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Technology is creeping towards the bond trading desks of large investment banks. Government bond traders may have been the Masters of the Universe in the 1980s, but they’re going to have to accept that life is about to get tougher.

“The rise of electronic trading has reduced the number of traders working on a trading desk, so there are less people who have to do more,” said Vladimir Danishevsky, senior group manager and the head of corporate bonds flow electronic trading IT at Citi, formerly with Barclays and Credit Suisse. “Traders don’t have a choice – they need to apply this to their execution and their pricing on some trades which are not their primary interest or not for their primary customers to find a smart price that allows them to use most of their balance sheet for certain customers in the best possible way.

Banks are spending more. Greenwich Associates’ reported on fixed income trading released yesterday revealed that the nation’s top six government bond dealers are spending nearly $25bn on technology this year.

Bond traders are going to struggle to adapt, according to a panel of e-trading experts at the The Trading Show New York this week. The main drivers of change include regulations, higher capital requirements for banks, illiquidity, technological innovation and increasing institutional investor appetite for data-driven insights.

What does the rise of electronic trading mean for bond traders and their career prospects? Fewer traders on a particular desk saddled with more responsibilities.

“Most of the providers of liquidity are not interested in providing it to all sources, just their preferred customers – sell-side executions try to give preferential pricing to their golden customers, not the whole world,” said Danishevsky.

Firms are focusing on data analytics, transaction cost analysis (TCA) and best execution as they try to capitalize on newly available order-book and market data to enhance their operational efficiency and lower costs. But they still need humans working in those functions, even as technology begins to shoulder more of the load.

“Best execution is still between two individuals, one person talking to another person, and I don’t see how some of these [automation] practices trying to be put in place are going to improve the situation,” said Maxime Seguineau, a managing director and the head of algorithmic fixed income trading at Seaport Global Securities. “It’s hard in the credit markets especially to provide best execution not knowing what data is real and what data is not.”

“Electronic trading represents maybe 15-to-20% tops of the $700bn of bonds traded daily, so we’re not looking at a market structure that will mirror equities anytime soon, which is not to say that there won’t be opportunities, but you have to think about liquidity and the infrastructure required to get there.

Humans are still in charge of making requests for quotations (RFQs) or invitations for bids (IFBs).

“A workflow for corporate credit trading is primary RFQ-driven, which is legacy based on habits,” Seguineau said. “Even younger generations of traders follow that process, and firms are going to use an RFQ-based protocol regardless of trade size.

However, there are job opportunities in electronic trading technology infrastructure teams.

“The buy-side firms don’t even have enough expertise to build the systems,” Danishevsky said. “They’re mostly just using a Bloomberg Terminal and a MarketAxess Terminal, because they don’t have the expertise to get together and build something for all-to-all.”

The new electronic platforms enabling all-to-all trading are gradually starting to gain traction, but they are not a panacea for bond-market illiquidity.

“Banks are looking to all areas of technology to make things more efficient and moving forward, and it is becoming a bigger part of the marketplace, so if all-to-all provides some sort of liquidity to the market or another benefit, then it’ll be a success,” said Tom Bumbolow, a former executive director of credit sales at J.P. Morgan, where he worked for 19 years before leaving in March. “My concern is all-to-all only works if the clients are willing to put their balance sheets behind it, and I’m worried about the balance between buyers and sellers getting out of whack.”
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Studying for the CFA is by in large a lonely experience – you clock up your 300 hours holed up in your bedroom. But then, suddenly, you’re sitting the exam with a lot of other people. It’s only then that it hits home: this thing is competitive, most people fail.

For me (as an American research analyst in Hong Kong), I also noticed something else when I looked around the exam room: a lot of people were teenagers.

I began the CFA about three years ago when I was 27, which is about the average age globally for Level I candidates. But doing the exam in Hong Kong made me feel old.

It turns out that more and more people in Hong Kong – especially mainland Chinese students based here – are starting the CFA in their first year of university or even in their final year of high school.

They’re aiming to pass all three levels before they graduate from university and are then prepared to wait four more years to get the work experience needed to become a full CFA Charterholder. While I’ve heard of US students (college ones) occasionally doing this, the practice seems far more common in Hong Kong and China.

In Asia, where qualifications are even more highly valued than in the West, students tell me that they can get at least 15% more pay if they’ve already passed Levels II or III when they take their first graduate job in the investment industry.

I admire this. The onslaught of technology means landing your first job in financial services is getting tougher. So why not give yourself a head start?

Nevertheless, as a CFA candidate myself, I found it intimidating to be up against so many kids. They may be young and lacking in work experience, but they’re ambitious and (as students) they have more time on their hands to study than someone like me who’s working full time at a bank.

I also get the impression that they love studying alone, love rote learning, and the love sitting exams – three things which are crucial to passing the CFA and three things which I actively dislike.

I have now got CFA Levels I and II to my name, but I failed them both on first sitting and I’ve decided against attempting Level III. I’m doing a Masters in Finance instead.

Studying for the CFA means you have no life for at least six months and spend every waking hour memorising incredible amounts of information. I want to actually interact with people as a study – I’ll leave the CFA to the teenagers.

Owen Morgan (we have used a pseudonym to protect his identity) is a research analyst at a US bank in Hong Kong.

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If you want to work in banking in 2030, you’ll probably need to be in the front office – part of a small coterie of highly charismatic or highly numerative people who come from prestigious schools. Middle- and back-office jobs will still exist, but they won’t be in banks anymore.

So says Thomas Garside, a partner in the financial services practice at Oliver Wyman. Writing in a Financial News op-ed, Garside says that as banks look to cut costs in their swollen risk and compliance functions, they will either automate them or outsource them to third-party vendors. In the short term, Garside says most banks are conservatively expecting a 10% to 20% reduction in risk resources. In the long term, he says full-time risk staff could fall by up to 80%.

Garside isn’t the only one advocating banks outsource entire middle- and back-office areas to third parties. Sergio Ermotti, the CEO of UBS, is a big fan. He recently told Bloomberg that the impact of technology over the next 10 years is going to be very similar to the impact of regulation over the last 10 and that a “utilities” concept could create the cost-efficiency benefits of consolidation in the middle and back office without the front-end or shareholder complications. As this model evolves, Ermotti said UBS could end up with 30% fewer staff.

Once as many middle and back office staff as possible have been devolved to shared services and jobs have been automated, who will be left? The relationship bankers who bring in the clients and the “automators” who create the systems should endure. If you want to survive in banking long term, you’d better make these your niche.

Separately, Ted Greenberg, the son of the late Bear Stearns chairman Alan “Ace” Greenberg, is a stand-up comic who formerly wrote for Late Night with David Letterman. Now he’s written a one-man show called, well, Ace, in which he plays both his father and himself.

The play explores the younger Greenberg’s relationship with his father and the latter’s career on Wall Street, according to Bloomberg. The elder Greenberg transformed Bear Stearns from a small brokerage into a publicly traded international behemoth and instituted an anti-nepotism rule, going against the grain of Wall Street’s Ivy League-leaning insularity. The playwright says he and his sister had hurt feelings because they “took the anti-nepotism rule somewhat personally: We were like, ‘God, we’re not even allowed to work for our own dad.’”

Meanwhile:

In a play for a second term, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen said bank rules shouldn’t be overly burdensome. (WSJ)

Even so, President Trump has put together a short list of candidates, including Gary Cohn, to replace her. (Bloomberg)

Nomura’s equities agency broker Instinet has brought in a former Deutsche Bank electronic-trading specialist as its new head of international electronic sales. (Financial News)

As the co-founders continue to feud, more than 60 bankers, traders and analysts have departed Guggenheim Parters the last two years and the firm recently offered some senior managers bonuses to stay on for at least a year amid frustration over money, management style and personnel. (Bloomberg)

Do you suffer from groupthink or dumbfounded bullishness? Many traders and portfolio managers do. (Bloomberg)

Josef Ackermann, the former Deutsche Bank boss, doesn’t acknowledge the giving back of bonus money as an admission of mistakes. (FiNews)

The genius alumni of New York City’s Stuyvesant High School do everything well except raise money, but now a Wall Street clique is seizing control. (Bloomberg)

Michael Scronic allegedly cheated at least 45 people who thought they were investing in his Scronic Macro Fund, but instead he used the money to pay back other investors and to finance a lavish lifestyle. (Bloomberg)

“Ramp it,” a former head of foreign exchange at HSBC allegedly told one of his traders just before he executed a $3.5bn currency transaction. (Bloomberg)

Asif Aziz, founder and CEO of the real estate investment company Criterion Capital, is using a novel defense in a divorce case as he tries to hold onto his $1.3bn fortune. (Bloomberg)

The Brevan Howard master fund fell 4.61% this year through September and the firm’s AUM has shrunk from $40bn in 2013 to around $11bn today. (Business Insider)

Jobs are not safe at Carlson Capital’s Black Diamond Thematic hedge fund, which is down 19% after fees this year through September 30. (Business Insider)

Blockchain is approaching a tipping point on Wall Street because cryptography has figured out how to keep transaction data private. (Bloomberg)

Workplace chat groups on Slack and WhatsApp can act like a virtual water cooler, but they are also risky. (FT)

To land a good job after college, get excellent grades and do as many internships as possible. (WSJ)

Experiments involving monetary allocations found that economics students behave more selfishly than other students. (Plos One)
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If you want to work in high frequency trading now, choose your employer carefully. The lack of market volatility has meant most firms have struggled and consolidation among big players – notably the merger between KCG Holdings and Virtu – has resulted in some big job cuts.

But there are winners in this scenario. And, according to accounts released this week, Jump Trading and Hudson River Trading are two firms that continue to perform, hire and pay their staff well.

Jump’s 2016 results for its international operations were out today. It increased headcount by 44.6% over the course of last year, to 68 people and made bigger investments in front office and development staff than it did in support functions.

Jump said that it made “significant investment in personnel”, and this has resulted in some big staff costs. It spent $75.7m on its employees last year, on just 68 people. This works out as an average pay packet of $1.1m. However, it also spent $70.2m on 47 employees in 2015 – or an average payment of $1.49m. Its highest paid director received $1.38m in 2016.

This increase is in spite of a reduction in profits. It made $27.2m for its international operation last year versus $39.6m in 2015.

Hudson River, meanwhile, has the majority of its operations within its Chicago headquarters and is one of the biggest HFTs, and has said it accounts for 5% of shares traded in the U.S. every day. As HFTs consolidate, Hudson River is buying – it’s reportedly exploring a deal to buy rival Sun Trading, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In London, though, it remains relatively small, with just 12 employees, according to its 2016 accounts released earlier this week. This is one more person than it employed in 2015, however.

Hudson River has also done better in 2016 then the previous year. It made £6.9m ($9m) in profits last year, compared to £1.5m ($2m) in 2015. It paid its staff an average of £470.9k ($615k), which is broadly in line with the previous year.

Generally, HFTs have been struggling. Most of their revenues stem from the U.S. and they’re expected to be $850m this year, according to figures from Tabb Group, which is a massive drop from the $7.9bn they made in 2009.

KCG Holdings takeover by Virtu earlier this year has been particularly brutal on its London operation, which we understand has lost 70% of its headcount since the deal. So far, the fall out of senior staff has been beneficial to investment banks. Robert Crane, its head of electronic execution, has joined HSBC, Graham Wayne, the head of EU electronic trading, has joined Barclays and Goldman Sachs hired its chief technology officer, Mike Blum, for its electronic trading arm.

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Contact for news, tips and comments: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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I worked in equity capital markets (ECM). It was fun while it lasted and it lasted 15 years in Europe and in Asia, so you could say I was lucky. Except, my time in ECM also fundamentally rewired my brain. When I stopped being an ECM banker I was a different person to the 22 year-old who joined from university. And that wasn’t just because I was older.

The thing with ECM is that you need to be 100% positive at all times. First, you need to be 100% positive to win the deal from the issuer: you need to convince them that you and your team are the best and that you will be able to execute a flawless IPO at $200 a share, even though the chance of doing this is no more than 50%. Then you need to be 100% positive to persuade the ECM syndicate desk that the stock has positive momentum, so that they can communicate this enthusiasm to clients – and persuade the clients to pay $200 even though they only want to pay $50.

More than any other job, therefore, ECM is about maintaining an attitude of utmost optimism and confidence in oneself and in one’s team, even when this is unwarranted. Admittedly, this is a feature of all sales jobs, but in ECM it’s worse. If you screw up in ECM, the bank is left with millions (or maybe billions) of unwanted securities on its books and you’re toast. In ECM you’re playing god, even though you know it’s a farce. You’re promising clients big things and persuading the syndicate desk that everything is going to be fine, even though you know you’re ultimately at the mercy of the markets and none of what you say matters.

This takes its toll. The people who come out worse are those who start to believe the lie. Who start to think that all the over-confidence is valid and to make it a fundamental part of their personality. You get ECM bankers who behave like everything is wonderful all the time. You most often see this among new joiners who suffer a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. They tried hard to get the job and when they arrive the reality is far tougher than they ever expected, but instead of complaining they fall straight into line and start praising everything in a kind of total subjugation of the self.

If this sounds harsh, it’s because I know what I’m talking about. I was one of those young people. I spent two years clapping along with the corporate wagon convinced that all the deals I was working on were great and that I was doing the best job in the world. Unless you were like that too, I was exhausting to be around.

And then I got a grip. The only way to reassert my individualism was to convince clients that I could pull off their IPO even when I wasn’t sure; to insist to the syndicate desk the price was great even when I knew it wasn’t. It required a new personality trait and that trait was…cynicism. I left banking over five years ago and it’s stayed with me ever since.

Philippe Ersatz is the pseudonym of a senior equity capital markets banker, now retired

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What does it take to make it into an investment bank these days? Impeccable grades, multiple internships, ‘executive’ positions in university societies, the CFA level I? Maybe, but now that junior bankers are more qualified than ever, will spending tens of thousands of dollars on an Masters in Finance qualification really give you the edge?

Masters in Finance qualifications are far from being de rigueur among front office analysts. Our own analysis of nearly 800 analysts who were hired in top investment banks in 2017 suggests that around 20% possessed these post-graduate degrees. They are typically most common for UK analyst classes and among analysts in sales and trading roles, but more recently Masters in Finance qualifications have sprouted up in Continental Europe and the U.S. and they’re gaining traction.

Masters in Finance courses aren’t cheap: they typically cost tens of thousands of pounds, euros, or dollars per year. If you’re studying a Masters in Finance with the intention of moving into banking, you therefore need to make sure it’s the right one. So, which course is most likely to land you the job?

Our analysis of the eFinancialCareers CV database suggests that the MSc Finance course at London School of Economics is now most likely to land you an investment banking job. This is followed by the Masters in Finance course at London Business School. Imperial College London, the University of St Gallen and Warwick Business School, which has risen rapidly up the rankings this year, make up the remainder of the top five.

The league table is based on the proportion of people with finance-focused Masters degrees in our CV database who have gone on to secure a ‘front office’ investment banking job upon graduation. This means those who have moved into M&A, capital markets, sales and trading or equity research. Since the rankings are simply based upon individuals’ moves upon graduation, we’ve included both pre-experience courses (which make up the majority) as well as the small number that recommend students have industry experience before undertaking them.

We’ve allocated a greater weighting to those gaining a position in a tier one investment bank (Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley), followed by tier two banks (Barclays, Credit Suisse and UBS) and finally tier three institutions (BNP Paribas, HSBC, Nomura, Royal Bank of Scotland and SocGen) and, together with the proportion of people securing a job, have assigned a score to each college.

While it’s not easy to get a front office investment banking job anywhere, the U.S. investment banks still attract more applications and hold more prestige. Our weightings have worked in favour of those schools which feed into the U.S. firms, therefore. Some of the French schools, which have very highly-regarded MSc Finance courses, would have ranked higher were it not for the fact that so many graduates go on to work for French banks. The means that the likes of HEC Paris, Edhec Business School and Grenoble School of Business, which tend to feature highly in the FT rankings, are all out of our top ten. At HEC, for example, 43% of people working in banking on our database are at tier three institutions.

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Neil DeSena was an electronic trading pioneer, who worked across the full spectrum of Wall Street – from the back office to a senior role at Goldman Sachs and head of its product development for its trade execution platform REDI. In February, four years after co-founding financial technology-focused bank, SenaHill Partners, he died aged just 52.

Devastated by the loss of his business partner, co-founder and managing partner Justin Brownhill has shouldered the leadership load at the bank alongside Gregg Sharenow, the CFO and a former Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse director, and Kyle Zasky, who co-founded the electronic-trading startup EdgeTrade and sold it to Knight Capital Group, where he became an MD.

“I can’t describe how much we all still miss Neil every single day,” Brownhill says. “His vision, spirit, creativity, kindness, integrity and passion were ever present.

“We can never replace him, and we continue to strive to embody his ideals as the mantra of our journey forward, bearing his great name with the utmost of pride, and doing so for him, our SenaHill family and the whole fintech community,” he says. “He was a great man of the highest character and integrity – Neil’s legacy will shine bright and long at SenaHill and beyond.”

Right now, SenaHill is planning to gradually bolster their ranks with MD-level hires, in addition to recruiting for analysts, associates, vice presidents and directors.

“All of our co-founders have been entrepreneurs, having started, scaled and exited companies, in addition to our banking pedigree,” Brownhill says. “We’re looking for seasoned fintech minds and seasoned investment banking professionals with fintech experience from analyst through MD.

“You now have to be armed with more than just business process understanding; you have to understand how technology process and business process and the budgeting process and even the compliance process all work hand-in-hand in financial services,” he says. “It’s imperative that people have a very strong appreciation and understanding of where the industry’s going, focusing on one core niche and area of expertise.”

Brownhill got his start as a financial institutions group (FIG) analyst at Salomon Brothers and then worked his way up to VP at UBS before becoming an investment banking director at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ). At that point, he became an EVP at global equities and foreign exchange trading technology company Lava Trading, which Citigroup acquired. After focusing on electronic trading as an MD at Citi for two years, he left to launch the Receivables Exchange, one of the earliest alternative lending companies, in 2007.

Brownhill has also dedicated himself to cultivating fintechs. In addition to his direct investments and paid advisory work in the space, he mentors participants in New York City’s FinTech Innovation Lab, Barclay’s TechStars and StartupBootcamp FinTech, and he serves as a judge for the Innotribe Start Up Challenge.

“The financial technology arena is quickly becoming a trillion-dollar-plus industry – everything is being driven by technology today, including financial services, so we thought about how we could best serve the landscape,” Brownhill says. “We’re in the third or fourth inning of a major technology transformation that has been escalating over the last 20 years, starting with electronic exchanges and the online brokerage industry.

“Technological innovation has spread from the back office to the middle office and has continued to massively affect the front-office side of the business – technology is transforming the infrastructure of the industry to make it more efficient,” he says. “Where we stand now, we’re starting to see the convergence of the large institutions as people look at AI, blockchain, electronic customer service, robotic automation processing and big data, currently at the fore of evolving front-, middle- and back-office processes within the industry.”
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“Innovation” is more than just a catchword to Sanjeev Behl – it is fundamental to his role at Citi and to the culture and mind-set change that he is driving across the Asia Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS) Client Operations and Global Trade Operations teams.

Behl, Citi’s Head of Client Operations for Asia TTS based in Singapore, says digital innovation is transforming the way the Bank serves its trade clients, who include some of the world’s leading importers and exporters. And it is also helping to make jobs in TTS more efficient and interesting.

One particular product – the first of its kind in the banking sector – has put Citi at the cutting edge of trade finance and offers wider potential uses for the firm as a whole: Citi’s OCR for Trade Processing.

OCR (optical character recognition) has been around for a few years as a technology, but Citi has developed it to be used in a whole new way to address a long-standing problem in international trade.

The global import/export business is still heavily paper-based and to support clients, banks have to process document bundles of multiple pages for most trade transactions.

Converting these pages from physical paper into images has traditionally involved “primitive scanning”. Once they were scanned, someone still had to read through them to manually pull out information for customers, or to perform compliance checks.

“When you think how many clients Citi has globally, and how many individual transactions they support, that’s a lot of processing,” adds Behl. “If you wanted to find, for example, the fourth invoice in a document set, you may have to search through multiple and (sometimes) hundreds of pages – nothing was automatically categorised. It was inefficient and time consuming for both employees and clients.”

Citi’s OCR for Trade Processing, which was launched late last year and developed in-house, changes all that. It recognises what each document is, puts it into multiple broad buckets (example: invoices, insurance and shipping), and further organises into sub-categories – all without human intervention.

Just as importantly, the new system (with the help of some rule-based algorithms) also enables a faster process for ‘sanctions screening’, the previously laborious process of inspecting trade documents for potential breaches of Compliance guidelines.

“Until recently, someone would need to manually identify any ‘proper nouns’ (such as countries, companies and people) and then see if they were non-compliant – a sanctioned shipping liner on a US sanctions list, for example,” says Behl.

Citi’s OCR for Trade Processing has now taken over a good part of this work, which has improved the accuracy of the reviews and has freed up time for Citi’s operations employees. The “really innovative” advantage of the system going forward is how it deals with countries, businesses and individuals, highlights Behl. It gives the Operator the option of highlighting these words, allowing employees to use a simple ‘click to pick’ function to choose whether they qualify as proper nouns.

“This automatically populates an ever-evolving proper-noun inventory. And over time, the artificial intelligence capability we’ve built into the system will use this to recognise more and more nouns, with a decreasing need for human involvement,” explains Behl.

“End-to-end automated transaction flow is our objective in trade finance. In other words: making things speedier and simpler,” he adds. “Given that trade is so paper intensive, it’s vital for us as a Bank that we digitize paper in a much more effective way.”

The bank is now looking to expand the system beyond trade. “It has potential applications in all areas of banking where physical documents are still involved. The next step is to see how we can leverage it for use in payments.”

Citi’s OCR for Trade Processing was designed – and continues to be improved – as a collaborative effort between the bank’s TTS Operations & Technology teams globally.

Says Behl, “Working together across the world, we’ve managed to digitise some key priority areas for us, leveraging on advances of technology and innovation. This has resulted in more efficient and productive ways of working both for us internally, as well as improved the speed at which we can serve our clients. We are constantly evolving and are excited about where the latest innovative technology can take us.”

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Early next year Michelle Andrews is making what she describes as a “huge and exciting move” – and she’s already counting down the days.

Andrews, Head of UK Premier and Wealth Insights at HSBC, will soon be among some 1,000 staff and recent recruits shifting into the state-of-the-art new headquarters for HSBC’s UK ring-fenced bank in Birmingham.

What’s making Andrews so passionate about moving from London to Birmingham? For starters, she’s enticed by working in one of the city’s greenest and most innovative buildings. The 10-storey office, which overlooks Birmingham’s newly renovated Centenary Square, is far from your typical banking workplace.

“Employees were consulted about the design, which incorporates different spaces for us to collaborate or socialise in, and is also built around an ‘open work’ principle, with no fixed desks,” says Andrews. “This helps foster a non-hierarchical culture, and if you’re not always chained to the same desk, you can build rapport more easily with people across the bank.”

It’s not only the idea of working in a cutting-edge building that Andrews finds inspiring – she’s also sold on Birmingham itself.

“I hadn’t spent much time there until recently, so I visited with an open mind. I was really impressed by how vibrant and busy the city feels,” says Andrews. “There are so many shopping, eating and entertainment options in Birmingham – most of them close to the new office – so I’m not going to miss London.”

Birmingham also makes sound business sense as the new headquarters of HSBC’s UK retail and commercial bank, which is being separated from the firm’s investment banking arm. “It’s dynamic and entrepreneurial, is already the second city for UK financial services, and has radically transformed itself over the past 20 years,” says Andrews. “I can’t wait to be a part of that success.”

Andrews describes Birmingham as being at “the heart of the UK”. “HSBC wants to be the bank of choice in this country, and being based there means our staff will be close to the broadest possible range of our UK-based clients – both people and businesses.”

HSBC, which took over Midland Bank 25 years ago, boasts strong historical ties to Birmingham. It already employs 2,500 people across the city and opened its first branch there in 1836.

The bank is now investing more than £200 million in Birmingham, and when its new office opens in the first quarter of 2018 it will bring hundreds of new jobs to the city. “The good news, if you’re looking for a new role right now, is that we’re still recruiting for Q1 and we’ll need more people over the long-term as well,” says Andrews

Current vacancies for HSBC’s new head office span a wide range of fields within retail banking and wealth management and commercial banking – from customer service, business development and relationship management to audit, risk and compliance.

“We also need product managers and product developers to help enhance our customer proposition, especially within wealth, a part of the business we’re very committed to expanding in the UK,” says Andrews.

HSBC is hiring for analytical and data jobs, too. “Data analytics skills are hugely important. As we build this new office, it’s vital that we don’t just guess what our customers want,” she adds.

Andrews says all the new Birmingham jobs are “exciting opportunities for ambitious professionals, both in the UK and globally”. “We have already attracted people from London and from markets like Germany, Hong Kong and Singapore.”

HSBC is committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce in Birmingham, says Andrews. “Diversity is especially important because the customer landscape in the UK is always changing and we must reflect that, as a UK bank in a major UK city.”

If you’re interested in working for HSBC, but aren’t sure whether you want to relocate, Andrews has the following advice: “Spend time in Birmingham, even before you apply, and come with no preconceived ideas. You’ll find that it’s a very green city – with about 600 open spaces and more canals than Venice – so it’s great for families. It also has three of the UK’s leading universities.”

You’ll also be impressed by the transport connections. The airport is just a 10-minute train ride from the city centre, while 90% of the UK business market is within four hours’ travel of Birmingham. Direct train services to London take under 90 minutes and journey times will be slashed to 49 minutes when the HS2 high-speed rail link is built.

Your commute to work is likely to be straightforward – HSBC’s head office is less than 10 minutes on foot from Birmingham New Street station. And if you’re relocating from London, you’ll enjoy the more affordable housing that Birmingham has to offer.

Once you join HSBC you’ll be working for a bank which “encourages high performance”, says Andrews. “We want to reward excellence and employ people who can set their own high expectations for their careers, supported by the great mentoring, long-term learning and competitive salaries that we offer.”

Flexible working is also encouraged at HSBC. “To give one of many examples, we offer part-time work for parents returning to us after the birth of a child. We want people to enjoy being part of this new office and to get a good work-life balance. And we want the office to reflect our brand, culture and heritage,” explains Andrews.

Andrews says moving to a new city and a new headquarters will help take her own career “to the next level”. “It will be the same for you, if you move here. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join us right from the start of an exciting new journey for the bank in the UK, and to grow your career as we grow in Birmingham.”

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UBS and Credit Suisse are hiring more relationship managers in Asia as they focus on capturing more assets from the region’s millionaires and billionaires.

But with just about every other bank growing their Asian wealth units, have the region’s two largest private banks been forced to lure candidates with above-average salaries? Industry experts suggest not.

“UBS and CS can pay attractive salaries, but they’re mostly reserved for strategic hires such as market heads and team heads,” says Liu San Li, an ex-private banker, now head of banking at search firm IGS Asia in Singapore. “They pay their less-senior RMs well, but the boutique private banks usually outbid them easily.”

Several boutiques – notably EFG, LGT, Safra Sarasin, UBP, and VP Bank – are all expanding in Asia in 2017.

UBS and Credit Suisse offer pay rises of 15% to 20% to new recruits in Singapore and Hong Kong, says Rahul Sen, a former Merrill Lynch private banker, now head of wealth management at search firm The Omerta Group. While this sounds substantial, the average rise offered to RMs in across the industry in Hong Kong is currently 20%, according to a survey we conducted last month.

“You could get the same percentage or more at other firms,” says Sen. “UBS and CS are quite stubborn – they’re the big guns and they know they can attract good bankers without offering obscene salaries.”

The two Swiss giants have stricter salary bands than their smaller competitors in Asia, which can sometimes rule out even a 15% pay hike for a new joiner, he adds. At UBS, for example, director-level RM base pay is usually capped at about US$250k, so if you’re already earning close to that at your current bank, UBS is unlikely to offer you a big rise.

UBS and Credit Suisse won’t give you a large bonus percentage either. As we reported in our private banking compensation survey, their average range is 8% to 12% – well below that of other private banks in Asia.

But while the percentage may be small, your actual bonus figure is likely to be competitive.

“There are RMs at UBS and CS who produce much higher revenues than they would elsewhere because they have more options in each product category and have tier-one product support and platforms,” says Liu. “This can collectively can lead to more revenue generated to compensate for a lower bonus ratio.”

“Product platforms at UBS are a major drawcard for RMs,” adds Sen. “At UBS an RM can create a structured product sitting at their desk, while at Standard Chartered you need to ask four other people and it will take four days to get it done.”

Candidates are increasingly attracted by the investment banking products that Credit Suisse and UBS are encouraging RMs to offer entrepreneurial private clients, says Clarence Law, a Singapore-based private banking consultant.

Beyond any product advantage, though, UBS and Credit Suisse enjoy better brand recognition in Asia than their rivals. “This makes joining them an easier sell for the banker’s clients and therefore for the banker,” says Law.

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How competitive are you? If you passed an exam with a mark that was, “incredible”, would you take that exam again just to get the highest score ever? If you broke your right wrist and still wanted to play tennis, would you learn to play with your left? Would you scuba dive with sharks to compete with death?

If so, you’re not unlike Antonio Horta Osório, the Portuguese boss of Lloyds Banking Group. Known for being competitive to an absurd extent, the Times details how Horta Osório’s relentless drive nearly got the better of him.

The issue was sleep, or rather the lack of it. After taking over at Lloyds in 2011, Horta Osório became obsessed with turning the bank around. Instead of sleeping, he would ruminate about Lloyds: “Going around in loops, thinking about the problems.” On family holidays he couldn’t switch off: “I felt enormous guilt at taking two weeks off and I didn’t enjoy them. I was constantly thinking about…the share prices that were fluctuating, and so even on holiday I wasn’t sleeping.”

The lack of sleep started to get the better of him. He became anxious and disassociated. He couldn’t speak properly. He couldn’t play tennis properly. “You wake up very, very tired and you have to go to work and when you go back home at night you already know that you are not going to be able to sleep properly. It becomes a vicious cycle and I did not solve it.”

Things came to a head when Horta Osório didn’t sleep at all for five days straight. On the brink of mental and physical exhaustion, he was admitted to the Priory clinic, dosed with sleeping tablets and compelled to sleep for 16 hours for nine full days.

This was the start of the recovery. Nowadays, Horta Osório goes to bed at 10.30pm, doesn’t read emails between 7pm and 7am, mostly eats protein, and accepts his own limitations. “It showed me I was not Superman. And I became a better person, more patient more understanding, more considerate. It was humbling, but you learn.”

Separately, J.P. Morgan has got yet another person dealing with technological innovation in the bank. As we reported last week, CIB CEO Daniel Pinto is now focused on technological change and has appointed David Hudson to come up with Google-style “moonshots.” Now Business Insider reports that Samik Chandarana, a former credit trader and J.P. Morgan veteran, has been tasked with developing the bank’s data and machine learning strategies.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs has already paid “dozens” of Frankfurt schools fees costing €22k per student to ensure its employees’ children can be schooled in Germany from September 2018. (The Times)

RBS chairman says that unless the British government has something to show for its Brexit plans by the first quarter of 2018, banks will start activating their contingency plans. (Bloomberg)

Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan and Deutsche chairman Paul Achleitner disagree on how to treat Deutsche’s biggest shareholder – the Chinese conglomerate HNA. Cryan suggests HNA’s investment is speculative and could be bad for the bank. (WSJ)

Citi wants to set up an onshore cash equities business in China and might hire 10 people. (Reuters)

It’s a bad time for British private equity jobs: no one wants to buy UK companies any more. (Guardian)

If you make more than $75,000 a year you’re more likely to take public transportation to work than people with lower incomes. (Bloomberg)

A Japanese woman died after working 150 hours of overtime in a month. (Guardian)

A former broker at Piper Jaffray who was forced to retire aged 42 because of chronic fatigue syndrome is fighting at claim from his insurer claiming he’s a “skiver”. If he succeeds, he could receive £2.4m to see him through to retirement. (The Sun)

Another long list of exceptional bankers under 35 whose achievements may make you feel inadequate. (Business Insider)

The curious website of some German tax lawyers. (Roll on Friday)

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Central risk desks are a good place to work. As we reported last year, the desks – which centralize the execution of trades and hedges across the bank – are about as close as you can get to proprietary trading in U.S. institutions these days. The process is highly quantitative and typically involves algorithms, but human traders also play a part and those humans are hot. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that one of Citi’s most senior central risk traders is understood to have left the bank.

Citi insiders say Dariusz Kowalewski, the head of central risk trading at Citi, quit a few weeks ago. Kowalewski’s destination is unclear. He’s not thought to have spent long at Citi and joined after a career that spanned Barclays, Citadel, Getco and Knight Capital Group. Neither Kowalewski nor Citi responded to a request for comment.

Kowalewski’s disappearance comparatively close to bonus time comes as various banks are said to be building their central risk desks in London. Both Credit Suisse and Jefferies are understood to be looking to add to central risk teams and UBS is said to be hiring following the exit of its central risk head Paul Jefferys to Citadel in April and his replacement by Ryan Gould, a managing director at Citi, in May.

Central risk traders are often highly quantitative: Jefferys famously achieved 10 A grades at A level in 2004. Jobs in the area can be highly lucrative. In August, the head of one central book in London told us he works 50 hours a week and earns £180 ($236) an hour.

However, central risk teams are also said by insiders to be in a state of disarray. “A lot of banks are building in central risk, but none of them are clear about the kinds of people they want to hire – central risk desks tend to recruit people with a quantitative slant, but they’re often quite junior,” says one recruiter. He adds that central risk desks also have to deal with resistance from old school traders who feel threatened by the new highly quantitative traders who are intervening in their trades.

For this reason, some top quant traders in central risk teams decide working for a bank is just too much of a headache. Why work in banking when you could have a less politicized job with a hedge fund instead?

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Photo credit: Citi London by Håkan Dahlström is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I walked into my first job in banking. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m the sort of person that banks are desperate to hire. I can lead digital projects, I know most major development languages and I’ve launched products in other industries that banks are only really just starting to think about. But, two years into my banking career, I’ve had enough.

It’s not about dressing down in the office, writing on white boards, agile working or keeping us stocked with free fruit. Banks are making all the right noises about attracting technologists, but there remains one huge shadow looming over the industry that it consistently fails to get from under – bureaucracy. It’s not something they can easily strip away. Bureaucracy is part of banks’ DNA, its runs through their veins and is central to the way they operate.

I look back on the past year’s work that I’ve managed to push through and just sigh with resignation. If I’m honest with myself, I’m pretty sure that my ‘results’ over the past 12 months could have been achieved within four weeks if I’d been working in another industry. It’s kind of depressing, and although the money’s good here I’m not sure I can handle the lack of progress on projects any more.

I get it – banks are huge multi-national organisations that are subject to more regulations than anyone cares to think about. This means they’re really careful about what gets the nod, but to a technologist used to the pressure of deadlines, the pressure of simply getting multiple people to agree to that something should be done is a completely alien and frustrating concept. Banks are kings of multi-layer management – even the smallest decision has to be signed off by multiple people, which is a huge waste of time and money. We’re being paid, I think, to actually get stuff done, but we end up either spending countless hours pushing paper around and waiting for management get their act together, or sitting on our hands. Even once something gets approval, there’s always the chance that the decision will be reversed.

People within the bank are split. They’re either eagerly chasing down this paperwork, frantically trying to convince management of the urgency of the project. Or, they sort of give up and stare at their screens all day or play Candy Crush on their phones, waiting some work to land on their desk.

This is a problem for banks who keep saying they want to attract the best and brightest technologists. I know a bunch of people who have simply quit and gone into fintech companies. It’s a riskier move and the pay is not as good as a big bank, but at least they’re at the coalface of a project again, tackling problems and creating products. Banks really need to change the way they work if they don’t want to lose all their best people. For me, a brief foray into the banking world is over – I’m sticking in technology but will be working in any other sector.

Graham Mansfield, a pseudonym, recently left his senior technology role at a large investment bank in Canary Wharf

Image: Getty Images

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If you’re working 80 hour weeks in the investment banking division (IBD) of a major U.S. bank, chances are that you’ve toyed with moving into a consulting firm instead. After all, consultants are generally held to offer a better lifestyle than banks. When we spoke to various junior bankers who’d moved to the so-called MBB consulting firms of McKinsey & Co, Bain and Boston Consulting – last month, they almost all assured us that they were having a better time of it.

However, there’s a downside to moving into consulting: pay. The average consultant earns less than the average banker. And the average partner in a consulting firm earns less than average managing director in an investment bank. This applies as much to firms like Boston Consulting Group as to consultants at Big Four firms like PWC.

Boston Consulting Group has just released the results for its UK-based partnership for the year ending March 31st 2017. They show the average of its nearly 700 UK-based employees earning £101k ($133k). The average of its 56 UK partners earned £1.1m. Both numbers were consistent with the previous year.

While these are big numbers, banks’ numbers are – needless to say – bigger still. Goldman Sachs International pays its average UK employee £320k. It pays its average member of UK code staff (typically senior managers and significant risk takers) around £2m, while J.P. Morgan pays its code staff an average of around £1.3m.

BCG’s results also highlight the advantage of working for a consulting firm though: most of your pay is cash. Just 6% of 2017 compensation at the firm was deferred.

The pay figures don’t include wages paid to “outsourced consultancy” staff from other BCG Group companies who came to work in the UK during the year.

For bankers happy to accept a flatter pay trajectory, the good news is that BCG is hiring. UK headcount rose nearly 30% last year to 692 people as the firm added 98 new consultants and 72 new administrative staff.

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““

HSBC has lost a number of senior investment bankers as it continues to restructure and layoff in the upper ranks, and the latest departure is David Noble, who headed up equity capital markets for the Americas.

Noble worked at HSBC for over 12 years, having joined in 2005 from Lehman Brothers in New York as a senior vice president, but left in the past week – around a month after the bank shook up the senior management of its ECM team in North America. In September, HSBC named Brendan Spinks and Alfred Traboulsi as co-heads of ECM for North America.

He established HSBC’s Latin America ECM business and also expanded its U.S. operation during his time in charge. Noble was promoted to managing director and head of the ECM business across the Americas just a year after signing up to the bank from Lehman Brothers. He had around 11 direct reports across equity and equity-linked origination and syndicate.

Shortly after the appointment of Matthew Westerman in February 2016, HSBC made some sweeping changes to the senior ranks of its investment bank. In June last year, it up a corporate, financials and multinationals banking unit (CFMB) headed by Philippe Henry, while John Crompton, who was HSBC’s global head of corporate finance, and Florian Fautz, global head of M&A, left. Around a dozen senior bankers departed at the time, but Noble and other regional ECM heads – Adrian Lewis in EMEA and Alexis Adamczyk in Asia – all remained in their roles.

However, HSBC has been continued to cut costs within its investment bank, and senior bankers have departed throughout 2016. It said earlier this year that it was cutting 100 investment banking roles, primarily in the senior ranks. As we’ve reported variously throughout the year, senior bankers have departed and often decided to do something completely different. In the U.S. Ben Katz, who was head of DCM for the financial institutions group for the U.S. and co-head of HSBC’s financing solutions group for the Americas, left in February this year and launched his own advisory firm, Katz Capital Advisory. Matthew Riez, the global co-head of HSBC’s financing solutions group, started WhitmoreJoni Capital Management, while its head of consumer investment banking, Luis Galeano, left to become president and CEO of Cookies United, a New York bakery.

Separately, Paul Hatton, who was head of diversified industrial coverage at HSBC, has left for Deutsche Bank in New York. He joined the German bank in September, having spent the previous ten years as a managing director at HSBC in the U.S. He joined HSBC from ABN Amro in 2007, where he was a managing director within its debt capital markets team.

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““

In a move that could foreshadow banks’ struggle to shift staff to Europe ahead of Brexit, Dutch bank ING has been very busy hiring traders in London. The recruitment spree follows last year’s news that (irrespective of Brexit) ING was planning to shift between 50 and 60 trading jobs from Amsterdam and Brussels to London. Headhunters suggest that quite a few of the bank’s traders in the two cities didn’t want to be uprooted.

ING’s hires include: Stephane Siffredi, a director in rates and inflation trading who was last employed at RBC Capital Markets in 2015; Luke Negal, a former government bond trader at Morgan Stanley and RBS, who left RBS in November 2016 and joined in ING in August; Akash Garg, a junior emerging markets credit trader from Merrill Lynch, who joined in July; Gurchetan Lakhmana, a former VP in rates and FX trading from RBS who joined in September; and Gregory Nys, a European government bond trader from Credit Agricole, who joined in April.

A spokesperson for ING said the bank is, “relocating many colleagues from Amsterdam and Brussels,” and that, “some hires are being made locally from London’s expert talent pool in trading.” She added that ING is already seeing the benefit of, “bringing together the products, knowledge and experiences from London, Brussels and Amsterdam.”

Headhunters suggest the bank’s new recruits in London follow some traders’ unwillingness to displace their families from Europe. “There are traders who didn’t want to move for personal reasons,” says Christian Robbins at Tradestone Search.

Sources also suggest that some senior traders at ING were asked to accept UK employment contracts, and chose not to.

When it was announced last year, ING’s decision to move trading staff to London was said to be unrelated to Brexit and simply part of a plan to streamline its trading operation. At the time, ING’s CEO Ralph Hamers was quoted as saying the bank would probably have to review its activities as the effects of Brexit became clearer. ING’s new London traders could yet, therefore, find themselves moved to the EU – or ditched for any traders ING’s left behind.

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Photo credit: well designed signage by Martijn van Exel is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

A senior manager at a rival bank would like to ‘interview’ you, but it’s not part of a formal hiring process, no HR people are coming along, and they want to meet at a cafe. In fact, there’s no actual vacancy on offer right now.

Should you be suspicious? Probably not. Headhunters in Asia say they’re seeing a marked rise in so-called ‘introductory interviews’ in which bankers invite fellow bankers to meet well in advance of any official recruitment kicking off. Singapore and Hong Kong are hotbeds for this style of interview because of their comparatively small and interconnected banking sectors.

But don’t be fooled by the informal setting – these get-togethers could be the first step to landing a job, so it pays to treat them seriously. Here’s what to expect and how to behave.

You need to be at least an SVP

“Introductory interviews are mostly for senior candidates – SVPs/directors and above. They’re a less formal platform for bankers, usually in the same field, to assess one another and to build contacts,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting Group in Singapore.

You could be replacing someone who’s getting canned

“I now organise introductory interviews frequently for my clients,” says a Hong Kong-based headhunter. In some cases the bank will ask the recruiter to arrange the meeting – for example in “sensitive” situations where managers are scoping out potential replacements for staff they plan to cull, he adds.

There might not be an immediate opening on offer

“Instead the manager will often be considering strong potential candidates to build a ‘bench’ of talent for upcoming roles,” says the Hong Kong recruiter.

You’ll be sitting in a cafe for up to 90 minutes

Introductory interviews are almost always off-site, usually at a cafe, says Chai Leng Lim, director of banking and financial services at recruiters Randstad in Singapore. If you’re going to one, set aside at least an hour – 90 mins to be safe.

It’s mainly about ‘fit’

“Managers use introductory interviews to get to know the potential candidate and ascertain their cultural fit with the bank,” says Lim. “They also give managers the opportunity to assess the kind of jobs that would best fit the potential candidate.”

Focus your questions on the business

If there’s no immediate vacancy, don’t bombard the manager with too many questions about their hiring plans – you’ll sound desperate. “The meeting could be very exploratory or even confidential, so focus some of your questions around the business plans moving forward, not the current job situation,” says the Hong Kong recruiter.

And on team dynamics

Also express an interest in the manager’s own job and their team, says Lim. “Seize the opportunity to find out more about the manager’s portfolio and the workplace culture within the team to get an overview of the people you might be working for and with.”

Let them set the tone

“It’s sometimes a tricky meeting as it’s not precisely a formal interview but it’s not casual either,” says the Hong Kong recruiter. “Observe and match the tone of the interviewer to a certain degree. Be prepared to talk about what you want to do in your career and the type of bank you’d like to work for. In some ways it’s not unlike meeting a recruiter.”

Do prepare

The questions asked may not be particularly probing, but you must still prepare well for an introductory interview. “Make no mistake, you’ll be evaluated for the role or potential future role, so it’s important to build rapport and pitch yourself well during the coffee,” says Kuek from Meyer Consulting.

Don’t be negative

The biggest mistake people make at these meetings is being too negative about their current bank. “Just because you’re in a cafe you can’t be too casual and chatty – so no complaints about your bosses or how messed up your bank is,” says Kuek.

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““

A good time is seemingly coming soon for equities sales traders of a certain age. Financial News reports that the coming MiFID II regulations, which are due to be introduced in Europe from January 2018, are due to cause such confusion among asset managers that they will turn away from electronic trading systems and choose to interact with human beings instead.

If asset managers do this, life will become more complicated for banks which can more easily satisfy MiFID II’s “best execution” requirements using electronic trading systems. It will also become incumbent upon banks to find armies of human sales trades who can talk clients through the complexities of market structure under MiFID II, and unfortunately these sales traders are in short supply.

“You don’t have a lot of new talent coming through in that area because people aren’t trained to be sales traders,” an ‘executive’ tells Financial News. Because of this, he says the available sales traders tend to be in their 30s and 40s rather than their 20s and 30s.

The implication is that these 30 and 40-something sales traders who’ve spent the past decade struggling against the dissemination of electronic trading systems are to be granted a temporary reprieve. For the next year, while MiFID II bids in, everyone will want them to hold clients’ hands. “[Asset managers] might be more concerned about using a straightforward [trading algorithm] in the early months of MiFID II,” says the head of one brokerage recruiting human traders ahead of the rules.”They might want to pay someone to manage that order for them, make sure they’re accessing the right venues and navigating the new landscape.” It won’t be long though before clients will be confident enough to use the electronic trading systems again.

Separately, yesterday was a bad day for John Cryan and Jes Staley, the respective CEOs of Deutsche Bank and Barclays, who were lambasted in the press. Both men are struggling against shareholder dissatisfaction over their bank’s feeble share price. Both are being urged to do something about it – but for different reasons.

In the case of Cryan, the main criticism is that he’s done a good job of “cleaning up the bank” and cutting costs, but that he doesn’t have enough of a vision for future growth, particularly in the investment bank. In the case of Staley, the criticism is that he’s almost too visionary and that his vision of a stronger investment bank generating higher returns isn’t a viable one. If the two men copied from each other’s playbook and altered their strategies accordingly, all might be resolved.

Meanwhile:

Revenue at Deutsche’s investment bank has declined in all but two quarters since he took over in 2015 and has been falling in recent months. (Bloomberg)

Deutsche’s shares have underperformed banking peers by 30% since Mr. Cryan took over. He should articulate a better, more coherent picture of what Deutsche Bank will ultimately become. (Wall Street Journal)

Deutsche Bank is launching a new MiFID II related fixed income systematic internalizer before the mandatory deadline for banks in September 2018. In this way, it hopes to win market share: “By registering early as a systematic internalizer, we will be in a position to help clients by taking on post-trade reporting duties as soon as the obligations come into force.” (Bloomberg)

Deutsche Bank says it will put over 150,000 lines of code from its electronic platform Autobahn into the public domain. To start with, it will share the code with the Symphony messaging and collaboration platform. (Finextra)

Ex-Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins semi-gloating over current low share price (When Jenkins left the shares were 260p, now they’re 190p). (Financial Times)

Senior French banker in London: “Personally, I am preparing for life in Paris. Unless we get a (soft) Brexit deal, it’s almost inevitable.” (Reuters)

BNP Paribas Securities Services is using artificial intelligence to help manage trade matching delays. (Finextra)

Banks are spending more time talking about machine learning than MIFID II on conference calls. (Bloomberg)

The Bank of England’s QE buying was carried out in a secret room on the first floor, reached by windowless, stone-clad corridors that give the impression of walking towards a fortress turret. (New Statesman)

A reminder that banks by no means have a monopoly on bad bosses. (The Cut)

Be glad you didn’t become an academic. (Bloomberg)

Two former bankers (one an ex-Merrill derivatives trader) have retrained as GPs after their child was stillborn: “The only leftover from our previous lives was our Porsches.” (Daily Mail)

Your risk preference is an enduring trait, like intelligence. (New Scientist)

How to avoid being too nice. (The New Potato)

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““

The former head of fixed income trading at Schroders, who left the asset manager in 2016 after as part of a broader management shake-up, has re-emerged in a newly-created role heading up trading at Insight Investment.

Nick Robinson is now head of trading at the £552bn asset manager, a role he started earlier this month. Robinson left Schroders in June last year after more than 23 years heading up its fixed income trading team, and has spent the past 18 months running his own trading consultancy, which advises asset managers and hedge funds on everything from MiFID II regulation and the selection of the right trading platform.

Robinson fills a newly-created role at Insight Investment overseeing trading across all of its asset classe, which include fixed income, FX, equities and liability-driven investment.

His exit at Schroders was part of a broader shakeout of its trading team. Rob McGrath, who oversaw more than 40 traders across equities, fixed income and foreign exchange at Schroders, left at the same time as Robinson. Their responsibilities were taken over by head of equity trading, Gregg Dalley and Robbie Boukhoufane, who is now head of fixed income and FX trading at Schroders.

McGrath is now heading up his own fintech advisory firm called ZigIQ.

It’s been a tough time for senior traders in asset management, as large firms have merged heads of trading roles to oversee multiple asset classes. Over the past two years, some long-standing names have left big buy-side firms. Tony Russell, the head of trading at Newton Investment Management, left in November after nearly 20 years at the firm and has yet to re-emerge elsewhere. Paul Walker-Duncalf, the former global head of equity trading at BlackRock who left in July 2015, has been working for outsourced trading firm, Linear Investments, since May last year.

In an interview with Robinson after his departure last year, he told us that the role of buy-side traders has evolved beyond simply executing trades for portfolio managers.

“The skills needed are changing,” he said. “Buy-side traders need to add value to portfolio managers now. There are so many distorting factors in markets now, QE and other central bank, that the same trade can require different responses to market conditions,” he says. “MiFID II has meant a more of a focus on demonstrating best execution, so buy-side traders need to advise on this.”

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Image: Getty Images

““

Was it Deutsche Bank? Was it London? Was it both? Who knows for sure, but one of Deutsche’s hottest young managing directors has quit the German bank and resurfaced at….BNP Paribas in Hong Kong.

When we spoke to him in 2015, Hamzah Kahloon was the head of structuring for Deutsche Bank in the MENA and Turkey regions. Headhunters say he was subsequently also given responsibility for special situations structuring globally. Deutsche Bank declined to comment, but ex-DB colleagues say Kahloon quit around three months ago. After a period of gardening leave, he’s recently surfaced at BNP Paribas’ Asian operation, where he’s said to be responsible for cross asset class structuring and solutions in APAC.

Kahloon’s exit isn’t indicative of upheaval in Deutsche’s structuring business. Head of structuring James Davies has been with the bank 17 years and Sean Flanagan, the bank’s global head of equity structuring, has been there since 2010, when he joined from Citi. However, Deutsche’s structurers have experienced some changes. The former global head of structuring Ram Nayak was promoted to lead the bank’s fixed income business two years ago, and Flanagan was given his role only after the former head of equity structuring, Tom Leake, quit for Goldman in November 2016.

In light of his success at Deutsche, Kahloon’s exit is curious though. Headhunters say he was promoted to MD in 2012, just seven years after joining from university and that he was on a fast track at the bank. His move to BNP in Asia suggests it wasn’t fast enough.

Kahloon’s exit from Deutsche around July also suggests that BNP bought out his bonus. Last year, Deutsche Bank scrapped performance bonuses for staff above associate level. This year, the German bank has promised to pay people although weak performance at the bank’s trading business might mitigate against extreme generosity.

More than a bigger bonus, headhunters suggest Kahloon was likely drawn by a bigger job title and BNP’s bigger commitment to structured products. He may also have wanted to work in Hong Kong. After all, taxes are lower there and there’s no Brexit to contend with.

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Photo credit: Hong Kong from The Peak by Dhilung Kirat is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

““

Masters of the Universe adjust to the new reality as tech hits government bonds

I sat the CFA in Asia. I was surrounded by money-hungry teenagers

Morning Coffee: Banks of the future will only employ a tiny handful of elites. Why you should hire your children

Meanwhile:

Where it’s still possible to earn seven figure packages in high frequency trading

My ECM job messed with my mind

The top 30 Masters in Finance for getting a job in investment banking

Months after the death of its founder, this fintech-focused investment bank is growing

New tech innovation changing the face of jobs at Citi

HSBC is hiring for its new UK headquarters. Here’s how to get a job there

Why you won’t get an “obscene” salary at UBS or Credit Suisse in Asia

Morning Coffee: ‘Absurdly competitive’ banker made to sleep 16 hours a night. New man to know at J.P. Morgan

Meanwhile:

Top central risk trader quits Citi as rival banks hire

“Banks’ technology teams are a bureaucratic nightmare”

This is how much you’ll really earn working for Boston Consulting Group

HSBC’s head of equity capital markets for the Americas has departed

ING hiring in London after EU traders refused to move

The remarkable rise of the ‘introductory’ job interview in Asia. And how to prepare for one

You need to be at least an SVP

You could be replacing someone who’s getting canned

There might not be an immediate opening on offer

You’ll be sitting in a cafe for up to 90 minutes

It’s mainly about ‘fit’

Focus your questions on the business

And on team dynamics

Let them set the tone

Do prepare

Don’t be negative

Morning Coffee: Surging demand for 35 year-old traders a temporary blip. Cryan and Staley – the same, but different

Meanwhile:

Schroders’ ex-head of fixed income trading has re-emerged in big new role at Insight Investment

One of Deutsche’s top young MDs in London quit for BNP in HK

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You need to be at least an SVP

You could be replacing someone who’s getting canned

There might not be an immediate opening on offer

You’ll be sitting in a cafe for up to 90 minutes

It’s mainly about ‘fit’

Focus your questions on the business

And on team dynamics

Let them set the tone

Do prepare

Don’t be negative

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