Hiring meltdown: bankers in Singapore and HK suddenly pull out of job offers

November 9, 2017, 10:21 am

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You get through a gruelling multi-stage interview process, you prove your worth in a psychometric test, and you accept a job offer from a global investment bank. But before you start your new role, you suddenly pull out.

You’re not alone. Recruiters in Singapore and Hong Kong say they frequently encounter banking professionals who turn down jobs at the last minute. Here are some of the more colourful candidate excuses.

Control freak

“A candidate got cold feet because the hiring manager was following up very closely on her exit – not taking a counteroffer, her actual last day – resulting in her feeling harassed and having doubts about the boss’ management style,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting in Singapore. “The candidate didn’t want a control-freak boss, so decided to stay put. I tried to salvage the situation by mediating, but she refused to budge. The overly enthusiastic manager did more damage than good by getting too involved in the exit process, which is best handled by a recruiter.”

Under investigation

“I recently had a candidate change their mind after resigning because the regulator had just issued an investigation at their current bank,” says Richard Aldridge, a director at recruiters Black Swan Group in Singapore. “They decided it would be better to stay and be involved in a high-profile investigation as this would give them exposure and experience they could use in the future.”

Love-struck techie

“I found a great technology candidate, an American living in Hong Kong, for a leadership role at an investment bank,” says Vince Natteri, director of Hong Kong headhunters Pinpoint Asia. “After he accepted the offer he took a short trip to the States. He never came back because he found himself a girlfriend there. I tried making him return with the girlfriend, and so did the bank, but the heart is stronger than the head.”

Anxious expat

Farida Charania, Asia Pacific CEO of search firm Nastrac Group, secured a rare expat package (housing, schooling, club membership) for a New York-based banker applying for a Singapore job. “But the thought of making a large change – country, culture, bank – wound her up and she refused to move to Singapore,” says Charania. “Finally, the bank was kind enough to let her work from NYC in the short term, travel occasionally to Singapore, and relocate permanently after a year. But eventually she still refused to move and she left the bank.”

Too many interviews

A senior overseas-based banker recently pulled out of a regional role in Singapore after a four-month interview process, says Jay Abeyasinghe, associate director of financial services at recruiters Morgan McKinley in Singapore. “He was concerned about the length of the hiring, which unfortunately reflected badly on the bank. And he was also worried about whether he’d get an Employment Pass for Singapore – the level of uncertainty relating to passes has risen markedly of late.”

Getting flexible

“A candidate accepted a buy-back in her current job as her bank suddenly gave her the flexibility to work three days a week, matching the offer from the bank wanting to hire her,” says Aldridge from Black Swan. “She hadn’t thought her current firm would be that flexible, but she probably should have had internal discussions before going through a time-consuming hiring process.”

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Morning Coffee: The bank which employed too many jerks. Bankers’ wives speak up

November 9, 2017, 11:40 pm

≫ Next: RBS’s mountain man has just made a switch to the buy-side

≪ Previous: Hiring meltdown: bankers in Singapore and HK suddenly pull out of job offers

Once upon a time, under Bob Diamond, Barclays was known for a policy of excluding jerks from getting jobs at the bank. Through a process of exhaustive interviewing, anyone with disagreeable personality traits was identified and directed to the rejection pile. This might be why Barclays is sometimes known as a comparatively pleasant place to work for even now. Under Anshu Jain and his predecessors, however, Deutsche Bank appears to adopted the opposite tack.

In a long article about Deutsche’s origins and the situation in which it currently finds itself, the Financial Times says that in the 1990s and 2000s Deutsche set out to employ people who wanted to make money, no matter what. “Deutsche always hired mercenaries into the investment bank,” one former senior executive tells the FT, “They didn’t care about ethics.” Nor did it help that Deutsche historically encouraged internal politicking by often placing two people into the same role and pitching them against one another, or that Edson Mitchell, founder of the investment bank, had “Wild West attitudes” to risk taking, or that Deutsche’s U.S. business was built on the acquisition of Banker’s Trust, which came with its own set of nefarious goings-on after staff there were caught shifting dormant customer money into the bank’s own accounts.

This, suggests the FT, is both the bank and the set of bankers that current CEO John Cryan has inherited at Deutsche. While Cryan himself is “dry-witted,” “plain-speaking,” “cultured” and “parsimonious”, legacy Deutsche staff – especially those who’ve worked for the bank for over a decade, are likely to be the exact opposite. It’s Cryan’s job to get these leopards to change their spots. Good luck to him. Mitchell’s ethos was that, “If you don’t have $100m by the time you’re 40, you’re a failure.” With that attitude baked into the DNA of Deutsche’s investment bank, Cryan faces an uphill task.

Separately, spare a thought for anyone married to a (male) banker. Following claims two years ago that bankers were awarding “wife bonuses”, Quartz has a piece by a sociologist who’s spoken to wealthy women, many of whom are married to men who work in finance. These women complain about negative perceptions and the supposition that they’re undeserving. Many have college degrees and feel they’re wasting their talents. Their husbands hold all the money and all the power and they’re forced to conceal their use of paid childcare. One, who used to be a banker herself, says: ““[I’m] well-educated. I had a career. You know, where is all that now?…There are power dynamics, where he’s the breadwinner now, and I’m really not. And yet, I do so many things for the family that you can’t put a number on it.”

Meanwhile:

Javier Oficialdegui, a longstanding friend and colleague of Andrea Orcel, will now be running UBS’s investment bank in EMEA. (Financial News)

Fresh from cutting 100 staff, fund manager Janus Henderson is now ready to meet its cost target. (Financial News)

A French fund manager in Dublin is offering voluntary redundancy packages. (Bloomberg)

Contract roles in the City of London are actually up 23% year-on-year. (CityAm)

Citi is dabbling in its very own cryptocurrency: “Citicoin.” (Seeking Alpha)

Natixis, queen of exotic trading. (Bloomberg)

Gary Cohn tacitly reveales that he slept through years of Goldman Sachs media training. (Dealbreaker)

Low status males find women particularly threatening. High status males don’t. (PlosOne)

Flight diverted after wife uses sleeping husband’s finger to unlock phone, flies into a rage when she finds he’s been having an affair. (Guardian)

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RBS’s mountain man has just made a switch to the buy-side

November 10, 2017, 3:18 am

≫ Next: You alienate the top finance recruiters at your peril

≪ Previous: Morning Coffee: The bank which employed too many jerks. Bankers’ wives speak up

A former Royal Bank of Scotland managing director who quit investment banking to embark on an ambitious campaign to scale Everest for charity has returned to the financial sector in a senior role at an expanding buy-side firm.

Rory McHugh, the former head of alternative finance, specialist lenders and FinTech solutions at RBS, has just joined Ares Management as a managing director focused on structured credit.

McHugh joins the $106bn alternative asset manager at a time when the firm has been hiring for its credit business in Europe. Peter Higgins, a former partner and senior portfolio manager within BlueBay Asset Management’s leveraged finance division, joined in June to start a new liquid credit and high yield business in London. Jason Late, a director and high yield analyst at Deutsche Bank, also joined in September as a managing director within its European credit team.

Large alternative funds are increasingly moving into direct lending to fill the void left by traditional bank lenders. Ares said earlier this week that it had committed $3bn to 67 loan transactions within its U.S. credit fund during the third quarter.

McHugh left RBS in November last year, but spent a number of months consulting with FinTech companies and regrouping after 20 years in investment banking. At the beginning of this year, he started a gruelling training regime to prepare for an expedition to scale Everest.

“I’ve recently been training 19 days out of 20,” he told us in March. “This can mean hitting the hills for a six to ten hour walk with a 30 kilo backpack, staying in the City and going running, or – more often than not – running up and down the stairs in my ten-story apartment block in Clapham with a weight vest on.”

He raised £50k for Child Rescue Nepal, which enabled it to build four new schools in the remote region of Makwanpur in Nepal.

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You alienate the top finance recruiters at your peril

November 10, 2017, 3:56 am

≫ Next: Why Citigroup’s head of structuring has quit the “uninspiring” trading floor to build an AI food app

≪ Previous: RBS’s mountain man has just made a switch to the buy-side

You either love them or hate them. When you work in finance, the recruiters who call on a regular basis (how regular depends upon the popularity of your sector) are either a nuisance or the best thing ever. Too many people see them as a nuisance. This is both misguided and dangerous.

Personally, I love recruiters. I think they are super-useful and an important part of the ecosystem.

This is why I think that. Recruiters are like traders. Their job is to get trades done. They are trying to sell you the job and they are trying to sell you to the firm that might hire you. They are in the business of brokering human capital. They get paid if they can convince two parties that don’t know or trust each other to transact. Yes, they often don’t understand the job being offered or they don’t understand you, but that’s not the point.

You therefore shouldn’t look at recruiters as experts in your role. And you shouldn’t be frustrated when they don’t know everything about your market. You have to look at them as sources of liquidity in an illiquid job market and as sources of market intelligence about jobs.

It’s important therefore not to alienate recruiters, especially the best ones who can be a huge asset to your career.

Whenever a recruiter calls, it’s is your opportunity to learn about the human capital allocation happening in your market – aka who’s hiring, who’s firing, how much people are being paid. You need to be prepared with questions relating to this. The answers are incredibly powerful: they’ll inform you whether or not you’re getting screwed on pay, whether you could be in a better job with superior growth prospects, where people are happy and where they’re unhappy.

If you play headhunters right, they’ll do a lot of work for you. They can act as your sales team, your agents on the ground. You get them excited about you, you tell them all the cool, differentiated, money-making things you’re up to and how much your current firm loves you. Then you let them loose on the town.

If you’ve done your job well, they’ll come back to you with a handful of good jobs in no time.

You see, the human capital market in finance has always been and continues to be an opaque and illiquid market. It’s hard to know where the opportunities are and it’s hard to know who’s a good employer and who’s a good employee. This is what headhunters do.

The absolutely worst thing you can do, therefore, is to brush the headhunters off. To be brusque, rude, and belittling. I’ve seen people do this and believe me, things haven’t worked out for them.

Of course, not all headhunters are good. Just like any other industry, there are plenty of people in the game for a quick buck. Your job is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Figure out the ones worth talking to. You can tell the good ones because they usually have at least five to ten years of experience and know their market well. However, you can’t take it for granted that today’s junior headhunter won’t be tomorrow’s headhunting star. As a rule of thumb, be polite but firm with all the recruiters who phone you, and never slam the door on the best. They will make your career – or break it.

What I Learnt on Wall Street is an education focused business founded by an ex-Goldman MD and Family Office allocator. His firm has just launched: The 5 keys to unlocking a successful career in Finance, with the 1st class being held on November 23rd.

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Why Citigroup’s head of structuring has quit the “uninspiring” trading floor to build an AI food app

November 10, 2017, 4:36 am

≫ Next: J.P. Morgan M&A EDs are leaving in search of promotion elsewhere

≪ Previous: You alienate the top finance recruiters at your peril

In 2011, Erwin Parviz had quit as global head of structuring at Citigroup to spend his time at the top of a mountain. Paragliding, climbing, skiing or any adrenaline-fuelled pastime occupied his days. As far as he was concerned, his days working for an investment bank were over.

“I was just tired of working on the trading floor,” he says. “Before the crisis, it was business driven, and all that was needed to thrive was an ability to make money. Afterwards, a different type of manager emerged and the people leading were very political. It was not very inspiring.”

As the head of structuring and quantitative investment strategies at Citigroup, Parviz said that the scope for innovation within the team was constant during the pre-crisis glory days – new products, new client segments and new geographies to move into. Then it became a more arcane job; helping clients manage their risk during relatively complex fund-raising deals.

“The creativity and thirst for knowledge was just no longer there,” he says. “I had to get out.”

Parviz is a fine art photographer and an adrenaline junkie, so the plan five years ago was to say goodbye to banking all together and try something new. Then the Russians came calling.

Parviz says that he was about to embark on a paraglide when he received a call out of the blue from Russian investment bank Sberbank, inviting him to an interview in Moscow. The bank was building its structured products team, and needed someone to lead it. Up until this point, he’d spent the best part of 15 years working in quant roles in London.

“I didn’t want to go back to banking, I wanted to take time off and regroup,” he says. “I arrived in Moscow in the middle of a grim winter. Snow was falling horizontally and blowing in my face as I made my way to an interview feeling slightly underwhelmed. But the people at Sberbank were interesting.”

Parviz was lured back into investment banking, and spent the past five years building the structured products team at Sberbank in the Russian capital, which he said was a “weird side-move” that worked out for him. But in April, he quit banking again – this time for good.

“It’s strange, because quants are suddenly in demand I’ve been contacted by some finance firms. It’s tempting, but I’m trying something different. I want to see what I’ve been missing,” he says.

Parviz has launched 100Nuts, a start-up app based around food and nutrition, underpinned with artificial intelligence. He says that he’s being “deliberately vague” about the concept while they work out the kinks in the technology, but essentially it’s an app that tracks what you’re eating and makes recommendations on what you really should be eating.

“It’s an exciting time, and is a refreshing experience after working in banking for so long. It’s fast-moving, and your product has to iterate quickly in order to be able to evolve, or it dies. Things are done in days or weeks, rather than years as they tend to be in finance,” he says.

Parviz has used his connections in Russia to access the plentiful supply of quantitative and data science talent on the ground. He’s also team up with other team members to bootstrap the venture himself before turning to external investors. Since starting the business earlier this year, Parviz says that he’s gained “strong traction” with online food producers and retailers and is moving back to London in order to launch into the UK and European market.

He says that the new venture is tough, but it’s also a chance to reinvent himself.

“What I’ve realised is that the idea is just 1% of the journey to actually making something. It’s a cliché, but it’s been hugely challenging but really enjoyable,” he says.

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J.P. Morgan M&A EDs are leaving in search of promotion elsewhere

November 10, 2017, 6:08 am

≫ Next: Morgan Stanley loses senior fixed income quant as hiring heats up at the end of the year

≪ Previous: Why Citigroup’s head of structuring has quit the “uninspiring” trading floor to build an AI food app

When Goldman Sachs made its managing director promotions this week, 101 of its new MDs were in the investment banking division (IBD). That’s not bad: 96 of Goldman’s MD promotions were in IBD last time the bank made promotions (in 2015) and this was feted as a great success. But while Goldman is elevating its next generation of investment banking talent, there are reportedly fears that executive directors elsewhere won’t be so lucky.

Bank of America, Citi, UBS and Goldman aside, it hasn’t been a great year for banks’ M&A revenues. While these four firms achieved increases of 25%, 13%, 10.3% and 9% respectively in the first nine months of this year compared to last, the likes of J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse saw their M&A revenues increase by a lot less or even shrink (in the case of Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley).

M&A headhunters say this is causing some consternation among executive directors (EDs) in M&A who were hoping to get promoted to MD, but suspect that spaces at the top will be limited. “A lot of banks are too full at executive director level,” says one, speaking off the record. “There’s a classic need to thin down at the top.”

At J.P. Morgan, headhunters say some executive directors have left of their own accord. Christopher Dickinson, for example, left in September to go to Jefferies, where he is now a managing director in UK investment banking. Why wait for uncertain promotion when you can become MD in an instant in a new role?

At the same time – and despite a recent claim by J.P.’s head of M&A Carlos Henandez to the effect that deals are only “getting bigger“, headhunters say that J.P. Morgan has been gently encouraging some M&A EDs out the door. “It’s nothing too harsh, more a conversation along the lines of ‘Your future probably isn’t with this firm,'” says another London headhunter, also speaking anonymously. “I know of five or six who’ve left J.P. under these conditions in the past two months,” he adds, declining to give names.

J.P. Morgan declined to comment on the alleged exits. However, headhunters said it’s not the only bank where M&A staff are unlikely to be unhappy in the coming round of MD promotions. “Deutsche Bank is massively over-clubbed in some teams at director and senior VP level,” says one headhunter. The German bank increased M&A revenues by just 2.2% in the first nine months of this year, and is likely to focus promotions on the U.S., where it’s trying to build its business, rather than London.

If some banks aren’t promoting, which banks are hiring and promoting in the process? Jefferies is clearly one. Recruiters suggest Macquarie and Citi as others. Citi looks like the best bet: revenues in its M&A business are up 13% this year, and it has the balance sheet to help win deals.

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Photo credit: Where to? by Jens Schott Knudsen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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Morgan Stanley loses senior fixed income quant as hiring heats up at the end of the year

November 10, 2017, 8:26 am

≫ Next: Every question you’ll be asked in a Goldman Sachs interview

≪ Previous: J.P. Morgan M&A EDs are leaving in search of promotion elsewhere

RBC Capital Markets has just hired Morgan Stanley’s head of fixed income modelling as large investment banks continue to hire senior quantitative talent even at the tail end of 2017.

Vasily Strela, a managing director within Morgan Stanley’s fixed income quant team, has just landed at RBC Capital Markets in New York. It’s a major step up – Strela has taken the role of global head of FICC quantitative strategies at RBC.

November is an usual time to join a new employer within investment banking, particularly within the senior ranks, as bonuses have been accrued throughout the year and invariably need to be bought out.

But financial services organisations are willing to shell out for senior quants as the year draws to a close. Michael Steliaros, the former global head of quantitative solutions at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, arrived at Goldman Sachs earlier this month as global head of quantitative execution services. Meanwhile, Rajesh Nagella, who held various senior quant trading roles at Citigroup in New York, joined BlackRock as a managing director in late-October. Macquarie also hired Emanuele Di Stefano as a senior managing director in quantitative investments from Citigroup.

For all the talk of the struggle for quantitative talent in the financial sector, many making senior moves within investment banks have been in the sector for decades.

Strela joined Morgan Stanley in 2009 from J.P. Morgan, where he was an executive director in quantitative research. Before this, he was head of emerging market quants in at Bear Stearns, having had the misfortune to join in June 2007, less than a year before its collapse in March 2008. Before this, he was head of emerging markets quants at Morgan Stanley.

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Every question you’ll be asked in a Goldman Sachs interview

November 10, 2017, 9:20 am

≫ Next: Perfect resume, no interview: why banking recruiters in SG and HK are rejecting you

≪ Previous: Morgan Stanley loses senior fixed income quant as hiring heats up at the end of the year

You’ve landed an interview with Goldman Sachs. Well done: you’re in a serious minority. What should you expect? In the past, Goldman Sachs had a reputation for interviewing people until it hurts – putting potential hires through endless interviews with different Goldman staff just to check they’d be a ‘fit.’

Not any more. Goldman now uses Hirevue’s digital interviewing package to screen juniors. However, if you make it through the Hirevue interview, you’ll still encounter a human further down the line.

What will you be asked? Below is a list of all the interview questions candidates claim to have been asked at Goldman recently. Most were asked at entry-level interviews for candidates joining the firm at analyst or associate levels.

While you should prepare for the sorts of questions below, the key thing to know before you interview at Goldman (and this applies to Hirevue interviews too) is that you need to be 100% familiar with everything in your resume. The firm itself says this is and most of the candidates who’ve interviewed there say they were heavily grilled on the minutiae of their CVs. For example, if you’ve written that you took a Java programming course back in 2012, be ready to talk about it – in depth.

Fit Questions from Goldman Interviews

A team member isn’t contributing. You confront them. They still don’t contribute. What next?

Walk me through you CV?

Which was your preferred class at university?

Your professor accidentally sends you confidential information intended for another student. What do you?

You are working on a secret project. Your previous manager asks about it. He says he wants information on the project to help with an important decision. What do you do?

What are your strengths?

What are your weaknesses?

Which of your skills and experiences make you appropriate for this job?

What motivates you in life?

What would make you satisfied?

Why Goldman Sachs?

What makes Goldman Sachs different to its competitors?

Why do you want to work for this division of Goldman Sachs?

Why do you want this job at Goldman Sachs?

How do you know you want this job at Goldman Sachs?

Have you ever had any issues with work/life balance?

What skills do you think are required to do this job?

Can you talk about a mistake you made in the past, and how you overcame it?

Who is the most famous and influential person you would like to meet and why?

Can you talk about a challenge you faced in the past? How did you overcome it?

Can you talk through a time you worked with a co-worker? How did you build that relationship?

Can you tell me a time when you failed to meet a deadline?

What’s more important- deadlines, or the quality of work?

Can you tell us about an episode where you were short of time for delivering a large project? How did you overcome that?

Can you give an example of a time you streamlined a process?

Talk to me about your previous jobs.

What are you strengths?

What are your weaknesses?

Which role do you usually play in a team?

What would your team mates say about working with you?

Why would your team mates choose to work with someone else instead of you?

Would you rather be captain of a losing team or the regular member of a winning team?

Why did you choose your college/university? Why did you choose that subject?

Give an example of a time you acted as a leader.

Describe a time when you worked in a team where there were disagreements.

Describe a time you research a subject of interest to you. How did you go about that?

Would you say you’re a perfectionist?

What’s been the most important experience of your career? Why?

Can you talk us through a time when you had to decline a client’s request? How did you approach that?

Your friend is cheating in a test. He’s on his last warning. You’re the only one who knows he’s cheating. What do you do?

Tell me about yourself. You have three minutes.

IBD (Investment Banking Division) Questions from Goldman Interviews

Walk me through the three different ways of valuing a company.

Walk me through a DCF. What does a DCF do?

Walk me through an LBO analysis.

What factors can lead to the dilution of EPS in an acquisition?

If you are in a business that wants to preserve cash, what type of inventory accounting method would you use (LIFO or FIFO) in a time of rising prices, and why?

You’re using multiples to value a company but those multiples are skewed. What do you do?

What is Minority Interest and why do we add it in the Enterprise Value formula?

Why is cash subtracted from Enterprise Value (EV)?

Briefly walk me through a discounted cash flow analysis. (including WACC).

If a company raises debt, what happens to its WACC? What might make your answer wrong?

A client in the aerospace industry wants to know about related markets which are impacting his stock price. Which industries and markets do you look at?

Why can’t you use EV/Earnings or Price/EBITDA as valuation metrics?

Discuss a deal you have read about recently.

How do the three financial statements fit together?

Which is the best method of valuing a company and why?

What does shareholders’ equity consist of? How does net income affect it?

What will you actually do as an analyst or associate in an investment bank? What attracts you to this?

You’re meet the CEO of an industrial company. She wants to know how much her company is worth. Which information do you need?

How does depreciation move throughout the financial statements?

(If you make it through the first round of interviews for IBD at Goldman, you’ll be expected to complete a case study interview. There’s an example of a GS case study here.)

What does IBD do?

What’s the NPV of $1 with a 10% discount rate over 10 years?

You receive a dollar for the rest of your life? What’s the value of those dollars today?

Markets and Risk Questions from Goldman Interviews

How would you value a company which was very successful until recently, but lost market share due to a single event?

Where do you see markets trading in three months, six months, nine months?

Which structured equity product would you issue in the current market conditions?

Explain the options Greeks.

Explain what a put option is.

Explain the assumptions behind Black Scholes.

Is gold overpriced?

Are equities overpriced?

What’s moving the markets now?

What’s happening to market volatility and why?

What’s your top stock pick?

General Motors or Facebook? Why?

How would you hedge against the risk of an Apple bond defaulting?

Why are you better than other candidates on picking stocks?

How should a bank evaluate the creditworthiness of a counter-party?

Pitch a long stock? Pitch a short stock?

How would you invest $1k?

You’re given information about a company’s stock price over a period of 12 months. How do you determine how risky it is?

What’s the Monte Carlo method for pricing options? How does it work?

Talk to me about an asset class you’re interested in.

Describe a time when you used data to forecast trends.

What are today’s 10-year treasury bond returns?

Name a political event you’re tracking. How do you expect this to impact the markets?

Tech Questions from Goldman Interviews

Write a piece of code to create a Fibonacci sequence using recursion.

Write a piece of code to create a Fibonacci sequence using the iterative method.

Write a piece of code to determine whether a number is a palindrome.

Write a piece of code to determine whether two words are anagrams.

Write a piece of code to determine whether a binary tree is a binary search tree or not.

Write a piece of code to combine fractions from two arrays into a single array.

You have a ladder of X steps. You can go up the ladder by taking either one or two steps each time. Write a function to determine how many potential different combinations of one or two steps you could take to the top of the ladder.

Given two strings ‘X’ and ‘Y’, find the length of the longest common substring.

Why is a binary tree better than a hash table?

Why is a hash table better than a binary tree?

What’s the difference between a process and a thread?

When would you use a thread instead of a process?

How does garbage collection work in Java?

What are the differences between JS Angular and JS React? Which do you prefer?

What differentiates propositional logic from first order logic? Which is better?

When should you use functional programming vs. objected oriented programming?

How could you set up a recursive function so that a smart language / compiler could evaluate the function and never run out of memory?

Here is a file of employee names, presented as a string. It contains first names and last names. Write a piece of code to returns the most common last name in the list. Consider the complexity of your program: it will need to handle a large dataset in a small amount of time.

Talk me through the concept of inheritance in C++.

Talk me through the Java design patterns you know.

What’s a Linked List? Can you build one?

How can you speed up a database query?

What’s the difference between Java Heap Space and Stack Memory?

How would you find the middle element in a Linked List?

What are abstract classes in Java? What’s their purpose?

Find the maximum value in this binary tree.

What is overloading an interface? Why would you do that?

How would you write a programme to find the biggest number in a list of 10 numbers?

What’s Object Oriented Programming?

How does Object Oriented Programming differ from Process Oriented Programming?

What’s polymorphism in OOP?

What’s inheritance in OOP?

Write a piece of code to find the square root of a double number.

If you had to make a program that could vote for the top three funniest people in the office how would you do that? How would you make it possible to vote on those people?

What’s role-based access control? How would you implement it?

How do you calculate linear regression using the least squares method?

Brain Teasers and Other Questions from Goldman Interviews

Estimate the value of the tie industry in the UK.

How many airplanes are in the sky above New York City at any moment?

What is the angle between the hour and minute hand of a clock at 3.15?

If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?

When you heat a sausage in the microwave, the tear is always lengthwise. Why is that?

If I gave you €10m, would you either buy a 5-star hotel in the centre of Paris or 5 cheap motels along the ring road?

What’s the sum of all the numbers between 1 and 100?

Two die are rolled six times. What’s the probability of achieving results that sum to six?

You roll two dice for an infinite times, what is the probability that you get a sum of four before a sum of two?

What does the operations division do?

Talk to me a bit about our 3rd quarter results.

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Perfect resume, no interview: why banking recruiters in SG and HK are rejecting you

November 12, 2017, 8:19 am

≫ Next: “I know bankers in Asia who’ve got $1.2m sign-on bonuses this quarter”

≪ Previous: Every question you’ll be asked in a Goldman Sachs interview

You’ve applied for a banking job via a recruitment agency in Singapore or Hong Kong and your CV and cover letter are spot-on. All that now stands between you and interviewing with the bank is an initial meeting with the recruiter, a mere box-ticking exercise – you think.

Your situation is not as straightforward as it may seem, however. Global banks in Asia have been cutting costs for the past few years, and are putting more pressure on recruiters to only find them exceptional candidates.

If you don’t come across well when you meet a recruiter, they won’t hesitate to reject you. Here’s what to avoid doing.

Starting out with disrespect

Show respect to the recruiter when you first meet – even if they’re less experienced than you (this isn’t uncommon in Asia) and even if they’ve never worked in banking. Dress and behave as though you’re at a job interview with a senior banker. If you make a bad first impression, the recruiter will assume the manager at the bank will think the same and they won’t waste time recommending you, says James Incles, group country director at recruiters iKas in Singapore. “Do you make good eye contact? Are you wearing smart attire? Decisions are often made when you walk through the door.”

Mid-interview phone use

Switch off your device! Recruiters in Singapore and Hong Kong complain that too many candidates are checking their smart phones in the midst of job discussions. This doesn’t show that you’re a connected, sought-after finance professional; it suggests you’re not interested in the new job. Evelyn Lee, a director at LMA Recruitment in Singapore, has even seen candidates answering phone calls during interviews.

Monologues

“Sometimes candidates go on and on about their experience without realising that the recruiter already has their CV and knows what they do,” says Farida Charania, Asia Pacific CEO of search firm Nastrac Group. “It’s better to engage in a dialogue rather than rattling off a monologue. The consultant can’t help you by just listening to your experience – they need to know how its relevant to the job.”

Leaving your research too late

It’s a big problem: candidates who think they can do their research into the job only when they clinch an interview with the bank. “You’ll be expected to have done your homework and be able to talk about the employer with the recruiter. If not, it doesn’t really signal that you want the job,” says Lynne Roeder, managing director of recruiters Hays in Singapore.

Covering up your mistakes

Too many candidates in Hong Kong and Singapore think career mistakes should be covered up to save face rather than properly explained. “They sometimes rush through talking about their CVs like a runaway train,” says Sandeep Mohanan, manager of front-office financial services at recruiters Morgan McKinley in Hong Kong. “Whether it’s a low GPA or joining a firm because of a manager who left shortly after, use it as part of the story you tell the recruiter – will help engender trust.”

Getting aggressive

Don’t expect a recruiter interview to be a light-weight chat; except to get grilled on the same subjects that you would at a bank. And when you’re asked tricky questions, don’t lose your cool because you’re ‘only talking to a recruiter’. Vince Natteri, director of recruiters Pinpoint Asia in Hong Kong, explains: “I once had a candidate with a top-notch CV who seemed perfect for the bank. But when we probed into her background, her answers weren’t consistent and she became defensive and aggressive. Her attitude meant we didn’t refer her.”

Hiding your reason for leaving

“If we sense you’re not being truthful about your reasons for leaving a company, alarm bells will ring,” says Mohanan from Morgan McKinley. “This can have implications later on, particularly at the reference stage, and can jeopardise the whole hire.”

Badmouthing

If you’re sick of your current bank or colleagues, it’s tempting to use a recruiter as a sounding-board for your grievances. “Criticising other people is never a good idea in an interview with a recruiter. Focus on the positive when talking about your experiences,” says Roeder from Hays.

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“I know bankers in Asia who’ve got $1.2m sign-on bonuses this quarter”

November 12, 2017, 9:00 am

≫ Next: Willis Towers Watson is hiring in the UK. Here’s what it’s like working there

≪ Previous: Perfect resume, no interview: why banking recruiters in SG and HK are rejecting you

Banks in Asia don’t pay sign-on bonuses any more, right? The days of the golden handshake are over, correct? Well, no – at least not in private banking.

I was once a private banker myself, at a US firm in the 1990s, and now I recruit RMs here in Hong Kong and also in Singapore. So let me tell you that in the third and fourth quarters of 2017 almost all banks are routinely paying (big) sign-ons.

As we all know, there’s a massive talent gap in Asian private banking – banks from UBS to UPB are hiring as regional wealth rises, but there just aren’t enough experienced RMs around who want to move. In this kind of job market, sign-ons have become standard when banks hire in the second half and bankers demand compensation for the bonus they are sacrificing at their current firm.

They might get a guaranteed bonus too, typically a performance-based percentage, but that’s only paid after a year of employment. The sign-on, as the name suggests, is given out during their first week on the job or in their first pay cheque. And it’s paid in cash.

The amount typically reflects an estimate of what they would have got in cash at their current bank, plus a bit extra as an incentive for joining.

How much money are we talking? Let me give you some examples from down in Singapore, where I’ve been doing most of my hiring in recent months.

At AVP to director level, the sign-ons I’ve been involved with have ranged between S$20k and S$100k. For lower-grade MDs, S$150k to S$200k is the norm.

It’s the very senior MDs, the ultra-high-net-worth heavy-hitters, who get the serious money. I’ve placed people this year who’ve landed payments of S$600k and even S$1.2m. This is at the extreme end of the sign-on scale, but it is happening.

If RMs are moving from a listed bank (e.g. UBS) to an unlisted one (e.g. Safra Sarasin) in Asia they may enjoy the largest windfall. The privately-owned firm obviously won’t be able to match their stock options plan (as Credit Suisse, for example, would when hiring from UBS), so it will typically bump up their cash sign-on to help compensate.

No one bank stands out this quarter as being the most generous deliverer of sign-ons. But on the other hand, it’s fair to say that Asian banks tend to be more tight-fisted than their Western competitors.

Patsy Hao (we have used a pseudonym to protect her identity) has been a Hong Kong-based headhunter since 2000. Prior to that she was a private banker at two US banks.

Image credit: Mlenny, Getty

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Willis Towers Watson is hiring in the UK. Here’s what it’s like working there

November 12, 2017, 10:08 am

≫ Next: Morning Coffee: What Jamie Dimon wants from 20-something bankers. London banking jobs salvation

≪ Previous: “I know bankers in Asia who’ve got $1.2m sign-on bonuses this quarter”

Innovative, experienced, flexible and diverse. These are words commonly used to describe Willis Towers Watson’s growing fiduciary management service and team.

Since winning its first fiduciary management client in 2010, Willis Towers Watson has grown to be the largest fiduciary manager in the UK. This evolution, driven initially by demand from several multi-billion pound pension scheme clients, has seen the fiduciary management service expand and adapt its services to smaller clients too.

“All clients, regardless of size, can access the same innovative investment ideas and opportunities that may not be available to them under a typical investment advisory model,” says Katie O’Sullivan, Senior Investment Strategist at Willis Towers Watson. “Our service is flexible to each client’s individual circumstances; our clients have differing investment beliefs, levels of delegation and portfolio design. Some have a self-sufficiency objective, others are targeting buyout. We fully integrate with our actuarial and settlement teams to meet our clients’ needs.”

A collaborative approach is key, and gives Willis Towers Watson an edge over its competitors. “We work with our large and experienced manager research team, who are invaluable in sourcing new investment ideas. The research is global in reach and the rigorous process has a proven track record of adding value,” says O’Sullivan.

Willis Towers Watson also goes a step further. It not only invests in products that are on offer in the market, but also influences managers to establish new strategies to meet client requirements. “This creativity is for the sole benefit of our clients,” says O’Sullivan.

Working within a delegated model, Willis Towers Watson’s portfolio managers can make rapid investment decisions and execute these efficiently, to take advantage of opportunities in real-time. This is in contrast to the advisory model in which trustees typically make decisions in quarterly meetings.

Willis Towers Watson also looks at the bigger picture. It is currently focused on revolutionising the institutional investment market through technology, by launching the Asset Management Exchange.

This is a new institutional asset management marketplace, which transforms the interaction of institutional investors and asset managers. “By combining both scale and operational efficiency, investors benefit from significant cost savings,” says O’Sullivan. “This is another real differentiator for Willis Towers Watson. We work in a very entrepreneurial environment and are looking to change the whole industry for the better.”

Aside from delivering a great service to clients, Willis Towers Watson is also very proud of its diverse and inclusive culture, which O’Sullivan insists is key to its success.

“The benefits that diversity brings to an organisation are now widely accepted in our industry,” she says. “At Willis Towers Watson, we are committed to attracting, developing and retaining a qualified and diverse workforce. Through our inclusion networks, as well as our leadership and mentoring programmes, we encourage all our people to flourish as individuals. We want to make the most of the different attributes and experiences that each person brings.”

To bolster its recruitment efforts, Willis Towers Watson is working with the Bright Network to specifically reach out to candidates across a number of universities, not just the Russell Group network, and is also hosting and sponsoring a number of female-only careers events. “We’re drawing from a wider talent pool,” says O’Sullivan.

Willis Towers Watson is keen to promote its modern, flexible working arrangements. The firm offers agile working, including hot-desking, working from home, part-time positions, and term-time contracts.

“There are lots of different roles available at all levels,” says O’Sullivan. “Some are client-facing, like mine, and others are internally-focused. We support people in tailoring their role and their working hours to suit the lifestyle they want.”

For her, it’s a very rewarding environment. “For me, my role is ideal. I love working with people, building trusted relationships with clients and collaborating with my colleagues, who, I am delighted to say, are a fantastic bunch. But it’s also a technical role, so it’s mentally stimulating. I’ve always relished a challenge and Willis Towers Watson certainly offers me that.”

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Morning Coffee: What Jamie Dimon wants from 20-something bankers. London banking jobs salvation

November 12, 2017, 3:08 pm

≫ Next: Disappointed traders expected to desperately seek new jobs post-bonuses

≪ Previous: Willis Towers Watson is hiring in the UK. Here’s what it’s like working there

Jamie Dimon said that he never wanted to be an investment banker or a trader, he just wanted to “see a large corporation from the inside”. This, he says, is why he turned down offers from Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley to work alongside Sandy Weill at American Express. Nonetheless, financial services – and large banks – are still the place to be, he says.

In a talk to Stanford University students earlier this month, Dimon said that finance is still at the “nexus of how capitalist society functions”, is still a “fascinating field to get into” and is always going to be well paid. “It has to be well paid because we can’t do it with dumb people making dumb decisions,” he said.

J.P. Morgan spends $9bn on technology every year, and Dimon said that “we’re not at the bleeding edge, but we’re damn close”. While tech encroaches on everything from sales and trading to, increasingly, advisory work, Dimon also pointed to one part of the business where J.P. Morgan is keener than ever to hire the best and brightest. Dimon says the bank scours the top schools where it finds graduate investment bankers and traders every year and hires 10 people on to the bank’s general management programme because “we need people to run the damn joint too”. It wants the “same quality” among the people it hires here, as those who choose investment banking division and so it’s also paying the same compensation.

This being a business school interview, Dimon was asked about what “leadership qualities” he looks for in new recruits. Dimon replied that these are hard to demonstrate when you’re young, but looks for the “basic stuff” including people understanding everything there is about the strategy of the company. “People walk into your office and they say ‘I’d like to know about the strategy of your company’….and they didn’t bother to read the chairman’s letter that I wrote, which is like 30 or 40 pages long,” he said.

“Other people walk in and they know everything, so when you have a conversation they’re actually enhancing your life, as opposed to the other way around”. Dimon also says that he wants to see people who “don’t shave the truth”, and say the same thing to everyone. “The second I see someone doing something different to that, they just go on a list for me and I have no interest in them,” he said.

Dimon, who said he’d fire any J.P. Morgan employee trading bitcoin and later promised to stop talking about it after the furore the comments created, has also broken his vow of silence on the topic. “I don’t care about bitcoin, I couldn’t give a shit to tell the truth,” he said.

Separately, over the past week, the prospects for banking jobs in London have been looking a bit bleak. Financial services firms are poised to “flood” out if a Brexit transition deal is not struck soon, an expensive lunch with the European heads of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley and U.S. commerce secretary Wilbur Smith in London was generally downbeat, and the world’s biggest banks now see a “disorderly” Brexit as “inevitable”.

Still, investment banks are now talking about less severe job losses in London, and the FT has a new explanation – the “branch back”. While the initial fallout from Brexit discussed the need to move trading jobs out of London in order to retain their “passporting” rights to trade in the European bloc, this arrangement is essentially the opposite. EU regulators have already said that they’d resist “brass plating” of new European branches by financial services organisations and would expect a significant commitment of people and capital on the ground.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean an exodus of people from London. Right now, Deutsche Bank’s London operation, for example, is a really a UK branch of its European headquarters in Frankfurt. It has chosen a significant presence in the City to access the talent and infrastructure on the ground, but moving some functions to a new EU branch shouldn’t necessarily mean doing the same. This doesn’t mean the highly paid jobs will stay – some bankers have said this is more of an attempt to access back office staff, which is harder in the EU than finding retail banking or sales and trading employees.

“All of us aren’t quite sure yet where the UK regulators will come out in terms of how they treat branches of EU entities,” said one banker.

Meanwhile:

Facebook is hiring 10,000 ‘content moderators’ to ensure it’s able to investigate breaches beyond using AI to detect them (WSJ)

RBR Capital has softened its stance to break up Credit Suisse, but wants more cost-cutting (Financial Times)

“My kid—[if] I told her that she had to study for her science test, but she always failed, I don’t think she would study for her science test. The same goes for a bank: You want to incentivize them.” (WSJ)

Richard Gnodde, Goldman Sachs’ Europe boss as well as Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Alex Wilmot-Sitwell and JPMorgan’s Vis Raghavan were bought lunch by U.S. commerce secretary Wilbur Ross to talk about Brexit. They were not optimistic. (Financial Times)

MUFG Securities is still building after kicking off its investment bank after the financial crisis (Institutional Investor)

Goldman Sachs’ new London headquarters has been deliberately designed so that it’s easy to sub-let (Financial Times)

Why one bank is hiring while the others chop huge numbers of staff through digitisation (Bloomberg)

Lloyd Blankfein: social media guru for bank CEOs (Bloomberg)

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Photo: Getty Images

Image by Fortune Live Media licensed CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Disappointed traders expected to desperately seek new jobs post-bonuses

November 13, 2017, 4:01 am

≫ Next: This top HSBC FX salesman has just signed up to a fintech start-up

≪ Previous: Morning Coffee: What Jamie Dimon wants from 20-something bankers. London banking jobs salvation

Happy in your trading job in an investment bank? Feeling settled and confident about the future? It may not last. Following a disappointing bonus round, some headhunters are predicting that traders will flood onto the market in search of new jobs in early 2018.

“After all this year’s hiring, the bonus pool has a much higher fixed component devoted to new recruits than in previous years,” says the head of one leading fixed income search boutique, speaking on condition of anonymity. “At the same time, revenues haven’t really come through and there’s not the money available to match the expectations of existing employees.”

Macro (FX and rates) trading desks are expected to take the biggest hit in bonuses. U.S. compensation specialist Johnson Associates is predicting a 5% to 10% drop in fixed income trading bonuses this year compared to last, but the reduction is likely to be more extreme on macro desks, which have latterly performed poorly. At Barclays, for example, macro sales and trading revenues were down 27% year-on-year in the first nine months and 40% year-on-year in the third quarter. Rates desks started the year well, but banks like Citi reported weak third quarters as revenues floundered compared to more eventful markets in 2016. The exception was Goldman Sachs, which said a strong performance from its U.S. rates desk towards the end of Q3 helped mitigate its problems in commodities trading.

“After the third quarter, we expect banks to reallocate fixed income bonus pools to credit desks,” says the headhunter. “It won’t take a huge shift in the bonus pools for people on rates desks to be down $100k or so. This will cause a lot of disappointment, particularly in the mid-ranks, and we’re expecting all those people to come onto the market in January.”

The potential bonus upset on rates desks comes after a splurge of senior rates hiring this year. Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered have all been stocking up on rates talent in 2017. Although European banks are banned from paying old-fashioned guaranteed bonuses by regulators, they can still pay “indicative guarantees” based on the achievement of fairly easy targets. Sizable chunks of this year’s macro bonus pools are thought to have been pre-allocated to new hires as a result.

Not all headhunters are convinced that a tsunami of traders is coming their way, however. Kumaran Surenthirathas of Rosehill Search says there’s definitely a lot of pent up frustration with compensation at director level, but that this is no worse than usual. “There are a lot of traders who want to move and who will be very open to moving in the new year, but this is no more than usual,” he says.

Follow @MadameButcher

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This top HSBC FX salesman has just signed up to a fintech start-up

November 13, 2017, 4:14 am

≫ Next: Expansionary hedge fund pinches ex-BAML trader en route to Deutsche Bank

≪ Previous: Disappointed traders expected to desperately seek new jobs post-bonuses

A senior HSBC FX salesman, who has spent the past 24 years working for large investment banks in the City, has signed up to a fintech start-up pushing for the electronification of FX in emerging markets.

Chris De Sibert, who was a managing director and head of foreign exchange and commodities sales to banks in Europe, the Middle East and Africa at HSBC, has just joined R5FX, a currency trading platform focused on emerging markets FX that started life in Canary Wharf fintech hub Level39.

De Sibert is one of just five employees at R5FX in London and joins as global head of business development. The company was founded by John Vollemaere in 2013, and received a “single digit millions” investment from Deutsche Börse in November 2014.

While FX trading has generally been electronified for years in developed countries, Vollemaere told Euromoney in 2015 that “there hasn’t been much attention” paid to emerging markets. R5FX focuses on the real, rand, rupee, rouble and renminbi.

De Sibert joined HSBC as a director in June 2009 from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he was a director focused on FX sales into Southern Europe. Before this, he spent five years at RBS as head of Iberian FX sales. At HSBC, he led a team of 12 people, six of whom were based in London.

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Photo: Getty Images

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Expansionary hedge fund pinches ex-BAML trader en route to Deutsche Bank

November 13, 2017, 5:45 am

≫ Next: Only sycophants get promoted to the top jobs in investment banks

≪ Previous: This top HSBC FX salesman has just signed up to a fintech start-up

Hedge fund hiring is alive and well. Just ask Cross Ocean Partners, a U.S. credit hedge fund which is busily building its London presence, and diverting traders hopping between banks into its West London office.

Cross Ocean’s latest hire is Gary Erskine, a former director in global loans and special situations at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Headhunters say Erskine quit BAML several months ago and was on gardening leave prior to joining Deutsche Bank. However, he was reportedly persuaded to join Cross Ocean last month just days before his new Deutsche job was due to start.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment and Erskine didn’t respond to our attempt to get in touch.

While some hedge funds now like to hire exclusively from other hedge funds, Cross Ocean’s London office likes to hire from banks.

The fund is run in London by co-CIO Stephen Zander, a former head of the distressed trading business at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Zander left BAML in 2009 and has since worked for hedge funds, including Capula and Hayfin Capital Management. He joined Cross Ocean in February 2017 after 18 months when he was registered at regulatory hosting firm Mirabella Advisors, and has since been hiring in former traders from banks into his new team.

Alongside Erskine, Zander’s other hires include Stephen Pile, a former senior RBS credit trader who joined in June, and Ross van Beurden, a former AVP in credit trading at Citi, who joined in October.

In 2016, Cross Ocean Limited nearly doubled headcount from 11 to 21 people.

What turned Erskine to Cross Ocean instead of Deutsche Bank?

Deutsche’s problems are well-documented, but Cross Ocean isn’t exactly a safe bet either. Last year, Cross Ocean Limited, which includes support staff, made a loss of £4m on £7m of revenues (compared to a loss of £2m on £3.4m of revenues one year previously). The fund does, however, appear to pay OK: its 21 employees received an average of £260k last year ($340k), while four partners at Cross Ocean LLP each received an average of £558k. Deutsche Bank, by comparison, has gained a reputation for parsimony after cancelling bonuses for 2016.

In June, Deutsche Bank was said to make a last minute withdrawal of its job offer to Rob Allard, who was due to join as head of U.S. fixed income sales.

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Photo credit: Swerve to avoid gunshots ahead by Eric Bjerke is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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Only sycophants get promoted to the top jobs in investment banks

November 13, 2017, 7:32 am

≫ Next: UBS has just hired a top Apple analyst from small investment bank

≪ Previous: Expansionary hedge fund pinches ex-BAML trader en route to Deutsche Bank

If you’re a VP in an investment bank and you’re wondering why you can’t get further up the ladder, you have my sympathies. I’ve been there. I have been you. I was a VP for six years and for each of the last three I thought I was going to get moved up to executive director. Every time, I was disappointed. Eventually, they just moved me out.

So, this is what I learned from those wasted years.

Firstly, HR’s promotional process counts for nothing. Nor does all that advice about drawing management’s attention to your achievements. Nor does the belief that banks are some kind of meritocracy.

I know this, because I ticked all the HR boxes. I worked in sales and I regularly beat my targets. I loved winning business, especially from banks whose product was better than ours. I loved cross-selling, bringing in introductions and winning business for other teams in the firm. Throughout my career I noted things I’d achieved that would be of use to management when it came to the mid and end of year reviews and I made sure that I mentioned them in my self-appraisal. Seriously, I did it all. And it did not work.

If you’re in a bank yourself, you’ll know how these things go. The end of year reviews usually start around November and you get to write the self-appraisal. You review your colleagues and they review you too. You approach the colleagues you’ve worked with to rate you and if they trust you they’ll reciprocate. The whole thing is like a feedback questionnaire on Amazon: you get to choose between 1 and 5, where 1 is awful and 5 is awesome and the rest are something in between.

HR loves these appraisal systems. But I’ll let you into a secret: they count for almost nothing. During my time at a large U.S. bank, the results to the appraisals were consistently ignored. They were also consistently inaccurate: my manager loved creating unhealthy competition in the team and the appraisals were a great opportunity to stab fellow employees in the back. Everyone was afraid of being laid off. Everyone made sure they pointed out colleagues’ faults.

I discovered, therefore, that if you want to get promoted, you need to forget playing by the appraisal rules. Forget the cross-selling. Forget being a great team player. Forget noting all the good things you’ve done for clients. You need to do one thing and you need to do it very, very well. You need to kiss arse.

Take an example from my team. There was one guy who was genuinely hated by the rest of us. He wasn’t a team player – he was out for himself and he received a score in the lowest percentile on his team appraisal. No one liked him, except the boss. A month after the appraisal process was completed, we were all called into a meeting room and asked to congratulate this shark for his promotion. Naturally, we did, but none of us meant it.

On another occasion, I was asked to participate in a colleague review call along with MDs from our overseas offices. We’d be reviewing a member of my team whom my manager was very friendly with. I mentioned my participation in the call to my manager as a matter of courtesy and then he dictated, word for word, what I had to say to make sure my colleague got promoted and stood by to make sure I said it. My opinion counted for nothing.

My experience may have been exceptionally bad, but I don’t think so. If you want to make it to the top in a bank, you need to make your manager feel like the most special person on earth. This really is all that matters. And if you can’t do that, don’t waste your time: you’re going nowhere fast.

Josh Ryan is the pseudonym of an equities salesperson from a U.S. investment bank

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Photo credit: Waiting by the phone by Chris Chabot is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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UBS has just hired a top Apple analyst from small investment bank

November 13, 2017, 7:55 am

≫ Next: Awful phrases that Asian recruiters hate seeing on banking CVs

≪ Previous: Only sycophants get promoted to the top jobs in investment banks

Now’s the time to stock up on big name analysts as regulators prepare make the buy-side pay for equity research. UBS has just brought in a top Apple analyst in a senior role.

Timothy Arcuri, who was latterly a managing director at broker-dealer Cowan & Company, has just joined the Swiss bank to lead its U.S. semiconductors and semiconductor equipment equity research offering in San Francisco.

Arcuri spent five years at Cowen, having joined from Citigroup in 2012, where he spent eight years as a managing director in equity research in San Francisco. Before this, he spent four years at Deutsche Bank as a director.

He’s best known for leading a team of analysts covering Apple stocks at Cowen, and has issued numerous notes outlining potential technological advances with new iterations of iPhones.

More large investment banks have been hiring senior analysts in advance of MiFID II implementation in January, which will require banks to break out there research costs from other trading charges. Top-ranked analysts, who can provide in-depth research that fund managers are willing to pay for as well as all-important market colour through (expensive) one-to-one calls, are increasingly in demand.

Arcuri is another high-profile tech analyst covering Apple to move on in recent months. In August, Simona Jankowski, a managing director and senior equity research analyst for the hardware and communications technology sector at Goldman Sachs, left the bank for tech hardware firm NVIDIA, where she’s vice president of investor relations.

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Awful phrases that Asian recruiters hate seeing on banking CVs

November 13, 2017, 10:17 am

≫ Next: 10 things to know about global banks’ new Asian hiring spree

≪ Previous: UBS has just hired a top Apple analyst from small investment bank

Asian recruiters are deluged with CVs in Q4 as candidates start planning new year job moves. This is not a good time to send them a CV cluttered with the same old catch-phrases as all the others.

Some resume phrases have become so overused by banking professionals in Singapore and Hong Kong that recruiters can’t stand the sight of them. Here’s what to avoid.

“I’m bilingual”

There’s a growing trend for candidates in Singapore to include “bilingual” on their CV when in reality they are only fluent in English. “They use this word because some banks these days are looking for fluent Cantonese, Mandarin or Japanese speakers and they believe it adds weight to their application,” says Komal Mehta, a partner at recruiters KS International. “Always mention your level of fluency in the second language – for example, mention any courses you have done – otherwise it’s misleading for recruiters and HR managers if you’re not genuinely bilingual.”

“I managed 100 staffs”

Pluralisation problems often plague English-language resumes in Hong Kong. This is one of the chief offenders: candidates who’ve managed more than one person sometimes incorrectly refer to their employees as their ‘staffs’. “The word is always staff – whether it was one person you supervised, or 100,” says Tracy Tam of recruitment agency Ambition in Hong Kong.

“I’m creative and hardworking”

This phrase is so overused, especially by junior banking professionals in Asia, that it suggests a lack of creativity in the drafting of your CV. “I think candidates don’t reflect on whether these clichéd words add value or have any relevance,” says Lynne Roeder, managing director of recruiters Hays in Singapore. “Only express the factual and measurable aspects of your experience. ‘Managed 150 full-time employees across five teams, with five direct vice-president reports’ is much better than writing that you’re a ‘seasoned’ or ‘hardworking’ leader.”

“I efficiently and effectively….”

These adverbs can be applied to just about every task in the banking sector – therein lies the problem. “This phrase is too generic, especially if the candidate doesn’t back it up with some actual examples that these words describe,” says Orelia Chan, an associate director at Pure Search in Singapore. “And it doesn’t really catch the hiring manager’s attention because a lot of candidates use the same phrase without any differentiation.”

“I’m an ambitious and goal-oriented young professional”

“This is usually the first line on a CV from a job seeker who’s early on in their career search – but it’s throwaway line, it adds no value and if anything may seem a little too exuberant,” says a Singapore-based recruiter. “I’d always think that the person sending me their profile is genuinely looking to develop their career and is working towards goals – there’s no need to state it. Instead let the reader know that you’re a consistent achiever in your tasks and responsibilities and have been active in the development of your current role.”

“I was involved in…”

“This term immediately makes the reader second guess the content of the candidate’s profile,” says the recruiter. “While I can appreciate that you may not want to take ownership or credit for the overall project, opening a sentence with the word ‘involved’ casts a shadow of doubt on the achievements mentioned. My suggestion is to reference your responsibilities within the project and the achievements made from fulfilling, or overachieving your obligations.”

“I’m skilled in Microsoft Office, Word, Excel and Outlook”

Listing generic computer skills is a sure-fire way to repel a banking recruiter. “Why even bother to include such a phrase? Everyone is expected to have those skills,” says Adrian Choo, business development director at Lee Hecht Harrison. “It makes me think you have run out of ideas to put into your CV. It’s better to use that space to put in ‘special achievements’ like ‘climbed Mt Everest twice’.”

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Image credit: ariwasabi, Getty

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10 things to know about global banks’ new Asian hiring spree

November 13, 2017, 10:18 am

≫ Next: Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs WILL be offering fantasy jobs to 26 year-olds, with a twist. Traders’ lunch breaks

≪ Previous: Awful phrases that Asian recruiters hate seeing on banking CVs

Global banks will step up their hiring in China following Beijing’s landmark decision last week to allow them majority stakes in joint ventures with mainland securities companies. But don’t expect the new jobs to be advertised any time soon, say recruiters.

Western banks have long complained that current laws, which limit them to owning 49% of their JVs, thwart their profitability and growth on the mainland. Their hiring is curtailed as a result. Now China has promised (without providing a date) to raise the threshold to 51% and then scrap it altogether within three years.

Among US banks, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup could be first to take advantage of the regulatory change. Unlike J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, they own substantial stakes in their Chinese operations. UBS has already said that it wants to increase its shareholding in its China business, while Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse also have mainland JVs.

What kind of jobs could these banks create after gaining full control on their China businesses? We spoke to some experts to find out.

1. Global markets focus

Most of the new roles will be in the banks’ markets businesses. Securities trading jobs will open up across equities, debt and derivatives, says former Societe Generale banker Ivan Tang, now managing partner at Tangspac Consulting. Relationship management and securities investment advisory roles will also be created in the front office, adds Eunice Ng, a director at Avanza Consulting.

2. Senior staff

In a reversal of the recent ‘juniorisation’ trend, front-office markets hiring will be mostly at the senior end. “The likes of MS, GS, and Citi are poised to recruit director and MD-level candidates to capitalise on the Chinese government’s decision,” says Tang. “That’s because they want people who already have knowledge of best practices from other markets, understand local nuances in China, and can win Chinese clients.”

3. A small and Shanghai-based hiring spree

Global banks will have hundreds, not thousands, of new jobs. Jason Tan, a partner at search firm Carlson Harriet, expects them to increase their mainland headcounts by about 15% over the next few years. “Foreign banks are also swaying away from the Beijing and Shanghai two-office model,” he adds. “Instead, they will have one main office, in Shanghai’s Pudong district, covering the whole country,” he adds. “This is already happening: last year J.P. Morgan sold its Beijing securities JV, while Goldman opened a new Shanghai office.”

4. Not so much IBD recruitment

Foreign banks may not rush to recruit China-based M&A, ECM and DCM bankers, says Tang. “This news paves the way for majority ownership of JVs, but that doesn’t mean the stock exchange and listing rules are going to open up overnight in China,” he says. “Most investment bankers in Hong Kong are already working on China deals and travel every other week to China, so there’s no urgent need to increase IBD staff domestically in China,” says Stanley Soh, a Hong Kong-based regional country director of financial services solutions in Asia. “And China-focused bankers often prefer living in HK for lifestyle and tax reasons.”

5. Jobs beyond the front office

China is constantly revising its regulatory regime, so Western banks will need to hire even more risk and compliance staff as they expand. “And most of these jobs will need to be in China rather than Hong Kong. They need people who already know Chinese regulations,” says Ng from Avanza. Finance, product development, technology, client service and product control jobs will be in demand, too.

6. Project management

The banks will also need to bring in project and change managers to oversee the expansion, says Tang from Tangspac. “Foreign banks that assume majority ownership of existing ventures are likely to restructure their businesses and internal divisions. This will result in, for example, changes to compliance obligations that will need managing.”

7. Expect delays

All this hiring is unlikely to happen in the immediate future. Banks first need to decide on the structure of any new joint ventures and then wait for China’s approval. HSBC, which operates a majority JV under a separate Hong Kong-based regulatory arrangement, announced its new partnership with Qianhai Financial in November 2015, but it was only approved in June this year.

8. Little impact on Hong Kong jobs…for now

“Hong Kong will, in theory, become a less attractive destination for banks that have used it to access China,” says Tang. “In practice, however, the gradual opening of China’s capital markets has been a long-term trend and this one decision isn’t going to have much of a visible impact on Hong Kong jobs in the short term.”

9. No Western expat influx

“While there will be more overseas talent coming into Shanghai to fill some of the new jobs at foreign banks, I expect they will only employ Mandarin-speaking foreigners,” says Tan from Carlson Harriet.

10. No rush to take stakes

With the possible exception of J.P. Morgan (Jamie Dimon ultimately wants to return to China with full control over its operations), don’t expect banks without Chinese JVs to suddenly apply to set them up. “Other Western investment banks without significant stakes in China are likely to adopt a more cautious approach. They may wait on the side-lines to see how the coming months unfold,” says Tang.

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: Martin Poole, Getty

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Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs WILL be offering fantasy jobs to 26 year-olds, with a twist. Traders’ lunch breaks

November 13, 2017, 3:36 pm

≫ Next: Terra Firma MDs land new senior jobs after investment staff exodus

≪ Previous: 10 things to know about global banks’ new Asian hiring spree

Remember when Goldman Sachs started talking in earnest about automating its junior investment banking jobs? How Richard Rivero, head of the team bringing technology to Goldman’s investment banking division (IBD), said he’d be liberating Goldman’s juniors from rote tasks and freeing them up to “get out on the road” and meet clients? Turns out there might be something in it after all.

In the brave new world, Goldman’s juniors will be meeting clients, just not the clients they’d expected. They’ll also be out on the road, but it’s unlikely to be a life of business class flights to the world’s major cities.

Instead, Goldman could use its freed-up juniors to pursue smaller mid-market clients in cities that it previously neglected. As part of its plan to ramp revenues by $5bn, Bloomberg says Goldman’s going to chase family owned firms, firms owned by private equity funds, and public companies with a market capitalization of between $1bn and $5bn (small in Goldman terms). The bank has already shunted “rainmakers” to offices in the likes of Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle and Toronto and is now busy staffing-up its new satellites with analysts and associates.

If all goes to plan, Goldman’s client numbers will rise by 10% to 15%. Its bankers will do a lot more travelling to clients in obscure locations and more of its staff will be located in “branches” around the Americas. Rivero’s vision is being realized, which is all fine so long as you don’t object to living on the road, and weren’t exclusively hoping work on major deals out of New York City.

Separately, traders in Singapore haven’t had a lunch break in six years. This is unlikely to evince much sympathy from traders in London and New York whose lunch breaks disappeared aeons ago, but it’s a big deal in Asia. Now, after over half a decade of lunch break deprivation, Bloomberg says Singapore traders have regained the right to take half an hour off to eat at midday. They’re still deprived compared to other traders in the region: in Malaysia, China and the Philippines traders get 90 minutes for lunch; in Thailand, they get two hours.

Meanwhile:

ECM and DCM bankers in the U.S. could get bonuses that are 15% to 20% higher this year. (Financial News)

Banks deemed systematically important (and subject to harsher regulations) are about to drop by two thirds. Time to work for a Jefferies? (Financial Times)

International students coming to the U.S. are down by 7%. They’re going to Germany and Canada instead. (TES)

25% of households earning between $200k and $500k will pay more tax under Trump’s plan. (Business Insider)

Doing the dishes as a sign of status. (CNBC)

Very intelligent people make less effective leaders. (BPS)

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“I’m bilingual”

“I managed 100 staffs”

“I’m creative and hardworking”

“I efficiently and effectively….”

“I’m an ambitious and goal-oriented young professional”

“I was involved in…”

“I’m skilled in Microsoft Office, Word, Excel and Outlook”

Related articles:

1. Global markets focus

2. Senior staff

3. A small and Shanghai-based hiring spree

4. Not so much IBD recruitment

5. Jobs beyond the front office

6. Project management

7. Expect delays

8. Little impact on Hong Kong jobs…for now

9. No Western expat influx

10. No rush to take stakes

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