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After graduating I worked for a Singaporean bank, but I didn’t stay beyond two years. Then I did a stint of only eight months at one global bank and stayed at another foreign firm in Singapore for barely a year.

Despite my obvious track record of ‘job hopping’ (something typically frowned upon by hiring managers in Singapore) I’ve been promoted each time I’ve moved and my current bank was only too happy to hire me. So, how have I job hopped but not put my career in jeopardy?

For one, I’ve managed to successfully answer any job-hopping questions during interviews. And I’ve done this by explaining each of my moves as a “new business challenge”. This may sound corny, but it’s true – each of my jumps took me to a new function within banking. I’ve worked in digital banking; I’ve worked in a project management and planning role, for example.

Interviewers also try to probe my propensity for job hopping by asking the ‘where do you see yourself in X years?’ question. Again, I’m honest with my reply. I don’t say that I’d like to be with their bank in a senior role; I say I want to become an academic, to lecture in finance.

I then explain that I need to have a well-rounded finance career and experience many difference parts of the banking sector in order to become a good teacher and impart broad knowledge. This further explains my job hopping across different banks and functions, and makes it appear well planned (which it is).

It also helps that my (very) long-term goal of teaching is something slightly ‘charitable’ in nature – I want to help budding finance professionals and ‘give back’ to the industry rather than join a competitor bank.

Interviewers have responded well to this as I think people in Singapore are becoming more liberal these days and more open to alternative career choices.

My advice on how to get promoted

Another thing has been front of my mind with all my moves: getting a promotion to a higher job rank. And I’ve now successfully taken my pursuit of promotion to my current bank. This is how.

During the first month in any new job I make sure I always spend two hours a day having coffee with the people in my team and in other departments who will ultimately help me get promoted.

I get to understand their problems at an early stage so I can start planning how I can help solve them. Solving problems for others is key to clinching a promotion. I also take a rather unusual approach when discussing my career with my line manager.

There are only two core questions I bother asking: Am I doing enough to get promoted now? And if not, what can I deliver you – in measurable terms within X time frame – to get promoted? I agree to these measurable targets (which are over and above my standard annual goals) so that when I hit them my boss has no choice but to promote me.

Crucially, I never talk about wanting more money during these career discussions. In fact, I actually say: ‘I’m no bothered if I don’t set a salary increase this year, as long as I get promoted’.

I think that claiming I’ll forgo a pay rise has helped me get promoted in banking. And it could work for you too. Moreover, most managers will ultimately find it tough not to increase your wages after promoting you… so you’ll end up getting a pay rise anyway!

Hank Li (we’ve used a pseudonym to protect his identity) is a senior banking professional at a global bank in Singapore.

Image credit: SARINYAPINNGAM, Getty

At the end of last week, Credit Suisse paid out fines of $47m to the DoJ and around $30m to the SEC, to settle the investigation into its “princelings” hiring scandal. This was an investigation into the practice of hiring the children of highly-placed Communist Party officials in China into lucrative banking jobs in the hope the kids would be able to help CS Hong Kong get banking business from their parents. This was felt by the regulators to breach the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. But the official press release on the settlement might strike many of us as familiar.

One employee, described at length in the DoJ press release, was hired after a slightly less-rigorous-than-normal process in which a CS banker wrote her resume for her, and warned colleagues that “she is a princess who is not used to too many rounds of interview”. After joining the graduate intake, she was rated bottom of her analyst class, and criticised for little things like rarely coming into the office and bringing her mother along to training events.

This didn’t affect her promotion prospects. She got evaluations with phrases like “try to answer the phone and not be rude” and “come into the office more – we love to see your smiling face”. Other bankers were asked to send her “congratulations, couldn’t have done it without you” emails relating to deals they had done thanks to her connections. She ended up getting about $1m total comp before the investigation turned into a career speed bump. The settlement doesn’t record what the other employees thought about all this, but it’s hard to imagine that it was anything very positive.

This is something of an extreme case. But haven’t we all worked alongside someone who was just a little bit of a teacher’s pet? A relative of someone who is a senior executive, or a kid of a big client, or someone with a surname that’s on one of the conference rooms, for example. The fact is that investment banking is about doing deals, and for this reason, people who can help the bank get deals are more valuable than people who can’t. And the P&L account doesn’t really care whether the deals are brought in by financial brilliance and business savvy, or by family connections. That’s why this isn’t the first princelings scandal by a long way – JP Morgan, for example, paid $264m to settle similar charges two years ago. The old proverb that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is in many ways true.

Separately, which bank begins with D, ends with E and has a load of compliance trouble? Well yes, them too, but Danske Bank’s Estonian operations appear to be caught in a major money-laundering scandal which has grown and grown the more it’s been investigated and might involve as much as 53bn Danish kronor ($8.3bn). The bank is now seeing some customers shifting their own deposits in protest, and Bill Browder (of Hermitage Capital, and a perennial lobbyist against Russia-related organised crime) is planning to launch a criminal complaint against them.

What it looks like is a scandal similar to the HSBC Mexico case of a few years ago – a local operation that has never been properly integrated into the compliance framework of the group as a whole, and which has never in the past been seen as important enough to be worth supervising properly. A bad branch of a good bank is the most dangerous thing in financial crime, as it tends to be given the benefit of the doubt earned by the reputable parent, so there are much weaker constraints on its ability to expand its activities to truly amazing proportions. That’s another old proverb – “what you don’t know can hurt you.”

Meanwhile:

The top hedge funds in Europe surveyed, including some which don’t usually get much publicity. (Financial Times)

Steve Cohen gets turned down by the FCA as not “fit and proper” to open Point72 to the British hedge fund investing public. (CNBC)

A poem made up of Wall Street platitudes. (WSJ)

The inside story of the Blackrock / Hovnanian CDS affair. (WSJ)

HSBC and L&G chief executives will be having dinner with Donald Trump on his official visit to the UK. (Financial News)

Old Mutual Global Investors is to be renamed “Merian”, after a 17^th century butterfly expert. (Financial News)

A review of “Finn”, the new J.P. Morgan banking brand aimed at millennials. (Business Insider)

Citigroup has hired Gregoire Haemmerle and Pierre Drevillon from UBS to run CIB and M&A in France. (WSJ)

Arif Hussein is now running a burger restaurant rather than trading sterling rates for UBS, but he still wants them to cover his legal fees. (Daily Telegraph)

Credit Suisse has appointed Antoinette Poschung to the newly-created “Conduct and Ethics Ombudswoman” post, with responsibility among other things for handling all #MeToo cases. (Reuters)

Image credit: tuu Sitthikorn, Getty

It’s getting into that time of year when London is filled with the perennial sounds of an English summer. Leather on willow (or if it’s an Ashes series, leather on stump). Sausages sizzling on the barbecue. And the weary sigh of a posh kid in a new suit going “I just feel like I’m not really making use of my degree”. Yep, the interns are coming back again.

It’s an arrangement that seems to be set up in the best interests of absolutely nobody. A lot of college kids spend what ought to be the finest summers of their lives, sweating away in London and New York at the time of year when the city is at its smelliest. The banks pay money which could, pro rata, finance a pretty good management consulting project in return for work of close to zero value. And dozens of investment bankers face a choice between three equally undesirable options. You either spend time and effort in coming up with a challenging summer project unrelated to your real work. Or you bite the bullet and actually let a twenty year old rugby player loose on a few millions of client deals.

Or, like most of us, you come up with half an idea and some binders from last year, and put up with a gloomy bored presence sighing at the end of your desk for five weeks, occasionally looking up to ask a bizarre question. Heaven forfend, by the way, that you ask the person on the desk with least real work to help out with a bit of photocopying or make a tea run; in the brave new world of human resources, asking an intern to get some coffee is a grave faux pas.

How did it come to this? Once upon a time, there was a thing called “campus recruitment”. People interviewed for jobs in banking during their last year at university, on their campuses. Then, when they got their results, if they had passed, they started work as an employee. They were usually on six month probationary periods, so you could fire them if you’d made a mistake.

But MDs and Directors got tired of wasting their time going round the country, and they weren’t always very good at interviewing. So a system was devised whereby the candidates could come into the office and waste our time there, with the interview process spread out into an agonising getting-to-know-you exercise over a period of weeks. There might be some net saving of time and effort but I doubt it.

And there are real consequences for the industry. Since the recruitment process came to be dominated by internships, it has been entirely focused on a particular type of person – the type of person who knew that they wanted to work in an investment bank early enough to get their applications in for internships in their second year.

That’s not a representative cross section of society; most 18-year olds haven’t even heard of the investment banking industry, let alone decided on a career in it.

The people who apply for internships are generally very impressive in their academic results and extracurricular accomplishments. But there’s a certain similarity to their worldview, which is a result of a competitive treadmill of internships that robs them of any chance to have experiences that aren’t resume-enhancing. Graduate programmes today have achieved the feat of consisting of an impressively diverse group of young people, all of whom think exactly the same.

We should give the kids their summers back. It might not be possible to put the genie back in the bottle – now that this is the normal recruitment process for top talent, no bank is going to want to be the first to go back. But it wouldn’t be hard to shorten them, to a fortnight at most. Turn internships back into what they were meant to be – short work experience placements, not pretend summer jobs. All we have to lose are a whole load of bound Powerpoint projects that will be dumped in the bin five minutes after the intern class of 2018 leave the building.

Dan Davies, is a senior research advisor at Frontline Analysts and a former banking analyst at Cazenove, Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas.

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MBA admissions officers used to look more favorably upon applicants with financial services experience. The strong work ethic associated with investment bankers and money managers and the prestige that comes with working for a big brand are attributes that business schools such as Harvard, Wharton and Stanford covet, as they demonstrate readiness for the rigors of the MBA classroom.

These days, finance candidates have to take a more critical approach to MBA application strategy, as they represent the largest pool of incoming students at top business schools. And while MBA admissions committees do accept applications from oversubscribed populations, they are now focusing more on diversity of profession, gender and nationality, because it enriches peer-to-peer learning and contributes to their success in the rankings. With finance an overwhelmingly male-dominated profession, men in particular have a higher bar to reach in the current MBA admissions climate.

So, how do you rise to the top of a competitive pool when you’re a common commodity? Every element of the MBA application should be optimized if you are to set yourself apart from the financial herd. Here’s how to do it:

Recognize that your resume doesn’t make you special

The default among financiers is to assume that their strong work ethic, employer brand and high stats will get them into a top school, but that is not the case today. About 50% of our finance inquiries do not realize that the bar is higher for their cohort, and that their application must be more compelling to differentiate themselves from the competition. Accepting that truth is the first step to securing a place on a top MBA program.

Top business schools expect holistic interests and achievements.

Highlighting personal qualities and triumphs is essential to your MBA application strategy. At SBC, we charted the application journeys of 21 MBA candidates from private equity firms applying to Harvard (HBS), Stanford (GSB) and Wharton.

Our study concluded that past academic background nor GMAT (admissions test) scores could reliably predict whether candidates were admitted or rejected. Success — defined by either an admit or interview invite – was rather predicted by how interesting the candidate was to admissions officers, our study found.

Being “interesting” was conveyed through activities that candidates engaged with outside the classroom during their undergraduate degree or in recent years, to the extent work/life balance allowed. For example, debate leadership, athletic activity and a remarkable thesis were undergraduate experiences that correlated with admits to GSB and HBS. Emphasizing earlier life interests that show character and values can differentiate finance candidates vying for top MBA programs.

Display responsible leadership credentials

Admissions committees want you to demonstrate more than financial success. “Show how you have made a positive impact on the communities in which you have operated, as this demonstrates leadership and predicts success at HBS,” shared a former HBS Admissions Officer on the SBC consulting team who asked to remain anonymous as they still work in the industry. It’s important to list your leadership roles and titles held, but also how you interacted with others and worked well in teams.

Many business schools also want to educate people who will lead society, not just business, and consider how their career impacts the environment around them. Schools are thinking about employability when reviewing applications – a critical factor in MBA rankings – and whether candidates will use the MBA to achieve their career goals.

“Clarity of goals is extremely important to Wharton, especially as they’ve combined MBA admissions, career management, and student life under the same deputy vice dean,” according to Meghan Ellis, a former Wharton Admissions Officer on the SBC team. “The Wharton admissions committee will look at applications to see: is this person already on the fast track, are their goals logical and reasonable, do they have a plan for how they will use their time during the program and how they will meet their goals?”

In addition, illustrate how you will contribute to your new community at business school. Convey that you will be active and engaged on campus — how you will take on a leadership role within a club that you are passionate about, for example.

Use recommendations to show how you are at the top of your class

A career at a prestigious firm such as Goldman Sachs may not be enough to get you into business school, but it sure can help. A recommendation from a senior manager at a leading bank or fund can add some stardust to your MBA application.

Use your recommendation letters to convey what made you stand apart from your peers at the firm — including project or people management, and evidence of high performance, such as receiving promotions more quickly than others, which are all valued by MBA admissions teams. It’s not generally permitted to write the letters yourself, of course, but you can guide your recommender by explaining what business schools want to know about you, relative to the strengths and vulnerabilities of your profile.

Being a banker can still be an advantage to gaining an admit to an elite MBA program, if you know how to sell it.

Stacy Blackman is the president and founder of Stacy Blackman Consulting, an MBA admissions consulting advisory launched in 2001. Stacy earned her BS in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and her MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

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Credit Suisse has brought on board Raymond Sisson, a veteran salesperson who has spent his entire career in aircraft leasing, as a new managing director in New York.

It is not immediately clear what Sisson’s role will be at Credit Suisse given that he has never worked for a bank before. However, it is very likely that he has been hired by Credit Suisse’s private bank, which has built up an aviation finance unit for corporate customers and high-net-worth individuals as one of its core strengths.

Credit Suisse had previously been named the best private bank for business jet finance and advisory in EMEA by Corporate Jet Investor. Aside from bankers, the group also employs pilots, aeronautical engineers and lawyers for its aviation finance team. Sisson’s background would fit in well. He comes with more than two decades of experience in the aviation industry and has a JD from Georgetown University Law Center and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Before joining Credit Suisse last month, Sisson served as the chief executive officer and chairman at AVi8 Air Capital, a commercial aircraft leasing company that he co-founded in late 2016 with Ed Wegel, the former CEO of Eastern Air Lines Group. The company’s website is not functional at present, and Sisson’s LinkedIn profile implies he already ended his association with the firm in June.

Sisson began his career in 1995 with GE Capital Aviation Services where he served as a senior vice president and regional manager for 13 years. He moved on to become CEO and president of Titan Aviation Leasing Ltd. in 2008, but shifted to aircraft maintenance repair and overhaul service provider SR Technics as the chief commercial officer a year later. Between 2010 and 2016, he served as the CEO and president for Ansett Worldwide, a commercial jet aircraft leasing company. Up until last month, he was on the board of directors for Hudson Structured Capital Management, which focuses on equipment financing in aviation, shipping, rail, containers, and auto among other segments.

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The two U.S. co-heads of prime brokerage at Cowen Inc. have left the firm just a year after joining. Michael DeJarnette and Douglas Nelson were named co-heads of the U.S. business in 2017 after coming over as part of Cowen’s acquisition of brokerage firm Convergex Group. Insiders say the pair left the company in June.

Nelson had been the CEO of Convergex for over a decade before Cowen’s $100 million acquisition. DeJarnette was an executive director of prime services. The two were only named co-heads of the U.S. business in October after Cowen fully integrated Convergex within its own platform. The acquisition closed in June of last year.

Prime brokerage has been an interesting area to watch over the last few years. Executing trades and covering margins for hedge funds, prime brokerage units are capital-intensive yet can be highly lucrative. Banks that are looking to reduce their leverage and satisfy regulators have been cutting their exposure to prime brokerage while others have looked to fill in the gaps.

Credit Suisse has been scaling back its prime brokerage unit for several years. The Swiss bank cut seven staffers from its New York operations just last month. Faced with similar capital restraints, Deutsche Bank has also recently made cuts to its prime financing business in the U.S. Meanwhile, BNY Mellon launched an FX prime brokerage unit earlier this year while Standard Bank started offering prime services late last year.

Cowen was voted the best boutique prime broker at the 2017 U.S. hedge fund services awards while earning the same honor in Europe in 2018. The company declined to comment on the departures. DeJarnette also declined comment while Nelson didn’t respond to an inquiry about the nature of his exit.

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Santitarn Sathirathai, Credit Suisse’s head of emerging Asia economics, has joined Singapore-based internet company Sea, in the latest example of a senior Asian banking professional leaving for the tech sector.

Sathirathai, who had been with Credit Suisse in Singapore since 2010, is now group chief economist at Sea, Southeast Asia’s second largest tech start-up. The firm, which operates gaming, digital financial services, and e-commerce products across the region, is valued at about $4bn after listing in New York last year, but it faces mounting losses.

Sathirathai’s departure shows that banks in Singapore face a growing recruitment and retention threat from three types of tech firms: small fintech start-ups; global tech giants (most notably, Google), and now large local businesses like Sea and Grab.

Local and international tech companies aren’t only interested in hiring from the vast pool of technologists that banks employ in Singapore. They also want senior front-office banking professionals like Sathirathai – investment bankers, strategists, research analysts, and economists – who can help shape their corporate strategies as they expand into new markets and products.

As we reported last month, Grab recently hired an OCBC head of strategic partnerships, Gary Wong, as the new head of its mobile-wallet app, GrabPay. Sea also has ex-finance professionals scattered across its divisions in Singapore. Xiaoshan Lai, for example, a senior manager in corporate development and strategy at Sea, worked in a Southeast Asia advisory role at Goldman Sachs for two years.

Sea seems unlikely to stop poaching from the finance sector, especially for strategy-related jobs. It currently has two Singapore-based business development associate/senior associate roles available.

Singapore tech firms’ fondness for bankers is shared by their Chinese counterparts. As we noted last week, Tencent – which holds a stake of about 40% in Sea, an investment which has seen the smaller firm dubbed the ‘Tencent of Southeast Asia’ – has several former bankers and researchers with its M&A and strategy teams.

After graduating from LSE, Sathirathai worked as an economist at the Ministry of Finance of Thailand and as a visiting lecturer at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand between 2003 and 2005. He then obtained a PhD in Public Policy Analysis from Harvard prior to joining Credit Suisse.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: smortlock@efinancialcareers.com

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Citi and BlackRock have become the latest financial firms to announce that they’re hiring in Paris rather than London. But Michael Corbat and Larry Fink, CEOs of Citi and BlackRock respectively, aren’t the ones receiving the plaudits on behalf of Parisian finance professionals. The praise is instead being heaped on a former investment banker: French president Emmanuel Macron.

As British government ministers resign amid this week’s Brexit-induced UK political crisis – the type of which typically unnerves stability-seeking bankers – a pro-banker promotional blitz from Macron is setting up Paris as an attractive destination for newly-minted finance jobs, and also for roles being relocated away from London.

BlackRock has announced that it has chosen Paris over London for its new base to provide alternative investment services across Europe and Asia. Citi, meanwhile, has recently made a series of senior appointments in the French capital and says it will continue to expand there, reports Reuters.

The Financial Times is now describing all this as a “coup” and a “victory” for Macron, who worked for Rothschild & Cie Banque between 2008 and 2012. The FT highlights the president’s promises to cut taxes and red tape under a “France is back” pitch, as well as his dinner with Blackrock’s Fink (alongside other investment sector leaders) at the Elysée Palace last year. “The effect of Macron has lightened up the country – before his election it was pretty bleak,” Luigi de Vecchi, chairman of corporate and investment banking in continental Europe at Citi, told the FT.

Recruitment by banks in Paris this year – J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and HSBC are all expanding headcounts there – may just be the tip of the iceberg. Arnaud de Bresson of the business lobby group Paris Europlace told the FT that recent Parisian hires at international banks are part of a “first” wave of team expansion.

Separately, have you ever wondered what your job title might be in five or 10 years? The answer is not what you might expect. HSBC has commissioned a new report into the future of banking, which highlights six potential titles on the horizon. Worryingly, if you work in the front-office, they are all of a tech-related persuasion: mixed reality experience designer, algorithm mechanic, conversational interface designer, universal service adviser, digital process engineer, and partnership gateway enabler.

Meanwhile:

UBS joins the banks that are hiring in Paris. (Financial News)

Chairman of Barclays EMEA banking operations retires. (Bloomberg)

The 30-year saga of Barclays investment bank, in one book. (Financial News)

Standard Chartered exec says the bank’s culture isn’t toxic. (ITV)

J.P Morgan promotes banker into new European infrastructure role. (Financial News)

Hong Kong bankers are quitting for biotech companies. (Bloomberg)

New Singapore CEO at Standard Chartered. (Finews)

Ex-BNP equity derivatives strategist resurfaces at Citi. (Global Capital)

UBS hires yet another China banker. (Finews)

Why your firm probably won’t be acquired by Goldman or Morgan Stanley any time soon. (Bloomberg)

The team that Goldman Sachs is backing to win the World Cup. (Business Insider)

Image credit: Alija, Getty

Working for Citi may be no easy task. The hours may be long, the pay not be totally satisfactory (although you should at least get a lot of cash in your bonus) and if you work in tech or operations the chief executive of Citi’s investment bank says you’re heavily at risk of losing your job to automation.

Sounds appealing, right?

Well, yes. This year Citi says it’s had 60,761 applications for 520 jobs at its corporate and investment bank globally.

In other words 99% of people are rejected, so if you’re thinking of interviewing at Citi, you need to prepare very well indeed. Below, we have listed all the questions people claim to have been asked in recent Citi interviews for your convenience.

IDB (Investment Banking Division) questions from Citi interviews

What are the advantages and disadvantages of ‘Comparable Company Analysis’?

How do you calculate the cost of equity?

To calculate shares that are fully diluted, which method would you use?

How do you value a company?

Which are the typical stages of an IPO?

How much do you know about discounted cash flow analysis?

What do you think of stock repurchases?

What is the best metric for valuing a company?

How many hours are there between the 27^th of February and the 3^rd of March?

In which kind of scenario would you not use comparables of discounted cash flow to value a company?

Why is minority interest subtracted out in the calculation of free cash flow?

Explain how the balance sheet and cash flow statement tie together.

Explain to me how an LBO is constructed and implemented.

How would you value an apple tree?

Sales and trading questions from Citi interviews

Which factors influence the price of a residential mortgage backed security (RMBS)?

Talk me through the European Debt crisis from the beginning to the current time.

What is the main driver that is making the debt crisis persist? What would be the solution in your opinion?

What is the difference between ‘TIPS’ and an ‘I bond’?

What is the role of a corporate client solutions team?

What is bond duration?

Technology questions from Citi interviews

What benefits does Python provide over other languages?

What are the differences between an object and an interface?

What is an inner join in SQL?

How do you swap two integer variables without using a temporary variable?

What is multithreading in the context of a CPU?

What are primary and foreign keys in a DBMS?

In the language Java, what is considered ‘static’?

How does java string class work?

What are paradigms and how do they come into Java?

Describe, in as much detail as possible, the software development life cycle.

Which agile methodology do you find fits with your work style and why?

Sources: Glassdoor.com, WallStreetOasis.com, Vault.com

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)

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In around a month, the new generation of juniors will arrive to join the analyst classes at investment banks. They might come with ideas about how their banking careers will evolve, but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from 18 years in finance, it’s this: nothing goes to plan.

Back in the early days, I didn’t think I even had what it took to fit in on Wall Street. I remember spending weekends researching my next career, convinced Wall Street wasn’t for me.

I was a shy nerd, I spoke with an accent, and I became a lonely cubicle slave, working hours on end. I wouldn’t speak in meetings because I figured who was I to be saying anything. When it came to bonus time, I just accepted whatever they paid me, happy with whatever scraps came my way.

I never expected to be where I am today. Along the way, I’ve made more mistakes than I care to admit and I’ve seen every single successful person I know do much the same.

Back in the early days, I thought mistakes were something to be ashamed of. I wanted to be the best and the fastest at everything. For example, when I was new to Wall Street, my boss gave me a project to be completed by the end of the day. I rushed through, proud of how quickly I was getting it finished. I handed it to my boss, waiting for my pat on the back. As it turned out, I had messed the whole thing up.

I was so focused on getting it done that I had completely missed the point.

I learned the hard way – quite a few times – to slow down and see the big picture. Now I tell all the new recruits to: “Try to figure out the substance of what you are doing and what makes your client happy, rather than the very specific, narrow task you have been asked to do”.

Finance is also an industry where things can change, fast. Just because you’re in a dark place one year, don’t assume you won’t catch a lucky break the next.

For example, I spent many years at Lehman Brothers in New York. While I was there, I was forced to change roles internally as my career was going nowhere. It was one of the lowest points of my career. And then, just one year later, I was hired by Goldman Sachs! Three years after that, I was made MD. It still amazes me how quickly things turn around.

Never assume that unexpected (good) things won’t happen when you work in finance.

You might want the security of a planned future, but you don’t have to have a plan for everything. Once you can let go and acknowledge this, you’ll get much further. I’ve seen so many young guys make the mistake of being in a huge rush for success. Finance careers don’t work like that. You’ll screw up – it’s inevitable. You may also feel out of your depth. What’s important is that you keep trying.

Over time, I learnt that you only get what you ask for and I learnt that if you want to excel, you have to treat every day like an interview. I learnt that no one really knows what they are doing, and that we are our own worst critic. I learnt to trust myself and stop sweating the small stuff and start building the systems and habits that have changed my life.

The author is a former Goldman Sachs managing director and blogger at the site What I Learnt on Wall Street.

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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Photo credit: Cube Farm by Mark Blasingame is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

While merger and acquisition activity has spiked globally during the first half of 2018, the U.S. has clearly offered the most fertile ground, accounting for more than half of global M&A volume during the first six months of the year. This shouldn’t come as a particular surprise as the political and economic climate in the U.S. is generally perceived as an advantage for dealmakers. But volume aside, there were significant market share changes during the first half of the year, with several surprises.

Goldman Sachs vs. the world

Goldman Sachs is always a perennial contender for the number one spot on the M&A league tables, finishing second globally, second in the U.S. and third in Europe, according to Bloomberg’s first half assessment. No complaints, right? Well that depends on who you ask.

Goldman Sachs saw its global market share of M&A revenue increase by 4% during the first six months of 2018 but still lost its top ranking to Morgan Stanley, which boosted its market share by nearly 14%. Fellow rival J.P. Morgan gained serious ground on Goldman Sachs by increasing its market share by almost 11%, inching within less than 2 percentage points of Goldman in the league tables. Fourth-place Citigroup saw its slice of the global M&A pie increase by 14% during the first half.

Same song, different tune in the U.S., where Goldman Sachs increased its market share by a respectable 3.8% compared to a year ago. The only problem is that its closest competition, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, saw a 16.5% and 14.1% jump, respectively. Like in the global rankings, Goldman dropped from first last year to second for the first six months of this year, again behind Morgan Stanley.

In Europe, Goldman Sachs had perhaps its worst showing, dropping from first to third in the league tables while losing 8.5% in market share. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan each increased their market percentage by around 10% in the EU.

Other surprises

Bank of America M&A’s team had a tough first half of the year, dropping from 5th to 10th in the U.S. league tables while falling from second to fifth in Europe. It was the only U.S. bank ranked in the top 20 in M&A revenues that lost market share to the field globally.

One of the bigger surprises is Barclays, which, after languishing for several years during cost-cutting strategies, appears to be back on track in M&A. The U.K. bank slightly edged up globally but increased from 16th to 9th in the Euro league tables with an 8% local bump in market share. No other non-U.S. bank had a more successful first half in M&A.

Failing to protect home-court

Perhaps the biggest disappoints in M&A were local firms that failed to protect their domestic business from foreign rivals. Local bank BNP Paribas fell from 1st to 6th in M&A volumes in France, representing an absurd 43% lose in local market share, according to Bloomberg. Fellow French bank Crédit Agricole, meanwhile, saw its market share drop nearly 16% over the first half of the year. France is a small market, and things can change quickly, but U.S.-based Morgan Stanley accounted for an eye-opening 40% of French M&A revenues.

Overall, M&A activity is bustling. The number of deals for 2018 is right on pace to equal those inked in 2017, but the average deal size has grown from $80m to $98m over that stretch.

All things considered, you’d likely rather work for a U.S. bank no matter where your office is located. Morgan Stanley appears the ideal employer at the moment. The firm has locked up the top spot on the league tables through the first half of the year in the U.S., the EU and APAC, displacing Goldman Sachs in all three locales.

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As Chinese companies dominate new listing in Hong Kong, more rank-and-file ECM bankers in the city are vying to join the mainland banks that are underwriting these deals, say headhunters.

“There’s now an increased willingness by ECM bankers from bulge bracket firms to move to Chinese banks,” says Yvette Kwan, a former APAC investment banking COO at UBS, now a partner at Hong Kong finance consultancy Quinlan & Associates.

“About 10 to 15 Hong Kong-based ECM bankers – locals, mainlanders and others – call us each month over the past year looking to join a Chinese securities house, even for a reduced salary, just to secure a job in their field,” says Jason Tan, an investment banking headhunter.

Lead by top-ranked CICC, half of the banks in Dealogic’s Asian IPO year-to-date revenue table are Chinese. “Mainland banks are winning more IPOs in Hong Kong because they already have strong relationships with the Chinese private companies that are increasingly dominating new listings here,” says Hong Kong finance professional Matt Huang, author of the book Young China Hand. While some Western corporates have listed in Hong Kong in the past – Samsonite in 2011, for example – few do so now.

Chinese banks have also landed Hong Kong IPOs by offering fees as low as 1%, well below the rates of their global rivals. “Chinese banks, like many other Chinese organisations, have always use pricing to win deals,” says Tan. “Call them price butchers if you like.”

But mainland banks aren’t hiring “superstar” MDs from the likes of J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, says Tan. “They’re winning deals with low fees, so they can’t justify spending millions on senior people from Western banks.”

The ECM jobs they have on offer are largely at the junior to mid level. “Due to their extensive corporate banking networks, Chinese banks already have a strong deal pipeline to originate Chinese issuers suitable for IPOs” says Stanley Soh, a Hong Kong-based regional country director of financial services solutions in Asia. “So they need strong IPO execution bankers to lead and enhance the overall execution experience.”

“Their big pipeline also makes them great training grounds for junior bankers to work on a variety of different IPO deals,” adds Soh.

If you leave a Western bank to join an ECM team at a Chinese bank in Hong Kong, expect your base salary to fall between 10% and 30%. “But in the current market your bonus may make up the differential due to the higher volume of IPO deals Chinese banks are now involved in,” says Soh.

Meanwhile, ECM specialists in Hong Kong who want to remain within global banks are having to “reinvent themselves”, says former UBS COO Kwan. “The traditional China-focused ECM banker within Western banks is in decline, so some are expanding their coverage to other countries, or expanding their scope into other products, like DCM,” she says.

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In which jobs will you earn the highest base salaries in the Singapore finance sector? And how much will you actually get paid when you reach the senior ranks in these roles?

To find out, we averaged out director (i.e. people with about 10 years’ experience or more) pay figures across salary surveys from three recruitment agencies in Singapore. We then eliminated jobs with an annual salary of less than S$350k to produce the table below. We used the maximum figures from each firm’s director-level pay range, so the salaries listed are for top performers.

While the nine functions in our S$350k table are all in the front-office, there is now surprisingly little variation among them when it comes to senior pay.

The table-topping investment bankers in ECM, DCM and M&A, for example, now ‘only’ earn 20% more in base pay than their private banking counterparts at director level in Singapore. The pay gap is narrowing as demand for relationships managers stays strong and IBD hiring flatlines.

Private banks – most notably Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank – continued to hire in large numbers in Singapore. Moreover, boutique firms such as EFG, LGT, Safra Sarasin, UBP, and VP Bank are also expanding and sometimes offering pay rises of between 30% and 50% to entice RMs to join their smaller platforms.

Meanwhile, despite Asian equities job cuts by several major banks over the past three years (most recently Deutsche Bank), senior pay in sales, trading and research remains close to that in investment banking.

The figures also suggest that bankers who move to the buy-side in Singapore probably aren’t doing so to boost the base salaries. Pay in private equity and hedge funds is still below that in IBD, although the extra rewards on offer (especially in the form of carried interest in the hedge fund sector) are potentially greater.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: smortlock@efinancialcareers.com

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Morgan Stanley gave a possible window into its eventual succession plan on Monday by offering a huge promotion to someone with a polar opposite background from its current chief executive, opening up the possibility that the bank could look a bit different after James Gorman retires.

As part of a series of moves, Morgan Stanley gave its trading chief, Ted Pick, oversight over the firm’s investment banking division. Pick, seen a potential successor to Gorman, may have just cemented his front-runner status as Morgan Stanley’s next CEO as he now controls businesses responsible for half the firm’s revenue. What makes the move interesting is that he’s different from Gorman in almost every way, including his experience and personality.

With a background in consulting and wealth management, Gorman is one of the most conservative CEOs in banking. He loves sustainable, predictable revenue, and suggested several times during the bank’s latest earnings call that he sees the firm’s securities business, which Pick has run successfully for several years, as more of a cherry on top rather than a core business that can be relied upon for consistent revenue. When asked how seasonality and market volatility affected Morgan Stanley’s terrific trading results in Q1, Gorman appeared to go out of his way to talk up other businesses within the bank, like wealth management, while downplaying the importance of sales and trading.

“We will do fine when the markets are tough and we would do well when the markets are good,” Gorman said after the bank booked $4.4 billion in trading revenue in Q1, up 26% year-over-year. “There are others who might do better when the markets are good, that’s fine. What I care about is how we do when the markets are tough.”

But perhaps this is why Gorman may prefer Pick, who cut 25% of Morgan Stanley’s fixed income traders in 2015 while slashing risk-weighted assets and relying more on electronic trading. Pick helped mold Morgan Stanley into a trading behemoth while simultaneously ratcheting down risk. Whether he would hold the reins as tight with Gorman gone is the question.

Either way, Pick’s potential ascension would likely bring a change in attitude at the top for Morgan Stanley. Unlike the extremely mild-mannered Gorman, Pick is known to have a penchant for profanity. Gorman’s predecessor, John Mack, once played a trick on Pick by having compliance pretend to flag him for his expletive-laden emails. Needless to say, Morgan Stanley could become a bit more fiery if Pick eventually succeeds Gorman, though the current CEO is only 59 and suggested that he’s not leaving anytime soon.

Elsewhere, a sell-side analyst at New York equity research firm Sidoti & Co. quit his job while burning every bridge he could, only to unsuccessfully try to put out the fires with a bottle of champagne. In a since-deleted Instagram video captured by the New York Post, Francesco Pellegrino pops a bottle of champagne, takes a swig, pours the rest on his boss’s floor and leaves a short letter of resignation on his desk: “F#*k you I quit.” Pellegrino will likely have to search elsewhere for a recommendation.

Meanwhile:

Beyond Pick’s elevation, Morgan Stanley also appointed co-head of investment banking Frank Petitgas to run its international business. Susie Huang, current head of M&A in the Americas, will take Petitgas’s seat, making her the first female to run an investment bank at a bulge bracket firm. (WSJ)

Goldman Sachs will reportedly meet early this fall to discuss its own succession plans. The bank’s remaining decision is likely to name the successor to current COO David Solomon, who is widely expected to be named CEO following the reported year-end retirement of Lloyd Blankfein. (NY Post)

Credit Suisse has dismissed the MD who reportedly acted inappropriately with an intern earlier this summer. Paul Dexter, a former managing director within the firm’s M&A division, allegedly had previous instances of inappropriate behavior. (Bloomberg)

There are three constants in life: death, taxes and Nomura announcing plans to grow in the U.S. The bank wants to hire 15 senior-level investment bankers, focused mainly on U.S. M&A. (NY Post)

The former CEO of Heartland Payment Systems has been charged with insider trading. The SEC has accused Robert Carr of tipping off a romantic partner that the fintech firm would be acquired before the news became public. (WSJ)

Deutsche Bank has hired one of its own investors, private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, to advise the German bank on its restructuring plan. DB has reportedly completed most of its job cuts, though this news could change that. (WSJ)

Employees at McKinsey & Company who pushed back on the consulting firm for doing business with the highly controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency have got their wish. McKinsey will no longer consult for ICE. (NY Times)

Blackstone is planning to launch a $20 billion global private equity fund, its eighth. (Bloomberg)

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One of the greatest battles between management and staff in the investment banking industry is “mobile phones on the trading floor”. On the one hand, personal phones are a compliance disaster area. Staff can use them to talk to headhunters, to pass on information that they don’t want to talk about on a recorded line and even to download inappropriate videos.

On the other hand, financial markets employees were among the first adopters of smartphone technology, and it’s considerably more difficult to get their phones out of their hands than it is to do so from an average teenager.

The FCA, among other regulators, has been looking at this problem for a while. Even in the absence of clear criminal intention, it’s still possible for employee’s social media use to be in breach of regulatory principles – a recent case concerned an employee who was simply in the habit of boasting about all the deals he was involved in to a WhatsApp group, inadvertently revealing confidential client data as he did so. As far as anyone can tell, only the most draconian of social media policies could eliminate this risk, and since banking employees are usually hired because they’re intrinsically social people, some sort of risk is more or less inevitable.

An uneasy truce that some banks had reached was the policy of BYOD, or “bring your own device.” Rather than being restricted to the corporate Blackberry, you were able to get the office email on your own iPhone, in exchange for having the corporate monitoring software installed, and some of the most egregious compliance risk apps, like WhatsApp and Snapchat, deleted.

But this might not be sustainable. The thing is, if an employee is using their own phone for corporate purposes, it’s not clear what that means for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Under a literal reading of the regulation, all of the employee’s contacts could be considered to be personal data held by the corporation, with all the associated overhead cost and compliance obligation. Since up to 40% of employees use their personal mobile phones for corporate business, that’s a considerable GDPR problem.

The official position of the FCA – and therefore the likely position of all European regulators, and in all probability global regulators too pretty soon – is that BYOD is just not allowed.

So if you’re going to go by the letter of the law, it’s the work laptop, the work mobile, and absolutely nothing else allowed on the trading floor or in the office.

Is this sustainable? The whole history of mobile technology in the financial services industry says not. Welcome back to the days of the “batphone”, the “burner” and the private device semi-secretly hidden in the handbag or jacket pocket. And to the days of senior management giving lectures at monthly meetings, but basically accepting that every now and then, the employees will pick up a subtle vibration from a desk drawer, and suddenly feel the need to “pop out for a cigarette”
to find out what’s really going on.

Dan Davies, is a senior research advisor at Frontline Analysts and a former banking analyst at Cazenove, Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

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In a world where job security and loyalty to employers are fading memories, it’s normally a given that you should have a well-written, up-to date, modern-recruiter-compliant CV ready to go. Strangely though, there’s one highly visible and successful vocational group whose CVs often look like relics from a bygone age. These are senior bankers.

“Bankers CVs tend to look very dated,” says Janet Moran, founder of The CV House. “You regularly see just a list of job titles and responsibilities, in Times New Roman type. They tend to transactional and don’t focus on strategic skills or leadership skills.” They are, she explains, designed to satisfy the requirement of producing a CV and not much more.

But does this matter? Historically, perhaps not. Financial institutions are good at promoting from within and, if you are moving up in the same organisation, people know who you are what you’re good at. Moreover, even when moves involve going to a different firm, they are often done via networks and contacts. So again, the CV is there to tick a box, rather than sell a candidate.

Nigel Parslow, a director at Harvey Nash Executive Search says that banking is a highly visible industry. “People know each other and they see what deals are being done.” It’s a bit like being in the movie business: everyone knows what you’ve been working on and how you’ve performed because your work is out there for all to see. “Financial services,” he adds, “is a very open sector.”

However, for all this, the need for a half decent CV may be growing. Recruitment processes are becoming more robust and professional says Ms Moran. Moreover, she adds, if there is a Brexodus from the City (or indeed any other form of downturn) jobs may be harder to come by, competition could increase and CVs might go from being a hygiene factor to being a genuine differentiator.

Worth remembering too, regardless of the economic climate, is that if you’re applying to jobs which are some distance (either geographically or functionally) from your current role, your CV will eventually fall into hands of someone who doesn’t know you or inow of you. In this case, the CV will be all they have to go on. For this reason says, Mr Parslow, you want it to be more than just a perfunctory record of what you’ve done.

He adds that even a traditional banking CV (a page on your history and a transaction sheet) can be improved: “You should try and show that you’ve worked on a range of deals across a range of sectors and demonstrate deal ownership.”

Andrew Pringle, the founder of Circle Square says that CVs have an important role to play for those from certain backgrounds. “If you’ve come from somewhere niche like a tech boutique which is not known to mainstream recruiters or if your job is non-vanilla, you need to provide a description.”

Here, he suggests a brief synopsis of the organisation and your own role. “Give quantifiables. You might say that your boutique has five offices across Europe and closed X deals, of which you worked on Y.” You should, he adds, explain too how much the deals were worth and how big your role in them was. Again, it’s about making yourself stand out.

There are some situations where you really are likely to need to go above and beyond a banking CV. These are where you are either moving out of banking and into a sector that measures career progress more conventionally or into a management role in banking.

Here Ms Moran counsels that here you want to be thinking about a CV which shows how you’ve contributed to organisation goals or dealt with strategic issues. “I’ve worked with bankers who’ve been involved in really groundbreaking activities, led teams through really difficult times and made really difficult decisions,” she explains. “But they don’t show any of this on their CVs. “There’s no indication that they can manage people or persuade people.”

Even if you’re not thinking of moving, it’s a good exercise to write your CV out anyway. Doing so is a good way of forcing yourself to take stock of your achievements, charting your career progress and planning where you want to be in a few years’ time.

Finally, as Clive Davis, UK Strategic Accounts & Operations Director, at Robert Half says, particularly in a business environment where change is expected, you never know what might be round the next corner – and so it is always good to be up to date. “Any passive candidate should ask themselves, ‘If an opportunity presents itself do I have a CV ready – and how good is it? How well does it represent who I am and what I’ve really been doing?”

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Understanding the true sentiment of bankers is a difficult task, particularly when it comes to pay. No matter the size of bonus pools, bankers habitually think they should earn more than they actually do. This year is no different, with more grumbling about recent bonuses than celebrating. That said, bankers at some firms are more discontented than others. Generally speaking, those in the U.S. and the U.K. fared better compared to their expectations than their counterparts in continental Europe, though there were a few outliers.

The data below comes from salary benchmarking firm Emolument, which surveyed more than 2,500 bankers across more than a dozen firms. Somewhat surprisingly, bankers at three U.K. firms – Barclays, HSBC and RBS – report being rather content with their 2018 bonus. Perhaps U.K. banks are taking care of their own before sending them packing post-Brexit? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan filled out the top half of the chart, while Citi and Bank of America dragged down U.S. firms as a whole.

Meanwhile, just a handful of bankers at French firms BNP Paribas and SocGen reported being happy with their bonus. That trend may continue considering the most recent league tables. French banks took it on the chin in their own home country during the first half of 2018.

On the other side of the coin, the number of bankers who were unhappy with their 2018 bonus outpace their contented counterparts two-to-one. To no one’s shock, Deutsche Bank led the way with 52% of staffers displeased with their bonus. The bigger surprise, however, was that 26% of Deutsche bankers were actually happy with their bonus. Facing massive layoffs, the German lender has apparently decided to reward top performers it hopes to keep while passing over middling staff. Our own recent survey covering total compensation found similar results, with more Deutsche bankers being satisfied with their pay than one might think.

The biggest statistical outlier is Goldman Sachs, where just 24% of bankers reported being unhappy with their bonus – nine percentage points lower than at any competing firm. Expectations seem to meet reality at Goldman Sachs. Roughly half of respondents were neither happy or unhappy with their bonus.

Source: Emolument

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I work for a big European bank in Hong Kong. After nine years in the job I’ve had enough and I want to join an American firm, preferably J.P. Morgan. Why leave when I’ve successfully moved up the ranks to VP level here? For starters, my bank has been through some rough times globally – and I’m not talking 2008; I’m talking now.

People have been made redundant in Hong Kong, while others have left in frustration. And there’s obviously been a lot of water-cooler speculation about the future of the bank. I’ve been more fortunate than many of my peers because I’m still here, but my long-term career prospects at this bank have recently diminished. Previous talk from HR about job mobility and international assignments have gone out the window.

I’d like to move into a new job function, in Hong Kong or elsewhere, but I can’t see any opportunities here. While things aren’t as bad as they were in 2016, the bank still isn’t doing as much hiring – internally or externally – as it used to. Recruitment is still focused on anti-money laundering and compliance, and until very recently there was a policy that for every two people who left, only one could be hired to replace them.

In this kind of environment, managers and HR clearly aren’t in the mood to discuss career changes – they want us to just get on with your current jobs. Moreover, the redundancies and the dearth of replacement hiring have increased my workload. I don’t have set hours anymore and I can’t delegate very easily; I just stay in the office until the work is done.

The bank’s recent troubles have also affected my job function in a more specific way. In theory, I’m tasked with developing innovative financial products for clients in Hong Kong. But everyone is more risk adverse and nobody is as interested in new product lines.

Managers are scared of signing them off and it’s difficult to set up the internal conversations I need. My team and I feel fatigued by the never-ending product hurdles we must overcome.

The big job cuts may be over for now, but for many staff the perception of our bank has been irrevocably damaged. The feeling is that we’re no longer a market leader as an investment bank; we’re just trying to stay alive. Product-wise, we’re certainly falling behind the competition, especially Asian banks, US banks and even the fintechs.

I’ve only just started my job search, but I’m definitely targeting US banks. I can see, for example, that Citi and J.P. Morgan are investing a lot more in their technology operations in Asia than my bank is – and this directly benefits people in their product teams.

But I think my decision is mainly based on personal experience. I’ve worked with many J.P. Morgan employees over the years and they’ve always impressed me more than any of their counterparts. JPM, therefore, is at the top of my list.

Winton Cheung (we have used a pseudonym to protect his identity) works for a European bank in Hong Kong.

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Investment banking is meant to be an egalitarian system where all that matters is your ability to make money, in principle. In practice, anyone with experience of watching hiring and promotion decisions being made knows that the PLULPLU Principle (‘people like us like people like us’) is at least as important as in any other walk of life.

Now a report has come out putting some figures to the perception, and shaming and praising the best and worst companies in London for their class bias. The Social Mobility Foundation has published a list of the top 50 companies for recruiting people from poorer social backgrounds. And finance has not come out well.

Interestingly, some of the top companies on the list are accountancy and legal firms – KPMG, Grant Thornton and Deloitte are all there. The asset management and insurance sectors are also well represented by Aviva, M&G and Standard Life Aberdeen. This suggests that it’s not necessarily anything particular about financial knowledge that makes it easier to acquire if you grew up rich. But of the allegedly meritocratic world of the sell-side, only J.P. Morgan manages to appear on the list.

Why is there such a gap between the myth-making of “poor and hungry” and the reality? Part of it appears to be driven by the fact that top investment banks are even more obsessive than other blue-chip employers when it comes to only recruiting from the world’s top brand-name universities. This means that all the social stratification that’s already in the admissions process of Oxford, Cambridge and their equivalents worldwide tends to be reproduced on the graduate admissions programme at Barclays or Goldman Sachs.

It’s also true that getting a job in banking usually means coming through the internship route, and this means putting together a resume of academic and extramural selling points pretty early on in your university career. That’s something that people don’t necessarily realise they have to do if they didn’t come from a background where finance and investment was a daily subject of conversation.

And once you’re into the industry, there’s an awful lot of path dependency. Genuine rainmakers who can win deals or generate trading profits will find that they can move from bank to bank based on their track record. For the rest of us, the industry is likely to judge you based on what your previous employer looked like. So if you join a second-tier company to start with, it’s that much harder for you to reach the top ranks of the bulge bracket. As a slight first step to remove this path-dependency (and to help reduce discrimination in the hiring process), State Street has banned its managers from asking about previous salaries when making hiring decisions.

Deutsche Bank, of course, has been needing a particular kind of talent – in the chief operating officer division – for a while now. Its attempt to buy in some help from Matt Zames, the former JPM COO and Jamie Dimon lieutenant has not gone down well with its shareholders, though. The decision to hire the Cerberus Operations Advisory Company to advise on restructuring, rather than McKinsey or any other consultancy, has raised eyebrows because of a perception that Cerberus’ 3% equity stake in Deutsche creates a conflict of interest. “You have to ask yourself how Cerberus is earning most of its money”.

The private equity giant has assured the market that there will be full Chinese Wall separation between its advisory and investing activities, and agreed to be restricted in buying or selling Deutsche stock for as long as the consulting relationship goes on. But as the owner of a 5% stake in Commerzbank and (jointly with JC Flowers) of HSH Nordbank, it’s easy to see how Cerberus could be in a position to generate synergies for its own investments. And activist investors might wonder how a shareholder can really hold management to account if they’re partly on the payroll. Deutsche clearly needs help, but lots of people are wondering whether this was the help they needed.

Meanwhile:

Analysts are getting their scorecards ready for JPM and Citi as they kick off the Q2 results season. (Financial News)

Overall, UBS has tried to analyse the “sentiment” from earnings call transcripts measured by their use of favourable and unfavourable words and phrases. (Business Insider)

Credit Suisse has to decide whether to appeal against a Texas court which ruled that it had misled Highland Capital over a real estate development that collapsed in the crisis. (Reuters)

Deutsche Bank wants to get back into the top five for LBO lending. (Bloomberg)

The European Investment Bank wants Britain to remain a member post-Brexit. (FT)

Nomura are still hiring in some areas – Nezahat Gultekin has arrived from Temasek to head up tech banking in London. (Financial News)

The Kindle version of hedge fund cult classic “Margin of Safety” which briefly went on sale this week turned out to be a pirate edition. (Forbes)

The head of Morgan Stanley’s “Hollywood team” of brokers to the celebrities has left, after some #MeToo allegations. (WSJ)

Goldman Sachs is trying to get the IBD dealmakers to bring in wealth management clients. (Bloomberg)

And Elliott Management has taken control of AC Milan with a €50m equity investment. No word of what AC’s Argentinean players think of this. (Financial News)

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Landing a job on the buy-side is a notoriously difficult task. The sheer number of people who apply to work at hedge funds, private equity firms and venture capitalists means you’ll likely need a blue-chip resume just to earn an interview. An MBA can help you separate yourself from the herd.

We scoured our CV database containing more than 900k resumes to identify the business schools that will give you the best chance for a career on the buy-side. As one would imagine, the list is made up of top programs, with U.S. business schools being the biggest feeder of talent. There were some surprises, however. Graduates of NYU’s Stern School of Business, a top destination for prospective investment bankers, don’t populate as many chairs on the buy-side as one might think. There are also fairly large gaps between top-rated programs in Europe and Asia. Columbia edging out Harvard and Wharton may come as a surprise to some, though it finished atop the list last year as well and was second in 2016.

The rankings are made up of the MBA programs with the highest percentage of graduates from each school who are currently working at hedge funds, private equity firms or venture capitalists. Schools included in the rankings needed to hit a minimum threshold of current buy-side employees and total MBAs grads within our database to be statistically significant, hence the omission of Stanford Graduate School of Business, which does well within the VC world but provides too small of a sample size overall.

It’s important to note that the rankings are based on the percentage of graduates from each business school working at hedge funds, private equity firms and VCs, not the overall total. MBA programs with larger enrollments like Wharton, Columbia, Harvard, Booth, INSEAD and London Business School account for the greatest number of buy-side employees, but the rankings are shifted slightly because a few other qualifying programs enroll fewer students yet sport higher percentages. An argument can be made to give those five schools an extra bump as more of their alumni are in the business and can help make introductions, though they all rank very highly anyway.

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