [Upgrades] can’t put any of the systems of today at risk” (Financial News)

Banks are most at risk from AI job losses (The Conversation)

Winton is trying to lure scientists into making predictions about climate change (Financial Times)

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When Philip Augar got his first job in the City of London, it was 1978. He’d just graduated (admittedly from Cambridge) and was wondering about becoming an academic historian – except there were no opportunities; or maybe a teacher – except there were better candidates than he; so he settled on the City. Despite knowing nothing about finance and attending a half hour interview that comprised mostly of questions about his background and sporting prowess, the young Augar was given a job: he became an investment analyst on a salary of £100 a week.

Times have changed. While the influx of U.S. investment banks helped professionalise London banking in the 1980s, so the influx of European bankers did wonders for the standard of people working in the City in the 1990s and 2000s. The Europeans tend to be better educated than the British. They speak multiple languages (fluently). They’re more likely to work in front office jobs, and they earn more. Recruiters have long complained that Britons are a bit inadequate by comparison.

As jobs move out of London and into Frankfurt because of Brexit, this has the potential to become a real problem. Our estimates suggest that Europeans occupy at least 40% of front office roles in the City. The German banking scene, however, has long been very, well, German. If the best jobs are in Germany, Britons may struggle to get a look in.

“Interviews in Frankfurt can appear very different to interviews in London,” warns a German executive director on the trading floor of one major bank in the City. “Graduate candidates in Frankfurt have often progressed further in their studies – they have a Masters or a PhD. 95% of them have some finance, business, economics, or maths background, whereas in London it’s more common for students to have studied something completely unrelated to finance.”

Because of this discrepancy in educational background, both he and other German bankers say German finance interviews are a lot more difficult than in London. While preliminary London interviews are all about “fit”, German interviews go straight for the technicals. “It’s absolutely normal to ask German markets candidates about bond maths or M&A candidates about valuation techniques,” says the ED. “German candidates find London interviews easy by comparison.” Other candidates who’ve interviewed in both countries say German interviews are a lot more rigorous; a far higher standard is presumed. One German hedge fund manager suggests a good reason for this: strict German labour laws make it difficult to dump unwanted candidates; when banks hire in Germany, they need to get it right.

This is the scene that monolingual British students with little knowledge of banking risk intruding upon after Brexit takes place. While London has been receptive to European students, European financial centres may be less receptive to students from the UK – unless they have a Masters in Finance and a high level of fluency in more than one language.

Even experienced analysts and associates may find their careers impeded under the new reality. Frankfurt-based recruiters already report an influx of CVs from young British bankers trying to get a foothold in Germany ahead of Brexit. Although Elena Barclay, at the German office of recruitment firm Dartmouth Partners, says U.S. banks in Germany are willing to consider applications from non-native German speakers (providing you already speak some German and are willing to learn), non-Germans are at a disadvantage. More importantly, non-native German speakers are denied access to the holy grail of a job in private equity.

Rupert Bell is a Briton in Munich. An Oxford and Exeter University graduate who speaks French and German, he’s been recruiting private equity candidates in the German city for over eight years. German private funds are growing, says Bell, but they’re rarely interested in hiring people for whom German is not their first language.

“There are over 100 private equity funds in Munich,” says Bell. “But very few of them will consider anyone who is not a native German speaker.” This is a function of the German economy: “Most of the private equity transactions in Germany are small and involve the Mittelstand,” says Bell. “Even though all the deal papers are in English, the Mittelstand owners want to talk to someone they trust and that means a native German speaker. It’s just too much of a risk for funds to hire anyone else.”

Bell says the most desired German analysts and associates are nursing multiple job offers from private equity funds in the beautiful city of Munich: “There aren’t enough good Germans to fill these slots. We see people with several offers all the time.”

Meanwhile, as Europe’s financial centre shifts east, Britons risk being left behind. Admittedly, there’s no much you can do about being a non-native German, but you might at least want to start making provisions for the possibility that an understanding of German will give you an edge in getting the best banking jobs come 2022.

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Change is afoot at Credit Suisse. On one hand, it’s hiring under new global head of equities, Mike Stewart. On the other, it’s bigging-up systematic trading as a way of increasing revenues at incredibly healthy margins. Somewhere in the confluence of these two things, the Swiss bank has decided to part company with Nas Al-khudairi, its head of electronic products, who was promoted less than two years ago.

Insiders say Al-khudairi left Credit Suisse on amicable terms in the past few days. Colleagues confirmed his exit. It’s not clear who will be replacing him. It’s thought that Al-khudairi is off to Barclays, to join Stephen Dainton, who was hired from CS in August as global head of equities at the British bank. Barclays is building its electronic trading business and hired Graham Wayne, KCG’s former head of electronic trading, in July.

A Credit Suisse veteran, Al-khudairi spent 20 years at the bank and was head of cash equities for EMEA before assuming the electronic role – now part of Stewart’s purview. Although Credit Suisse ranked equal third for cash equities trading in Europe in 2016 according to Greenwich Associates, its electronic equities business ranks outside the top three in both EMEA and the U.S. In May this year, Credit Suisse hired-in Stuart McGuire from Deutsche Bank as head of cash equities trading in EMEA. McGuire has an electronic and program trading background.

As head of electronic products, Al-khudairi was particularly concerned with boosting revenues from systematic trading strategies in Credit Suisse’s FX and credit business in both EMEA and the Americas. However, when Stephen Dainton, former head of equity trading in EMEA, left in January 2017, Al-khudairi had electronic equities trading added to his responsibilities.

Al-khudairi has a big fan base at CS. Insiders say he was one of a few “brilliant” people at the helm of the markets business who was willing to stand up to CEO Tidjane Thiam. His exit follows that of other big names in Credit Suisse’s electronic equities business, most notably NYC-based Daniel Mathisson in February 2016.

Al-khudairi is being replaced by Anthony Abenante, a CS outsider who was hired in August. Abenante was the CEO of Instinet between 2007 and 2012 and has worked as an advisor for various companies since.

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Photo credit: Exit by Lionel Martinez is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

There’s a revival in rates recruitment in London investment banks, and competition is heating up. Banks are hiring from the buy-side and people who left the market years ago to fill senior roles. And, it seems, Russia.

HSBC has just hired Maxim Safonov, the head of global markets at Sberbank CIB who has been working in Moscow at the Russian bank for the past five years. Safonov left in July last year, but has just re-emerged as a managing director in rates trading at HSBC in London.

This is a return to HSBC for Safonov, who spent six years at the bank between 2004 and 2010 as head of markets for Moscow and later head of trading for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Safonov has flitted between roles in hedge funds and investment banks in both London and Moscow throughout his career. He left HSBC for now defunct hedge fund FrontPoint Partners in 2010, and later moved to Finisterre Capital, an emerging markets focused hedge fund, where he was a portfolio manager covering FX and rates strategies. He joined Russian bank Troika Dialog in 2012, which was later acquired by Sberbank.

HSBC has continued to cut senior investment banking jobs throughout the course of 2017, with around 100 roles earmarked for the chop in January. On the advisory side of the business, HSBC bankers have been flooding out, either to other banks – J.P. Morgan has just taken on senior FIG banker Ricardo Rubio in New York, for example – to start their own businesses, or even to run cookie companies.

But there’s room to grow its rates business. In its interim report, HSBC reported a 9% increase in rates sales and trading revenues, to $1.1bn, and said that it increased market share in Europe. While banks in the U.S. are looking to make senior credit hires, the focus in London has been recruiting senior rates staff, according to headhunters.

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On Wall Street, pay negotiations going into a new job are an art form – a cat and mouse game where an employer tries to low ball and the lead candidate tries to inflate their worth as much as possible. This could all change. A new law passed in New York in May prevents employers from asking about salary history. Suddenly, there’s a new game to play in the search for a new finance job.

The new law comes into force in November and, as we’ve pointed to previously, Alan Johnson, the founder of compensation consultancy Johnson Associates, believes this will lead to Wall Street firms low-balling candidates. But it could also lead to sell-side and buy-side firms in the U.S. standardising what they pay their employees, according to Steven Gold, a partner at recruitment firm Green Key Resources.

“This will provide a greater challenge for recruiters to manage the process on behalf of their clients and may result in a much longer negotiation process,” Gold says. “Firms in general will need to have more depth in the candidate pool because it may be hard to achieve an acceptance, and candidates may go off the market during a lengthy negotiation process.

“Offers may be less likely to be accepted by candidates as they could be affected by expectations that may be too high and clients may not want to make an offer that matches that number,” he adds. “This may create a more adversarial negotiating relationship, which is not an ideal way to start a new job.”

Employment attorneys are singing its praises, however, suggesting that it will help level the playing field for women, as well as candidates of color and other minorities.

“While the gender pay gap may be narrowing in the U.S., women on Wall Street, especially minority women, still earn less than their male counterparts,” says Raquel Alvarenga, a labor and employment associate at the Cohen, Tauber, Spievack & Wagner law firm. “This new law assists in bridging these gender and racial wage gaps.

“This new law takes aim at the glass ceiling by preventing a woman’s prior salary from impeding her higher earning potential,” she says. “The new law encourages pay equity by eliminating employers’ oftentimes myopic focus on pay history in determining a new hire’s compensation structure.”

Mark Shirian, the founding partner of the Mark David Shirian law firm, an NFL agent and an NFLPA-certified contract advisor, agrees with that assessment.

“This new law will give prospective employees more bargaining power by limiting any possible contentious salary negotiations,” he says. “Employers will now have to change the way they recruit new talent and will have to update job applications and how they gather data to determine market salaries.”

Others are decidedly less sunny.

“This will lead to litigation – it’s going to be a nightmare,” Johnson says. “You better keep written records of this – if you’re going to make a candidate an offer, document it in writing, having them sign a form, ‘no, you did not ask me my past compensation history.’

“A year from now or five years from now who’s going to remember a conversation?” he says. “A lawsuit could claim it was tainted from the day the candidate got there. Many of the people will be gone, left the company for different jobs, so it’s important to document that – you didn’t ask [about salary history] but the candidate may or may not have volunteered that information.”

What are your pay expectations?

Is there a workaround that recruiters and hiring managers are likely to employ? Asking about pay expectations will become the standard. The law does not allow employers to ask applicants for salary or any compensation or benefit history. However, prospective employers will be able to ask the candidate about their desired compensation.

The percentage raise over their current level of compensation candidates should ask for will be on case-by-case basis and driven by a variety of factors, including supply/demand for a particular role and unique market skill sets, Gold says.

“I do believe job applicants will have to be more forthright with their expectations supported by quantitative and qualitative arguments as a basis for their expectations,” he says. “In the long run, the compensation will be based on the position’s value to the firm and whether the candidate’s expectations fit within their budget.”

While hiring managers and recruiters can’t ask, you can offer, for example, responding to an offer by saying, “That’s nice, but I actually make X” and then the real discussions will begin.

“It will actually be worse than it was before – the problems that it was intended to cure will get worse,” Johnson says. “[Recruiters] can certainly ask their salary expectations, and the better the negotiator you are, the further you’ll get with that, but the truth is, most candidates don’t really know [how much they should be paid].

“You’d be smart not to say anything rather than volunteer what you got paid – instead, say, ‘I expect to be paid competitively, and I expect you do make me a competitive offer; I expect more money than I’m making now,’” he says. “Candidates are almost always better off putting it back on the company, and if they offer more, great – if not, tell them no, you need to pay more.

“It’s going to be awkward on both sides – it’s going to be clumsy for everyone, like a first date.”

Be reluctant about volunteering what your compensation expectations are, but if pushed, you’ve got to have a number. And if you do reveal your compensation history, be honest with them, because they can check that.

“This will require more negotiating than before, because on Wall Street there is no fixed pay grade based on title – it could range from very little to a lot for the same role,” Johnson says. “Recruiters will think, ‘Without the pay reference point, we’re guessing, and we’re going to guess low and we’ll see what they say.’

“Don’t be insulted [by a low-ball offer],” he says. “It’s the only real way for the company to attack this.”
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““

Steven Gregornik, a partner and chief executive officer at Capula Investment Management in London, has become the latest senior figure to depart from the $10.2bn hedge fund this year.

Gregornik has been at Capula since 2012, when he joined as chief operating officer, but was promoted to the CEO role 2013. David Gu, who was also co-chief investment officer, held the role at the time, but moved across to money management duties. Gregornik’s departure was revealed on Companies House today, but the register suggests that he departed in late May.

Capula, a fixed income focused hedge fund set up by former J.P. Morgan trader Yan Huo and co-chief executive Masao Asai in 2005, has been losing senior staff throughout this year. In June, David Gu, co-CIO and partner at Capula, left the hedge fund to join Adarga Limited, a tech firm that uses machine learning and cognitive computing to help clients delve into reams of data. Meanwhile, Thorkild Juncker, its co-head of investor relations, also departed in July.

It did, however, hire Fredrik Gentzel from Deutsche Bank as its chief operating officer in February.

Despite the departures, Capula does not appear to be struggling. While a number of high profile hedge funds have retreated from expensive Mayfair offices in recent months to cut costs, Capula has just moved into a plush new 12,000 square foot office across three floors at a new development in 7 Clarges St, Mayfair – a stone’s throw away from Green Park.

According to Oktra, the designer who worked on the building, the look was “a sophisticated yet simplistic design”

“We converted the second floor into an open plan trading floor with meeting rooms. On the third floor we designed a main reception area, with a five meter long patterned sprayed metal desk using overlaid cutting sheets to form a sculptural piece. On the sixth floor we built a complete catering kitchen”, it said.

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““

Technology is a big deal in J.P. Morgan’s corporate and investment bank (CIB). The division employs around 10,000 technologists and just hired a new chief technologist in the form of Mike Grimaldi, the ex-Deutsche Bank technologist who spent most of his career at Goldman Sachs. Now, it wants its former technologists to come back again.

The U.S. bank just opened its “Reentry Program” to technologists in the UK. If you’ve worked in technology before (either at J.P. Morgan or another bank), were at vice president (VP)-level or above, left voluntarily and have been less than two years out of the market, you have between now and October 27th to apply for a 14 week “re-introduction to corporate life” in J.P. Morgan’s technology division in London, Glasgow or Birmingham. At the end of it, you might be offered a new job.

J.P. Morgan launched its reentry program in New York in 2013 and has run it in the UK for the past three years. However, previous iterations haven’t covered technologists. The decision to expand into tech is likely the result of J.P.M’s huge technology hiring needs. Assuming a turnover rate of 20% among its technology staff, the CIB alone needs to employ 2,000 new technologists a year just to stand still. In the bank’s 2016 annual report released this April, COO Matt Zames said J.P.M gets 10 applicants per role for its tech vacancies; impressive – but nothing compared to the 50 graduate applicants per role for jobs in the investment banking division (IBD).

Even so, not every senior technologist who’s left J.P.M for something else is likely to rush back again. Technology teams everywhere are disproportionately male, making it less likely that J.P.M will be able to tap a group of women who’ve taken extended maternity leave. Instead, those who left may be like Vanessa Menendez-Covelo, the former J.P.M. developer who quit to become an acupuncturist.

“It got to a point for me where I wanted to do something different,” Menendez-Covelo told us earlier this year. “…“For ten years I woke up at 4:30am to go to yoga class at around 5:30am, do yoga until 7am and then be at my desk by 8am, and then work until about 7pm and get home by 8pm.”

She added that banking tech had become less exciting than it used to be: “Budgets have been squeezed and you’re asked to do more with less. What I saw in the last few years was that it was all about maintaining systems that were old.”

This being the case, JPM may need to offer more than 14 weeks of corporate reintegration if it wants to lure tech staff back into the fold. The program is open to project managers and business analysts as well as architects, cyber-security specialists, and developers in Java, Python, C++, C#, JavaScript, HTML, WPF, and React (Facebook’s library for building composable user interfaces).

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UBS appears to be hedging its bets on the U.S. economy. Despite a bumper year for M&A deals in the Americas, the Swiss bank has started building a new restructuring team.

UBS has just hired Lloyd Sprung, who for the past six years has been working as a senior managing director within Evercore’s restructuring division, as its head of restructuring. This is a new focus within the bank and UBS is said to be building the team.

Insiders suggest that Sprung has been given a mandate to “aggressively” grow the new restructuring division, and UBS has been already been advertising roles at the junior level. It’s hiring analysts and associate directors in New York to work on what it calls a “new focused client effort” within restructuring M&A team in New York.

Sprung’s team will be working on restructuring and broad range of deals across distressed M&A and equity capital raising, as well as representing companies, creditors, owners and other key stakeholders during restructuring negotiations.

Restructuring deals are traditionally the preserve of smaller investment banks. Lazard, Houlihan Lokey, Rothschild, Evercore, Moelis & Co, Greenhill, Perella Weinberg and Miller Buckfire are dominant in this sector. KPMG Corporate Finance ranks third this year, according to Dealogic figures, while Goldman Sachs and Centerview Partners have cracked the top ten in 2017 thanks to their involvement with telecom firm Avaya’s bankruptcy.

Restructuring and distressed M&A bankers are usually hot when the economy is suffering. 2016 was a bumper year, with $25.5bn worth of deals within the distressed M&A and restructuring sector, according to Dealogic. So far 2017 has been poor for restructuring bankers, however, with just $2.1bn worth of deals announced.

In theory, it’s a great time to be working in M&A in the U.S. Revenues were up by 32% year on year in the first half of 2017 – to a record high of $926m, according to Dealogic. However, yesterday, Goldman Sachs co-head of investment banking, Gregg Lemkau, told Bloomberg that clients are confused about the messages from the U.S. government and want to see more clarity before committing to new deals.

The U.S. GDP grew by 3% in the second quarter, up from an initial estimate of 2.6%, suggesting the Trump administration is breathing life back into the economy. However, some believe that its running out of steam, and recent analyst reports have even suggested a recession could be on the cards. UBS appears to be preparing for this.

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““

Probal Banerjee, DBS’s head of large corporates for India, has moved to ING in Singapore in a managing director role.

Banerjee joined ING as head of corporate clients for India on 1 September, according to a spokesperson for the bank in Singapore.

During nine years with DBS, Banerjee helped to oversee some of its business and headcount expansion on the subcontinent. DBS is now the fifth largest foreign bank in India by assets.

Banerjee led the Singapore firm’s Bangalore branch from 2008 to 2012, growing its workforce from seven to 52. He then moved to Mumbai for his most recent role.

He is currently based in Singapore, although we understand that he may relocate back to Mumbai with ING in the future.

This is Banerjee ‘s second stint at a Dutch firm, having worked as a corporate banker for ABN AMRO between 2002 and 2008 in New Delhi, Bangalore, and Kolkata, according to his online profile.

While losing a banker as experienced as Banerjee – who began his career in 1997 – is a blow for DBS, the Singapore bank plans to keep growing in India, one of its major markets.

Last week DBS secured in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India to convert its existing franchise to a locally incorporated wholly-owned subsidiary. This will allow it to expand its operations in the country, DBS said in a statement.

DBS has also just opened a new five-floor office in Mumbai’s Express Towers, designed to “embed a start-up culture within the bank” and featuring “activity-based workspaces and social zones” to encourage “greater interaction and ideation among employees”.

In 2016 DBS also opened a new technology hub in Hyderabad and announced that it would recruit 1,500 people there over two years.

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““

I’m a former private banker now working as a headhunter in Singapore, so I know how tough it is to decide whether or not to join a new bank.

Moreover, these days it’s not just the likes of UBS and Credit Suisse who may want to hire you in Hong Kong or Singapore. Several boutique banks are also recruiting, following a flurry of recent takeovers that have given them more clout in the job market, despite remaining outside the top-10 private banks by assets in Asia.

LGT, for example, is still recruiting more RMs after acquiring ABN AMRO’s Asian wealth unit earlier this year. Last month, VP Bank said that it wanted to double its Singapore headcount and EFG said it would keep on hiring in the Republic, having taken on BSI’s Singapore RMs last year.

Meanwhile, Safra Sarasin is expanding in Asia and UBP is also growing its regional headcount – fresh from its takeover of my own firm, Coutts International, in 2016.

But should you join one of these five European boutiques that are all adding RMs in Asia? Here some issues you should weigh up before deciding.

Bonuses

EFG and LGT employ a brokerage model – which uses a set formula to calculate bonuses – meaning RMs more or less know in advance how much they will be paid, based on their revenue/AUM for the year. By contrast, most private banks in Asia use a discretionary model, which can be very subjective. Although the main KPIs are still AUM and revenue, less quantifiable parameters are also counted (albeit given less weight). For example, your work attitude, work quality and adherence to the bank’s protocol, to name but a few.

Market segmentation

Will you be told that your clients must come from one market, or will you be allowed to cover several countries? UBP’s market segmentation is more well defined than the rest, a legacy of Coutts Bank, which had enough RMs from different countries to divide up teams into fixed market desks.

All of the other four banks, especially VP and Sarasin, have very flexible market coverage. Despite this, you still need to consider whether in the future the bank you join will grow so big in Asia that market segmentation rules will start to kick in for its RMs.

Career progression

It’s a bit of a dead heat here. The five boutiques offer very good opportunities to climb the corporate ladder, because the link between promotion and performance is much clearer (and less political) than at the big banks.

Products

All five firms lack corporate banking and investment banking platforms, which is obviously a major issue if you’re currently at a large universal bank. As for product financing, they have a lot more restrictions in place compared to the big banks. Before joining, be very sure what products qualify for financing and the financing percentage. And at job interviews, ask very specific questions on what products can be financed and under what conditions and rates.

Branding

Will your current clients actually want to move to the new bank with you? Do they even know much about the boutique you want to join? In the case of EFG, they probably do. But the other four still don’t have a high profile within wealthy circles in Asia, so make sure your clients are comfortable well before you accept a job offer. Having said that, the profiles of these firms are starting to rise in the wake of publicity surrounding the recent takeovers. LGT is better known in Asia now than it was before it acquired ABN AMRO, for example. The brand recognition of all these firms looks set to improve.

Minimum AUM per account

Do your clients have enough assets to bank with these boutiques? Currently, all five banks are fine taking on clients with about US$2m in assets. However, this might not always be the case. You might soon have to target clients with assets of at least $3m to $5m because the banks might well raise their minimum thresholds, as some of the larger firms have already done. The worst-case scenario is when the clients’ accounts have to be closed because of their failure to top up their AUM.

Industry coverage

Many RMs overlook this area. You might not be aware that some boutique banks actually don’t accept clients from certain industries that they deem risky, not just in terms of political risks but also business risks. Some banks reject oil and gas and energy clients no matter how ‘clean’ or how financially strong they are. It’s imperative to ascertain this in the interview. It will otherwise come as a rude shock when you come on board.

KYC/compliance

All are comparatively less stringent than the tier-one private banks, so long as all checks and documentation pass MAS regulations. That said, EFG could potentially be extra cautious because they acquired BSI (whose license was revoked by MAS due to the 1MDB case) last year. And compliance standards for all banks look set to keep on rising.

It’s a huge challenge to move AUM and clients these days, even for senior RMs. So it’s very important that you have a checklist of the above factors before you decide to join a boutique.

Liu San Li is an ex-Coutts private banker, now head of banking at search firm IGS Asia in Singapore.

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““

Financial services firms are more stringent than nearly every other private-sector industry when it comes to pre-employment background checks. You’re likely to be subjected to screenings for a criminal record, credit checks, education and work history verifications and even drug tests. Some red flags are career killers; others are more subject to interpretation and leniency if you’re honest and handle the situation correctly.

“From a regulation standpoint, financial institutions have to run a criminal background check at a minimum,” said Nick Fishman, VP of communications at SterlingBackcheck. “They are concerned with crimes related to dishonesty or moral turpitude, which is a pretty wide umbrella.”

Each financial institution may have its own unique requirements. Some require you to take a drug test, a situation that has gotten murkier now that so many states have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes and in some cases recreational uses. Many will verify academic credentials, past employers and do a credit check.

“While checking candidates’ credit score is not recommended for all industries, for financial services it’s particularly vital,” Fishman said.

It’s common among younger candidates who have not been screened in the past to not believe that an employer is going to conduct a background check, or they think that a background check will not discover something they don’t want the hiring firm to know, he said.

“If they’ve lied on their resume, they should realize that an employer is going to do this background check, so it’s always better to be honest,” Fishman said. “The best course of action to divulge [a potential red flag] up front, because the last thing you want when considering hiring someone is a surprise.

“It’s best to be open and honest with someone, especially when they are going to receive that information eventually anyway,” he said.

Criminal background checks

The depth of criminal background checks depends on where you’re working. Small financial firms can be more subjective – federally-insured banks can’t.

Section 19 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (FDIA) prohibits federally-insured banks from hiring anyone with a history of theft, embezzlement, money laundering or dishonesty, says Chris Dyer, president and CEO of PeopleG2, an Anaheim Hills, California-based firm that specializes in pre-employment background screening.

Certain exceptions can be made, but it’s a difficult process. The Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC) can provide a waiver exception for certain minor offenses that occurred more than 10 years ago. Dyer recalled a case of a man who was granted a waiver after being busted for shoplifting decades earlier.

Firms that sell and trade securities are excluded from hiring applicants who have any felony criminal convictions or have been convicted of misdemeanors involving acts of dishonesty.

Now that’s not to say misdemeanors or crimes that occurred outside of the period in question won’t necessarily trip you up. It depends on the firm and how you position it.

“With petty drug arrests and DUIs, it really depends on the institution,” Dyer said. “The bigger the institution, the more objective they are likely to be. It can be black or white. Smaller firms are typically more subjective.”

If you’re not forthright about a conviction, your chances plummet, said Adam Zoia, CEO of Glocap, a Wall Street search firm. “When it comes to criminal matters the best approach for a candidate is to pre-disclose and explain such as a youthful DUI,” he said. “Although there is no guarantee that a prospective employer will proceed, it increases the odds to raise it proactively.”

Credit checks

Most financial firms do credit checks for people involved in revenue-generating activities or handling money. When it comes to support positions, it can go either way.

Ross Baltic, managing partner at Mercury Partners, a New York-boutique search firm, said that all of his clients do thorough credit checks in addition to criminal background checks. If you forgot to pay a bill on time, you should be fine. The real problems are bankruptcy and deep debt.

“If this person is so far in debt and has some serious financial problems, banks will wonder if they are then more likely to steal money,” said Dyer. “Especially if the wage being paid won’t cover the debt.”

Drug tests

Simply put: many firms do pre-employment drug tests, some don’t. One word of warning for consultants: clients can ask you to take a drug test before working on a project, even if you’ve been with the firm for years. It happens.

Work and education verification

Again, it depends on the firm, but many hire third-parties to verify every detail on a resume, including dates of employment and GPAs. “We’ve seen many candidates over the years tripped up because of either inaccurate employment dates or more commonly leaving a very short term job off his or her resume,” said Zoia.

The best piece of advice is to not embellish dates of employment on your resume. While it may seem harmless, it can come back to bite you come the offer stage.
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It’s possible that people have got banking careers all wrong. That instead of being about getting trained at a prestigious and highly-remunerative name whilst earning CV points, they’re actually about meeting people. – Meeting people and getting the sort of pedigree that will later allow you to borrow huge sums of money from them and the institution.

This has been the experience of the two ex-Goldman and one ex-Credit Suisse employees who set up Neyber, a fintech consumer lending company in which Goldman Sachs just invested £100m and Gaël de Boissard, the former co-head of Credit Suisse’s investment bank, and Henry Ritchotte, the former chief operating officer at Deutsche Bank plus others, just invested £15m.

It’s not clear whether Neyber’s founders – Monica Kalia (an ex-Goldman executive director in banks research), Martin Ijaha (an ex-member of Goldman’s European bank loan investing desk) and Ezechi Britton (a former structured products consultants at Credit Suisse), know de Boissard and their other investors personally. However, it’s telling that their fundraising rounds received publicity precisely because they were ex-bankers. Would they have done as well if they’d tried raising money straight out of university? Unlikely.

All three were more than just ‘pass-through bankers’ of the kind who spend 18 months on an analyst program before skipping off to something else. Kalia was at Goldman nearly six years. Ijaha was at Goldman nearly six and a half years (despite having fintech dreams throughout) and then spent 18 months in private equity at HG Capital. Britton was at Credit Suisse five years and then Lehman five years before that. These aren’t fickle analysts who’ve seized upon fintech as the next best thing.

If you want your banking career to provide a platform for doing something entrepreneurial in the future, therefore, don’t quit too soon. Don’t quit before you’ve build a reputation for yourself as a reliable pair of hands. And ideally don’t quit before you’ve built relationships with senior bankers who might one day invest in your ideas, or with the division of the bank that might have money to invest. If you leave without doing any of this, you’ve missed a trick.

Separately, Morgan Stanley is honing its appeal to Generation Z. Business Insider reports that the company has developed some special Snapchat filters which are only available to students at UPenn, Harvard, Villanova, Howard and 14 other ‘elite’ colleges. Keen students can use them to put Morgan Stanley artwork, logos and other designs over the messages they send. Fun.

Meanwhile:

By 2020, Goldman Sachs plans to have the same revenues as in 2006. (WSJ)

Mitsubishi UFJ will be moving “dozens” of people from London to Amsterdam because of Brexit. (Bloomberg)

“It is my priority as chancellor to ensure that the UK remains the financial services centre of the world.” (The Guardian)

Andrea Orcel says UBS plans to build its pricing around a basic research package probably costing “thousands or tens of thousands” of dollars and then charge extra for value-added services such as access to the bank’s analysts. (Bloomberg)

Ex-Citi CEO Vikram Pandit says 30% of banking jobs will disappear because of artificial intelligence – but he would say that as he’s now a fintech investor. (Bloomberg)

Agency broker Olivetree keeps hiring in North America. (TheTradeNews)

Houlihan Lokey hired a very senior banker who left Barclays. (Reuters)

J.P. Morgan accidentally advertised on ZeroHedge. (Quartz)

New accusations of sexism in Silicon Valley: “People would leave with a manager, go to the parking lot, have sex in the car, come back in and get promoted.” (Vanity Fair)

Say goodbye tax efficient carried interest. (Marketwatch)

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Few hedge funds are hiring as much as Balyasny Asset Management right now. The $12.1bn firm is looking to become the “Amazon of hedge funds” and has been poaching from its buy-side rivals and large investment banks across every hedge fund strategy there is.

One big hire to land recently is Amol Pai, who joined as a portfolio manager on its fixed income team in August, having spent the past five years as a trader at Citadel in New York.

Pai is the latest senior recruit in a hiring drive that has spanned multiple strategies and has stretched across both London and New York. In the U.S, it brought in Ulrich Brandt-Pollmann as head of systematic strategies from Credit Suisse and hired Stephen Brown as a portfolio manager from Pine River Capital Management earlier this month.

Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management has also proven to be a happy ground. Since hiring William Wappler, a managing director at Point72 who joined Balyasny as a managing director in 2015, a number of employees have moved across. In April, Balyasny hired Brian Cassese, a global macro analyst at Point 72 in Connecticut, as a global macro research analyst and trader, Shaoyi Li also joined as a quantitative researcher and Ernesto De Valle was hired as an analyst in May.

But while Balyasny’s recruitment in the U.S has stepped up, its London office has grown massively this year. Headcount has increased by 30% since the Brexit vote last year, and it’s still poaching junior and senior employees from large investment banks.

Most recently in the UK, it’s brought in Ivan Kalinin, a former associate at Citigroup who was latterly working as an investment analyst at Astellon Capital Partners and Daniel Do-Thoi, who was a financials equity analyst at J.P. Morgan.

Balyasny’s appeal is more than simply that fact that it’s growing. Its latest accounts for 2016 suggest that it spent £43.1m on its employees last year – or an average payment of £624k.

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““

If you work in an investment bank, you might think you have it worse than your pre-crisis predecessors. People like Kerim Derhalli, the former global head of equities trading at Deutsche Bank, would certainly say so. In an article earlier this year, Derhalli said the investment banking industry went through an extraordinary bubble between 2002 and 2008 and that all who worked in it then were very lucky indeed.

The mantra goes that all who’ve worked in the industry since are far less fortunate: revenues are stagnating and banks are facing a wave of technological change. Not for nothing did UBS CEO Andrea Orcel tell Bloomberg yesterday that he wants budget for, “technology or for hiring more people” [our emphasis]. Not for nothing is Goldman Sachs strategizing to achieve the same revenues in 2020 as it had before the crisis hit in 2006.

Nonetheless, it’s possible to argue that staff in investment banks haven’t done that badly since it all went wrong. Five months ago, The City UK declared that there were 78,000 more people working in accounting, law, consulting and finance jobs in London than there in 2008. Six months ago, the Wall Street Comptroller’s office said finance employment was at its highest level since the crisis – even though it was still 6% below the peak and pay per head was 22% below 2007. Banking jobs have certainly disappeared – the UK Office of National Statistics says the banking sector employs 119,000 fewer people today than before the crisis struck, but it’s not necessarily the staff employed by investment banks who’ve suffered.

In a newly published book, Gregor Gall, a left wing academic and writer who’s professor of industrial relations at the UK’s University of Bradford, argues that the real ‘bankers’ who’ve suffered in the wake of the crisis are the employees of retail banks who’ve had their pay cut, their hours extended and their promotional prospects dimmed by the meltdown of 2008.

Gall conducted a big study of British high street banks and unearthed all this and more.

“Since the crisis, the high street banks have made increasing use of targets to measure performance,” Gall says. “Increased regulation means it’s a much more performance-driven culture and that people are having to work long hours just to try reaching these targets, which are often unattainable anyway.” How long is long? Gall says you won’t find many people in retail banking working the 12 hour days of investment banks, but that where employees used to work seven or eight hours, they’re now working eight to ten. “People are coming in early and staying later to try reaching the targets. There’s been an extension of the working day.”

At the same time, Gall says opportunities for advancement in high street banks have all but evaporated. “There’s been so much downsizing that it’s much harder to get promoted. Moreover, most people can’t achieve the targets required for promotion. The internal labour market has become much tighter.” At the same time, nefarious high street banks have begun plotting employee performance on bell curves and doing away with poor performers. The result is that while retail banks used to be conduits for social advancement, allowing people to join as tellers and progress to head office, Gall says they’ve instead become highways to nowhere. The only area which has undergone any growth is – surprise – compliance and regulation.

If you work for an investment bank, none of this is likely to come as a particular shock – or will probably elicit much sympathy. If you’re working 80 hour weeks and are subject to continuous assessment which sees the lowest 5% of performers let go while as many jobs as possible are being shifted to cheap locations elsewhere, 50 hour weeks and bell curves are par for the course.

However, Gall stresses that retail bank staff make a lot less money for their pains (hourly pay for a Citi teller in NYC is $14; the annual salary for a Lloyds cashier in the UK is around £17k) than investment bank staff. He also argues that retail bank employees didn’t do much to elicit their current tribulations: “You see banks cutting costs in retail divisions in response to problems in the investment banking arms. If you choose to work in investment banking and to be money rich and time poor and insecure in your job, that’s up to you, but these people were never planning to work until 40 and retire on their savings and their futures have been spoiled too.”

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