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Why is that there are so few women at managing director (MD) level in investment banks? That there are hardly any female strats? That even after decades of focusing on women’s initiatives, banks like Goldman Sachs admit they still have a long way to go? At this week’s London conference for women in quantitative finance, senior women shone a light back upon themselves.

Sometimes, women can be responsible for the lack of progress. “My CEO asked me to lead a team of people with 10-18 years’ experience and my first reaction was that I had never done that before and wasn’t ready,” said one senior systematic trader. She recalled how a female executive told her that women often sell themselves short in this way: “You say you’re not qualified and this becomes the message – ‘She’s not qualified’,” she said. “Guys never do this. They will always say, ‘Yeah I’m super-qualified for that job.” She went for the promotion.

Nor are women always receptive to banks’ attempts to help them with maternity leave. Another senior female quant who has two children recalled a conversation she had with her manager. “I was nine months pregnant and he wanted to talk to me how they were going to get me from director to managing director. I didn’t want to know,” she said. “But if I’d known what I know now, I would have been talking about what was happening with my team and managing the roles [for the future].”

There was agreement too that women will often sacrifice ambition and responsibility for security and an ability to cope. One panelist pointed to Donna Strickland, this year’s co-winner of the Nobel prize in physics. Despite being brilliant, Strickland is only an associate professor. When an interviewer asked Strickland why she wasn’t a full professor she said she “never applied.” “Women tend to find somewhere they feel comfortable and to sit still,” said a female head of algorithmic trading. Men don’t do this.

Another senior quant trader said women can be unduly hesitant about joining large investment banks, which they (wrongly) perceive to be full of aggressive men. “We were trying to hire a female trader from another bank who clearly wasn’t that happy in her role, but she wasn’t at all interested.” When the woman eventually agreed to an interview she disclosed that she thought the bank trying to hire her would be full of, “alpha males making unilateral decisions.” “We’re not like that at all,” said the trader. “We’re actually very collaborative.”

What can be done to make amends? Natalie Basiratpour, a panelist and director at recruitment firm Octavius Finance, suggested women channel Leda Braga, the founder of Systematic Investments, who famously joined BlueCrest when she was 34 weeks pregnant. Sometimes it makes sense to take a risk.

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For the second time in as many years, Citi appears to be reloading its Delta One sales and trading teams. The bank has made at least three new hires in the last month alone.

Andrew Dawkins, former head of Delta One sales in the Americas for BNP Paribas, joined Citi in October as a managing director working out of New York. Citi also added Claus Hein, former head of synthetic equity distribution for EMEA at Deutsche Bank. Hein started in London last month as a director of Delta One sales. The bank also just poached ex-Goldman Sachs strat Sriram Bharadwaj to work on its forwards desk as a Delta One trader.

The hires come nearly a year after Citi hired away three senior Delta One traders from rivals. At that point, insiders suggested that the hires were meant to replace traders who left following the arrival of Tom Regazzi from UBS as Americas head of prime finance. This time around, Citi appears to be adding headcount. Delta One trading desks have come back in vogue over the last few years following the end of prop trading, though some firms like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank are said to be scaling back the businesses in the U.S. Delta One traders like Kweku Adoboli have made headlines by incurring some spectacular losses, though Adoboli was convicted of going rogue after losing $2 billion of UBS’s money.

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Remember January 2017? If you work for Deutsche Bank, you probably will. – This was when then-CEO John Cryan announced a plan to shelve individual performance related bonuses for all but the most junior staff in Deutsche’s investment bank. Uproar ensued and Deutsche was effectively obliged to make amends at the bonus round at January 2018, a beneficence which possibly cost Cryan his job.

We’re now approaching January 2019 and Deutsche’s bankers are already starting to feel a bit sweaty about their bonus prospects for this year. A brief look at today’s changes to Commerzbank’s bonus scheme could make them sweatier still.

As Handelsblatt first reported earlier today, Commerzbank has decided to do away with individual bonuses for most employees in Germany, starting from now. Going forward, bonuses will instead be set by department or group. They will therefore depend on the performance of the group and the bank, not of the individual. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is pretty much what John Cryan implemented at Deutsche Bank nearly two years ago.

There are mitigating factors. Commerzbank’s performance bonus elimination doesn’t apply to employees outside Germany or to risk takers – meaning that most people in its investment bank will be spared. Even so, many will still be subject to additional new restrictions on performance related bonuses, set at 25% of annual salaries (for risk takers) in Germany and 42% in London.

There are three reasons why this matters if you’re at Deutsche Bank.

Firstly, Commerzbank is Germany’s second biggest bank (behind Deutsche). While Deutsche has a far larger investment banking and global markets operation, Commerzbank and its pay system remain a local Germanic benchmark – particularly as Deutsche refocuses on its home market.

Secondly, there have been suggestions – repeatedly shot down and potentially spurious – that Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank could one day become one. One senior Deutsche MD tells us he feels this is an inevitability as Deutsche loses large numbers of key staff: “We’re just sitting here, waiting to merge with Commerz,” he says despondently. Merging with a bank that restricts its bonuses to 42% of salaries may not be to everyone’s liking.

And thirdly, Deutsche’s newish CEO, Christian Sewing, is a German retail banker by trade. As such, it seems likely that he has a natural affinity for Commerzbank and its modus operandi given that Commerzbank is closer to his comfort zone than – say – Deutsche Bank’s office on London Wall. If John Cryan (who had an investment banking background) found it possible to do away with individual performance bonuses when the need arose, Sewing is likely to find it easier still. – Especially now that Commerzbank has set a recent precedent. Watch this space.

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Charles Gillet, Societe Generale’s chief information officer (CIO) for Asia Pacific, has joined French rival BNP Paribas, in one of the most noteworthy job moves in Hong Kong banking technology this year. Gillet, a 21-year Soc Gen veteran, is now APAC CIO for corporate and institutional banking (CIB) at BNP, based in Hong Kong, according to his online profile.

His departure is a major loss for SocGen because, as we reported in an interview with him last December, he had been spearheading a drive to hire C++ developers, Java developers, project managers and business analysts in Asia, particularly in Hong Kong.

Gillet’s approach to hiring at SocGen may provide some clues as to the type of experience you now need to get a job working for him at BNP. For starters, he’s a fan of the way tech companies have adopted agile working practices. “When developing our [SocGen’s] approach to being agile, we looked at the way technology companies – such as Amazon, Spotify, Google and Facebook – operate. About 75% of our roles in Asia are now agile,” Gillet told us last year.

At SocGen, Gillet had also become increasingly open to hiring technologists from outside of the banking sector. “My team already employs people who have banking backgrounds and we already know how markets work,” he said in December, in reference to his former firm. “So now we’re focused on hiring people who have a passion for technology, an innovative mindset, and can work in a collaborative way in a fast-paced environment.”

Before his move to BNP, Gillet had been a SocGen lifer. He joined the bank in Paris in 1997 as a trading-floor support contractor after graduating from French engineering school EIGSI. Two years later, Gillet had a permanent job managing a team of 20 people as global head of equity cash support.

This was to be his final Paris-based role at SocGen. Gillet lived in New York between 2000 and 2005 as global head of equity cash technology and then (from 2003) as head of business analysis equity and derivatives. He relocated to Hong Kong in 2005 to become head of equity and derivatives technology for APAC and worked in three other Asian jobs, including APAC head of front office technology, before becoming CIO for the region in 2014.

Gillet will be able to draw on recent experience in his new CIB-focused role at BNP. During his tenure as SocGen CIO he was primarily overseeing capital markets products, the bank’s sweet spot in Asia.

BNP Paribas is currently hiring into its Hong Kong tech team. Among other roles, the bank wants a trading application developer (with a strong background in C++/Java development) and a market access IT developer (to build interfaces with exchange systems throughout Asia Pacific), according to its careers site.

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Moving between banks after short tenures is, as a rule, something to avoid – even if the practice is still prevalent in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Interviewers in Asia love grilling candidates about their motivations for frequently changing firms – and most of the time candidates come up with very poor excuses. There are, however, a few reasons for job hopping that banks still consider to be reasonable. Here’s our pick.

1. X “affected the quality of my work” (and other changes of tone)

Justifying a small stint somewhere often comes down to the way you phrase your reasons, says Han Lee, a director at search firm Lico Resources in Singapore. So get your tone right. “If you say ‘I hated the politics in that bank’ it sounds like a bad excuse. But if you say ‘I recognise that politics are inevitable wherever you go, but I think the situation in that organisation was a bit extreme as it was severely affecting the quality of my work’ recruiters will respond much better.”

2. My new job was offshored straight away

“An unfortunate trend is that banks headquartered overseas now make very fast decisions to offshore jobs away from Singapore,” says Nichole Milne, a senior project manager at HR company Pontoon Solutions in Singapore. “I’ve worked with many candidates who’ve moved to new banks only to face offshoring upon joining.”

3. I know better now

Recruiters may not mind if you own up to a bad move. “I’ve interviewed candidates who’ve made poor decisions and regretted them, but turned this into a positive,” says a Hong Kong recruiter. “One person recently told me he job hopped for more money only to realise this was a poor driver. He said he’s now learned from that experience to make better informed assessments about changing jobs.”

4. My boss took me with them

To leave as part of a team move is generally an acceptable reason. “This is especially common in private banking and it shows that you’re a strong performer and that your boss recognises this,” says Kyle Blockley, managing partner of recruitment firm KS International. “Just make sure you also explain why the team move made sense from your own perspective.”

5. I left before I was axed

“It’s usually an acceptable reason when candidates say they were worried about job stability because they had heard news of offshoring or redundancies happening,” says Matthew Ng, a former commodities trader, now senior vice president of banking at recruiters Charterhouse in Singapore. “Potential employers tend to be empathetic with this.”

6. I wanted broader experience

This is an adequate excuse, but only if you can then provide details to prove that it’s true, says Christine Wright, Asia managing director of recruitment firm Hays. “You need to show that you haven’t been getting jobs with the exact same duties and responsibilities. If you’ve worked in different areas such as finance, operations and risk, that’s more acceptable.”

7. I returned to my core strength

So you went to the buy-side but moved rapidly back into banking? Just admit that the move was a mistake. “It’s ok to say you took a risk and tried something new, but it didn’t work out,” says Wright. “Make sure you show that you returned to your previous profession with renewed enthusiasm.”

8. The person who hired me walked out on me

“I’ve had several examples of someone joining a bank, only for the hiring manager to move into a different team a matter of days later,” says Chris Jackson, managing director of Pure Search in Hong Kong. “This can be especially difficult if you’ve really personally bought into that manager as a key reason for taking the job and you don’t have the same connection with your new boss, who wasn’t involved in the interview process. It can cause candidates to leave within their probation period.”

9. My department was undervalued

Candidates are sometimes justified in speaking up about how their department was viewed internally, says Steve Hutchinson, a partner at Fortitude Partnership in Singapore. “For example, I’ve heard compliance candidates say that the business had a poor governance culture and senior management followed certain practices that could have landed them in trouble with the regulator.”

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Image credit: Mike Powel, Getty

A growing number of senior Standard Chartered staff in Singapore are contacting recruiters about moving jobs before the axe falls, as concern mounts about redundancies at the bank under a new cost-cutting drive.

Stan Chart is considering trimming headcount, having made little progress since May in meeting its $10.2bn external cost target for 2018, according to an October 5 email from CFO Andy Halford to management that was seen by eFinancialCareers. But speculation that jobs will be lost in Singapore actually started in July/August when 2018 cost pressures began to bite, say insiders.

Since then, recruiters have noticed a marked uptick in Stan Chart staff getting in touch with them to discuss opportunities elsewhere. Most of these calls and emails have come from senior people, who have been further spooked by the October memo, which says job cuts should target expensive senior staff in high-cost locations. Stan Chart makes nearly 70% of its profits in Asia, and Singapore – an expensive financial hub – is home to many of its global managers.

“When I got back from holiday in late August, about 45 senior Stan Chart staff – many of them MDs – had got in touch in just two weeks wanting to meet me. I’ve never experienced that kind of interest in 15 years of recruiting,” says a senior headhunter in Singapore who asked not to be named. “And over the past few weeks I’ve had more of their people asking me for coffee – people who wouldn’t have been interested six months ago. They are nervous about cuts and looking to make pre-emptive moves. This new management email just formalises their concerns.”

The headhunter is not alone. “There have been more Stan Chart staff reaching out to me the last three months. And about 80% of SC people are open to opportunities when we approach them,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting in Singapore. “We’ve had an increased number of senior SC candidates contacting us recently, and many have cited concerns about possible job cuts. I expect more to reach out to recruitment agencies in the coming weeks,” adds Gary Lai, managing director at Charterhouse Partnership in Singapore.

Are senior managers at Stan Chart in Singapore right to be concerned about layoffs? “Yes, job cuts at a senior level here are almost certain. Roles in support functions – operations or regional positions with no definite P&L – will likely be affected,” says a source close to the bank. “Some cuts have already started, with some bankers from the industry coverage groups recently receiving redundancy letters.”

Stan Chart’s wholesale banking unit could bear the brunt of any cuts in Singapore, suggests the anonymous headhunter. “Singapore is a global base for wholesale, so there’s plenty of costly group-level director and MD jobs here. This is a cost-saving drive, and you save more money by reducing in wholesale than in retail, where salaries tend to be lower,” she says. “I expect redundancies in support roles rather than sales. Even senior compliance roles could be affected because Stan Chart has hired so heavily that there’s now room to downsize. Non-sales leadership jobs in front-office capital markets and transaction banking could also be under threat.”

The good news is that all the people we spoke to for this report say they don’t think redundancies will be on the same scale as those started in late 2015 when Stan Chart announced plans to cull 15,000 roles globally, including jobs in Singapore. A spokesperson for the bank in Singapore did not comment on redundancies, but she said: “We have previously stated that our second half expenses will be similar to our first half expenses. That remains our view – as we will confirm in our third quarter results update on 31 October.”

Meanwhile, CFO Halford’s suggestion that Stan Chart also save money by restricting external hires is likely to be put into practice in Singapore, say recruiters. “I anticipate a temporary hiring slowdown or even a freeze at SC, although critical hires will likely still continue,” says Lai from Charterhouse. “There are pockets of recruitment going on there, especially in technology, strategy and change management. But it’s much harder to recruit at the moment and the process is more dragged out,” says Kuek from Myer Consulting.

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Good morning! Jackie Luo, an engineer at Square, has opened up herself to some “radical transparency” by posting her own compensation details on Medium. It’s by way of introduction to her project of benchmarking men’s salaries in order to give women (mainly women in technology) an understanding of what the going rate for the job is, and to therefore have more of an opportunity to demand equal pay.

It turns out that Jackie, who only has three years of experience, is earning $233,097.51 (exactly) a year when her salary and stock are taken into consideration. This is comprised of $130,000 a year in salary, plus stock which was initially valued at $47,500, but has since risen in value (and may yet fall again). Jackie is, then, paid rather well. – Particularly when you consider that third year analysts in investment banksare paid around £113k ($150k).

We occasionally get similar data on how women are paid relative to men in the banking world, although they tend to come out as the result of equal pay lawsuits or in bankruptcy proceedings. We also have the top risk takers data provided to regulators in Europe, and there is of course a whole industry (which pays surprisingly well itself, apparently) in compiling and distributing suitably anonymised industry-level compensation award data for the benefits of bonus setting bosses. Wouldn’t it all be so much easier if we just do what they do with Swedish tax records and make everything public so everyone can have a look?

As well as considerably benefiting women and minorities looking for equality, there would be a considerable benefit to the simple sanity of the industry, and a huge saving in time spent driving ourselves crazy about what we think other people might be earning. Rather than speculating, backbiting and gossiping, we could all look it up on the corporate intranet and find out yup, Jim-Bob got paid $100k more than you did last year. Armed with that knowledge, you can either ask the boss for $100k more in the next year’s bonus round, or shut up about it.

Presumably, the reason employers are so hostile to this kind of transparency (many banks actually put it in your contract that you are forbidden to share your compensation details with other employees) is that they presume that everyone would choose the first option rather than the second. That might be a misestimation of human nature. It is all very well to schedule a meeting to tell your boss “I’m just as valuable an employee as Jim-Bob”, but there would only need to be a few blunt retorts of “no you’re not” before frivolous attempts were discouraged.

Perhaps the trouble is that as a species, humanity can only handle so much reality. What we would end up with is a world in which everyone was paid roughly what they were worth. How intolerable does that sound? With no status insecurity to drive us on, no feelings of impostor syndrome to temper our egos, and the thrill of bonus season replaced by a single, awkward fact driven conversation with a middle manager, or possibly a robot. It’s a lovely idea, but we would never cope with it.

Separately, unpleasant fact-driven conversations are likely to become the order of the day at Merrill Lynch as “numbers guy” Matthew Koder takes over as head of the corporate and investment banking division at Bank of America, and staff do not seem to be looking forward to the experience.

Self-styled numbers guys have a pretty mixed reputation in investment banking. At their best, they take out waste and dead wood and force dysfunctional institutions to address hard questions that they have been sweeping under rugs for years. At their worst, numbers guys create much more dysfunction than they identify, by second-guessing everyone, demanding short term results from long term relationships and sweating every upward and downward tick of the inevitable volatility of the industry.

When a deal goes unusually well, the numbers guy notices it and demands a repeat performance every quarter from now on. When a trade goes bad, the numbers guy is immediately asking dozens of questions about risk limits. Koder is described as “internally focused” rather than “a client guy”, but his mission is apparently to ensure that ML wins “its fair share” of M&A and capital markets business from its clients. Let’s hope he’s the good rather than the bad kind of numbers guy, but it’s an unpalatable truth that the success rate of numbers guys in investment banking is directly related to how bad things were before the numbers guy took over, and from the employees’ point of view, their successes can be as painful as their failures.

Meanwhile …

Bloomberg has live video from a not-very-full conference hall at the Saudi Future Investment Initiative https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1054673980026687489 and the latest details on who went and who didn’t (Bloomberg)

…as the World Economic Forum reminds us that we shouldn’t use the word “Davos” for any seminar series not organised by them and taking place in the desert, for example (WEF)

…And the whole episode couldn’t have come at a worse time for Goldman Sachs, which has just finished a major program of investment in building up its brand with Saudi decision makers (Financial News)

As UBS lifts its ban on private bankers travelling to China, Citi and JPM have asked their staff to “reconsider” going there (Bloomberg)

Moelis & Co are talking bullishly about hiring in “pretty much all of our sector groups”, after a good Q3 set of results (Financial News)

Dagmar Kamper Borens is leaving Credit Suisse, following the decision not to have an IPO of the Swiss domestic operations (Finews)

Jes Staley’s Barclays investment banking division is beginning to win over some of the doubters …(Financial News)

…but Deutsche is still the subject of tough pieces speculating on its ability to continue to exist as an independent bank (WSJ)

…although it is hiring a cloud computing specialist from the Bank of England (FT)

In a promotional interview for his forthcoming memoir, Paul Volcker says that banks are “in a stronger position than they were, but I don’t know how much they’re manipulating” and continues to call for more supervisory powers (NYT)

And Goldman Sachs is sponsoring a group of ex-Navy Seals who have created an anti-bullying program (which is targeted at bullying in high schools rather than in elite special forces units or major investment banks) (CNN)

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If ever there were a parable on the difficulties of an investment bank cutting its way to growth versus the more straightforward approach of growing its way to growth, Deutsche Bank and Barclays would appear to be it. The two European banks both reported their third quarter results today. One has been cutting in preparation for growth. The other has been taking a more straightforward approach. Guess which looks more healthy?

As was probably to be expected, Deutsche Bank’s new retail banking CEO has been all about job cuts to Deutsche’s corporate and investment (CIB). As page eight of the presentation accompanying the German bank’s results makes clear, most of the jobs that were removed from Deutsche Bank since June came out of the CIB. By comparison, other areas have barely been touched. The latest cuts follow cuts in the second quarter too, such that 931 front office staff and 363 back office staff (net) have disappeared from Deutsche Bank’s corporate and investment bank in a year. All these cuts have been accompanied by what Deutsche CFO James von Moltke described today as “restrictive hiring.” – Few new people have been allowed in; except, of course, 750 cheap graduates.

Deutsche’s shriveling headcount was accompanied by a shriveling of pretty much everything else. As the chart below shows, revenues in every area of Deutsche’s investment bank – save equity capital markets (ECM) – declined year-on-year in the third quarter. And in absolute terms, the €39m revenue increase in Deutsche’s tiny ECM business was a pinprick compared to the €307m that were lost in its fixed income business. Some of this was deliberate – Deutsche willfully pulled out of the U.S. repo business, curtailed its U.S. equities business and closed U.S. focused corporate finance teams. Nonetheless, double digit revenue declines look excessive and were queried by analysts on the bank’s investor call.

If Deutsche Bank looks diminished, the same cannot be said for Barclays. While Deutsche talks of cuts, the British bank has been crowing about all the new people it’s hired. So far this year, Barclays says it’s added 275 external hires to its markets business. Since the start of 2017 it’s added 50 managing directors (MDs) to markets. Over the same period, it’s added 33 MDs to its banking (M&A, ECM and DCM) business. It’s been investing in technology. It’s been investing in data science. Barclays has even been investing in equity researchers.

As a result, Barclays’ sales and trading results juxtaposed against Deutsche Bank’s (below) look rather stark. Barclay is growing. Deutsche is doing the opposite.

Barclays doesn’t break out the performance of its M&A, ECM and DCM businesses separately, but here the British bank’s advantage is less pronounced, – Barclays’ banking fee revenues were down 15% in the quarter; Deutsche’s were only down 2%. Barclays blamed weakness in ECM, where Deutsche Bank was contrastingly super strong. Deutsche also cited strong growth in leveraged loans.

Deutsche Bank now going for growth

So what next for Deutsche Bank? It still has over 1,700 job cuts (across the bank) to make in the fourth quarter. It still plans to cut costs (although next year’s €21bn cost target has been jettisoned). It still plans to extract costs from the investment bank through “efficiencies,” but it’s also chasing growth. CEO Christian Sewing and CFO Von Moltke said repeatedly today that the focus is now on, “stabilizing and growing the revenue base,” from the new and intentionally reduced client footprint in the CIB.

Will this be possible? It will take some turnaround given that total revenues in Deutsche’s CIB fell 13% quarter on quarter and 15% year-on-year in the past three months. Deutsche doesn’t have much room for mistakes. Even after all Sewing’s cuts, costs still consumed nearly 95% of revenues at the bank in the third quarter (up from 85% on year earlier). The return on equity in the corporate and investment bank is still just 1.1%. The margin for error is tiny.

Worse, as Jeremy Sigee, a European banking analyst at Exane, pointed out on Deutsche’s call, the German bank’s risk appetite (as measured by its Value at Risk) appears to be falling as the bank’s cost of capital rises in line with its falling credit rating. “You keep saying you’re going to take more risk and it doesn’t happen,” said Sigee. “If I were running a trading desk at Deutsche Bank, I would say I’m not going to bother as I’m not going to get paid anyway – or that funding costs are so high that it’s not worth taking risk.”

Von Moltke responded to Sigee by admitting that some of Deutsche Bank’s trading businesses have suffered as a result of the bank’s new BBB+ credit trading, but noted that ratings agencies downgraded the bank on concerns about costs rather than capital and risk taking. If Deutsche can increase revenues and cut costs, all will therefore be fine. Simple.

Barclays, meanwhile, is going for growth too. Revenues in Barclays’ corporate and investment bank were largely flat in the third quarter compared to the previous year, but the UK bank generated a return on equity of 6.6% in the business operating costs were ‘just’ 79% of operating income. The British bank is investing in electronic trading and a new iPortal system single entry point for its corporate banking clients. It seems to have momentum, which is more than can currently be said for DB.

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Brexit is coming – probably – unless it’s kicked into the long grass for a few more years (which might not be such a bad thing). Banks are rattling sabres about activating their contingency plans on December 1st unless there’s not more clarity; Bank of America is readying its new Paris office for opening early in 2019 and reportedly eyeing-up staff to migrate. So what do you say when you get the nudge? While you may have some legal grounds to refuse to move, the advised answer is an unequivocal, “Yes.”

“If you want a 10-15 year career in banking, you just say “Yes” when you’re asked to move to Europe and you agree to go with your family,” says one senior fixed income headhunter who’s been working with banks on their plans (and spoken on condition of anonymity). “You’re going to need to be fairly ballsy to take a risk and say no in this market, because there’s just not a lot of hiring going on in London now anyway.”

While it’s still early days, this seems to be what’s happening with the senior staff who’ve been commanded to migrate so far. “We already know several expat families who’ve gone to Paris or Frankfurt,” says one expat banker’s wife in the British home counties. “This is just what it’s like when you’re an expat – you’re used to chaos and doing what you’re told. You get told to go Frankfurt, you go to Frankfurt. It’s the mindset. Your husband is in a global career and you expect to move every few years. You’re resigned to going anywhere – except maybe Kazakhstan….,” she adds. It’s not easy – especially when your spouse has a career of their own and has to throw it all in to match the foibles of a finance employer.

The need to acquiesce reflects the comparative lack of control front office bankers in London have over their geographic destinies. Nor is it just locations that are uncertain – with banks like Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas and (allegedly) UBS all making redundancies in recent weeks, there are questions too over job security in the fourth quarter, and bonuses seem likely to be squeezed everywhere. Rarely has the future been so uncertain and the options so limited.

Of course, you can always hedge. The obvious way to do this is to agree to whatever your current employer asks of you whilst making quiet enquiries about the alternatives. Headhunters say this is happening, with Bank of America’s London staff in particular putting in calls to see if they can escape the Parisian fate they’re being signed-up to. However, vacancies in London remain thin. And banks are increasingly unwilling and unable to indulge staff who want to stay in the City. “All our banking clients are asking us to identify high quality producers who are already in Europe in case London staff won’t move,” says the head of another London search firm. If you won’t go, you won’t have a job.

“Banks started off being wary of p*issing off their big producers by demanding that they move,” says another headhunter. “- But this is evaporating and now they just want to get on with it.”

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If you’re a rank-and-file professional working long hours at a desk job, you’ve likely spent at least a moment or two wondering if the grass would have been greener if you took a different career path, maybe one that doesn’t pay as well but is less stressful and keeps you on your feet. Would life actually be better if you were a bartender or out on the road? The short answer – and the good news – is no, not really. But there are still a couple of options that provide a better overall sense of well-being for bankers and other professionals who burnout or who want a second career.

Researchers for a new study published in Preventative Medicine Reports analyzed interviews from nearly 75,000 employees across 11 job categories, looking at their overall well-being along with five career factors that contribute to happiness: purpose, social life, financial stability, community and physical health (the complete definitions for each are at the bottom of the article). As you can see in the chart below, the “professional worker,” including investment bankers, stock brokers, accountants, lawyers, engineers, computer programmers and marketing professionals, report having a happier life than people in most other lines of work. Good news all round. Except, as the (red) chart below shows, some people are better-off still.

Unsurprisingly, one kind of person who’s better off is your boss. Managers and executives feel better about where they are in life than those who report to them. Stick it out and become management and life may improve. The other ‘lifestyle’ option has likely danced across many idle minds: starting your own company. Business owners and those who classify themselves as self-employed report a better overall sense of well-being than professionals, despite not feeling quite as comfortable about their finances – the biggest deterrent for most people who would prefer to go out on their own. Other factors that lead to happiness like a sense of purpose, community and physical well-being more than make up the difference.

The final option: you can just say the hell with it and become a farmer or a fisherman. They’re the happiest of the lot.

Well being index

While it may sound crazy, plenty of successful bankers have left the business in the hopes of finding a quieter mind by running farms, ranches and fisheries. Michael Wentworth Waites, a former head of equities at Deutsche Asset Management, left to run a commercial hill farm in the U.K. Former private banker M.G. Hoysala now manages a 40-acre farm and coffee plantation. Former Credit Suisse exec Hector Sants lists organic farming as his top hobby. “They’ve had enough, they’ve got young children, and they want to get away from the stress of it all,” estate and farm realtor Charlie Evans previously told us of the banker-turned-farmer phenomenon.

Money matters. And so does the size of the pond

Looking deeper into the numbers, a few key trends emerge. As one would assume, people who work in lower-paying industries like construction, transportation and manufacturing report lower levels of financial well-being, though the differences aren’t as stark as one would think. But after cutting the data using three different salary thresholds, researchers found that top earners in all 11 job categories reported higher scores in each of the five well-being indices than their middle-earning colleagues, who likewise outpaced low earners in every category and every measure of well-being – with no exceptions. The job that you have doesn’t affect happiness near as much as the amount you earn compared to others in your field. A well-paid plumber is more content in life than a poorly-paid accountant. The grass may not be greener on the other side of the fence, but it’s definitely greener in the corner office or with the higher-paying shift at the bar.

In sales, you better be good

By comparison, you might want to avoid sales. In a commission-based business, it makes sense for money to be a big predictor of happiness for salespeople. But the differences are really stark. When comparing the highest and lowest income groups, sales tied for the largest gap in overall well-being. Sales workers in the lowest income group also reported significantly poorer physical health than high or middle-income salespeople. The job puts employees at a higher risk for poor cardiovascular health than other groups, according to the report. To be short: if you aren’t a very good salesperson, you probably want to try something new. It’s making you miserable and could actually kill you.

Wellbeing chart 2

Indices

Purpose: liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals.

Social: having supportive relationships and love in your life.

Financial: managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security.

Community: liking where you live, feeling safe, and having pride in your community.

Physical well-being: having good health and enough energy to get things done daily.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

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The big argument against getting a technology job in an investment bank is usually ‘the work’. – Do you really want to be spending your life updating tired legacy systems for a highly-regulated investment bank when you could be designing exciting new moonshotty products for a Big Four technology company? Err, no. But what if you got it all wrong? What if banks are where the exciting stuff is going down and technology companies are getting tangled up in their own ageing systems? What if that?

Clearly it’s not entirely this simple, but there’s certainly something to be said for the fact that banks’ technology jobs aren’t as boring as some people make out. The following chart, from research firm Greenwich Associates shows big banks’ (‘bulge bracket’) and small banks’ (‘middle market’) technology priorities for 2018. Regulatory-driven technology is far less important than it used to be. Today, technology in banking is all about improving client tools and automating trading.

technology banking

This shows in the kinds of people banks want to hire for their most exciting jobs on the trading floor. As the second chart (also from Greenwich), below, shows, banks are all about hiring data management people for their trading floors nowadays.

Skills for trading

Both trends are reflected in the goings-on at Goldman Sachs. Marty Chavez, the firm’s CFO-turned-co-head of the securities business is a big exponent of Marquee – Goldman’s product that allows clients to access its SecDB pricing and risk system directly. During the bank’s second quarter call, Chavez said Goldman is busy investing in, “digital access, digital formats of many kinds, digital user experiences…giving clients the abilities to plug in directly into our platform through APIs.” The firm is also busy building out its “FAST Team” (Franchise Analytics Strategy and Technology) which is a group of data scientists and engineers whose sole purpose is to turn data into takeaways for traders – using visualizations where necessary.

Suddenly banks’ tech jobs don’t look so tedious after all.

Meanwhile, there’s an increasing body of evidence to suggest that jobs in big technology companies aren’t as fancy as you might think. Why is it that so many people only stay at Google only two years? – That so many big names keep leaving Facebook? – That Silicon Valley firms are hiring armies of contractors to try keeping costs down?

More importantly, the more established the big tech firms become, the more that they too have their own legacy systems which you might find yourself staffed upon. Take Michael Lynch, who wrote a blog about quitting Google earlier this year. The way Lynch told it, his whole time at Google was spent working on a cruddy legacy data pipeline which had been in “maintenance mode” for years and wasn’t going to earn him a promotion any time soon.

Equally, big tech firms are now big bureaucracies replete with their own political power players (as per last week’s Tweetstorm from former Google designer Morgan Knutson). Sound familiar? Suddenly banks and tech firms are less distinct than you think.

Here’s the bad news for Evercore bankers: revenues for the third quarter were down, they advised on fewer deals and the compensation pool shrank. Despite all that, pay-per-head is still massive compared to other firms and the boutique keeps adding managing directors with unparalleled success.

Evercore set aside $217.5m for compensation costs during the third quarter – down 8% year-on-year – and $743m over the first nine months of the year. The compensation ratio ticked down from 60.9% to 59.3% during Q3. But Evercore only had 1,600 employees at the end of 2017, the last time it reported headcount. Liberally assuming the firm has added 100 people since, pay-per-head through the first nine months of the year stands at $437k, roughly 50% more than at Goldman Sachs. While down a touch, its 59% comp ratio is still eye-popping. Assume a decent fourth quarter and the average Evercore employee will take home just under $600k for the year. Based on analyst reports, that’s a safe assumption.

Evercore’s visible pipeline of deals remains positive and its less visible backlog is equally strong, according to Buckingham Research Group. Moreover, the firm is on pace for a record year of recruiting, adding a net 11 senior managing directors through the first nine months. “On a per senior managing director basis, [Evercore] stands out as having best-in-class productivity” of roughly $16.5m per year, according to Buckingham, which said the boutique has a near 100% success rate with senior banker hires, based on interviews with industry sources and competitors.

Though advisory revenues were down during Q3, Evercore’s smaller equity capital markets (ECM) team fared rather well. Underwriting revenues were up 4% year-on-year and 108% through the first nine months of 2018. Executive chairman John Weinberg said the firm plans on adding talent across all its business lines in the coming year. Based on the recent growth numbers, expect ECM to be key target.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

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You’ve toiled away in a banking job focused on the local market in Hong Kong for years – but now you’ve finally landed a promotion into a bigger and better role covering countries across Asia. After the initial excitement of your promotion dies down, you may find yourself wondering how you’ll cope with your new regional responsibilities – in particular, how you’ll go about managing people based in different Asian markets.

The first month for any new regional manager will be tough, as I know from my time at Standard Chartered here in Hong Kong. Here’s how I think you can get through it and win the confidence of your multi-national team.

Take a broad perspective

The single biggest difference between a regional Asian and local role is obviously the scope of your responsibilities. Many successful managers at country level struggle after being promoted because they fail to adopt a broad enough regional ‘perspective’. By this I mean: the ability to be comfortable with more uncertainty and ‘fuzziness’ (you will be faced with more opinions and more cultural perspectives); the ability to identify and engage a much wider range of stakeholders; and the ability to think about the regional impact of your decisions. The best regional leaders can work across functional and geographical boundaries in order to bring people together to create solutions for their bank.

Build alliances

In a regional role you may well be tasked with restructuring the way your team functions, but don’t be too eager to start changing things right away. Instead spend your initial weeks on the job identifying the people most important to your success – create a detailed stakeholder ‘map’ then talk to everyone on it. Don’t only use your new network to achieve your own objectives, try to help others – reciprocity is important when networking as a regional manager in Asian banking. Make the most of any face-to-face opportunities you have to talk to stakeholders in other Asian offices, even if this means staying an extra day on business trips to meet people for lunch or coffee.

Use influence, not authority

The more regional you are, the higher up the hierarchy you are, the less likely you are to have direct line-management power over some of the more junior people who will actually be critical to your success. Other regional managers at the same level as you will also impact your performance. This all means you’ll need to influence a lot of people without having authority over the them. When trying to influence them and make sure your ideas are taken seriously, I recommend building consensus on core issues but allowing some give-and-take on less important matters.

Show your ‘cultural flexibility’

This is a very important personal characteristic that involves a fine balance between pursuing your own ideas and integrating ideas from people from different cultures. Success in your new job lies in knowing what’s important to people across Asia and knowing how to engage with them. Understanding when to push your own opinions and when to allow for cultural differences will require a constant focus on the cultural implications of every decision you make. Don’t just accept cultural stereotypes. Travel and get to know people in your team from across the region – learn from them. Having a few trusted ‘local’ friends/colleagues in each of your countries will be very useful for sounding out ideas and getting initial insights into the potential cultural barriers you may face when launching a new project.

Embrace technology

Become a video-conference, phone, instant-messaging and email Jedi Master. Face-to-face meetings, while important, are actually getting less and less common, so use the virtual facilities at your disposal. Make sure you are able to connect to people through multiple channels and that you actively use each one. Different people respond to different forms of communication, so be sensitive and flexible in this regard. And don’t only use virtual communication for formal purposes – having a virtual coffee meeting could be a very ‘personal’ way to get to know a colleague in a remote location. And in all virtual meetings some casual chatting and personal introductions can create trust and build participation. Time spent on these seemingly ‘soft’ activities will always provide a ROI in the long term.

Henry Chamberlain is a Hong Kong-based industrial psychologist and executive coach, and a former head of selection at Standard Chartered.

Image credit: lzf, Getty

Are you looking to work for a US bank in Asia? Do you want one that has a large foothold in the region? Or would you prefer a firm that’s strong in IBD, with a brand that will impress future employers? Citi and Goldman Sachs (the only American banks to publish their Asian revenues for Q3) make for an interesting comparison.

Citi made almost three times more revenue in Asia that Goldman Sachs did in the third quarter –$3,785m vs $1,209m, according to the banks’ recently released financial results. This was not a one-off or even the widest quarterly disparity, as shown in the chart below, which compares Asian income at the two firms stretching back to Q1 last year.

As the size of its results suggests, Citi is a universal bank in Asia – where it has some 50,000 people across 16 markets – like it is in the US. Citi’s global consumer banking unit employs people in stable cash-cow functions that Goldman has little or no presence in (e.g. cards and retail banking). In Singapore, Citi’s headcount of more than 9,000 people, the largest of any foreign bank in the Republic, far exceeds that of Goldman.

Moreover, if you have a job at Citi in Asia, you are working in a region which is actually important to the bank’s global bottom line. As the second chart below shows, Asia’s share of Citi’s total revenue has hovered at about 20% for several quarters. Goldman, by contrast, has only mustered 12% to 17% over the same period.

Strip out consumer banking, however, and the figures tell a slightly different story. Citi’s other division in Asia, institutional clients group, comprises corporate and investment banking, treasury and trade solutions, markets and securities services, and private banking – and it therefore competes in similar sectors to Goldman. ICG in Asia made $1,930m in the third quarter – that’s still 60% more than Goldman’s overall Asian total of $1,209m, but Citi is a whopping 213% ahead of GS when its entire regional revenues ($3,785m) are included.

If you work in front-office investment banking in Asia, meanwhile, Goldman is the pick of the two banks. It ranked first for overall Asian IB revenue in the first nine months of this year, eight places higher than Citi, according to Dealogic. Goldman also topped the regional tables for M&A and ECM, with Citi ranking 7th in both categories. The appointment of Goldman veteran Todd Leland last week to head up IB in Asia is widely seen as an attempt by incoming CEO David Solomon to further strengthen Goldman’s regional franchise.

But it’s not just about the numbers. “Many young people want to work for Goldman – rather than say, Citi or HSBC – because they think having GS on their resume will open up more options for them in the future,” says a junior banker in Hong Kong. “And it’s still the most glamorous shop on the street career-wise.”

This positive perception of jobs at Goldman is widespread in Singapore and Hong Kong. The bank came third in an eFinancialCareers survey that asked finance professionals in the cities which employers they would ideally like to work for. Citi finished sixth.

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

Follow @simonmortlock

Last Friday, Deutsche Bank’s share price fell sharply ahead of concerns about its third quarter earnings. Yesterday, the bank’s earnings came out and the bank’s share price fell another 4.5%. At €8.7, it’s now so far from the €23 strike price for the retention bonuses issued in early 2017 as to make them seem risible. Bloomberg describes Deutsche as being in, “dire straits,” and points out that the bank is now trading at 70% less than its book value.

Davide Serra, founder of hedge fund Algebris, thinks Deutsche’s issues could be terminal. “Deutsche…is subscale everywhere with a very weak US franchise. And if they can’t make money at this part in the economic cycle, I don’t know if they can,” he told the Financial Times. Andrew Coombs, an analyst at Citi is equally sceptical and suggests that Deutsche could be caught in a downward spiral: “We fear the bank could continue to cede sales and trading share based on current momentum,” he says, adding that the bank’s targets are, “overly aspirational.” Kian Abouhossein, head of European banking research at JPMorgan, is equally dubious: “…in Deutsche’s case there is no sign of market share stabilisation,” he says. Where will it all end?

Deutsche Bank is already a shadow of its former self. JPMorgan’s analysts estimate that the bank’s fixed income currencies and commodities and equities revenues will be down 41% and 55% from their peaks this year, and with market share still falling this may not be the end.

Does this mean, then, that Barclays is a better bet? After all, it’s still busy hiring and had an excellent third quarter in sales and trading. Not necessarily. Barclays’ FICC share is down 78% from its 2009 peak. Banking analysts quoted by the Financial Times are lukewarm on the British bank too. Coombs, for example, says Barclays’ results were flattered by favourable loan-loss model adjustments under new IFRS 9 accounting rules, which are unlikely to continue. The general verdict appears to be that Barclays had a good quarter which will be difficult to repeat, which is concerning given the lurking presence of activist investor Edward Bramson (who wants big cuts at the investment bank) on the sidelines.

Separately, what kind of moniker can you expect at Citigroup if you’re a great performer and a nice guy? How about “Golden Boy”? This was apparently the name bestowed upon Rohan Ramchandani, a Citi trader accused of rigging FX markets, who’s on trial in New York. Ramchandani was, “very professional” and “very very smart,” said a former colleague in his defence. “Everyone wanted a piece of him,” she said. “The salespeople, the managers. I would actually say to him, you have to say no to some of these requests.”

Meanwhile:

Jes Staley: ““There has been a comment that European investment banks can’t compete with the US, and I would just point out that four quarters in a row we have gained market share. The reality of what’s happening with our markets franchise really belies the proposition we can’t compete.” (Financial Times)

Barclays said growth was strong in prime finance, with client balances 11% bigger than last year. Barclays expects to keep growing in this area because attracting clients with funding is the first step, after which it hopes they will use the bank for a growing share of their trading activity. (Wall Street Journal)

At 7%, returns in Barclays’ investment bank are still well below its other business areas like retail banking and credit cards, where returns are closer to 20%. (Bloomberg)

Another senior banker left Bank of America Merrill Lynch: Centerview Partners poached the senior Bank of America Merrill Lynch dealmaker Todd Kaplan. (Business Insider)

Blackrock’s EMEA operations will remain headquartered in the UK after Brexit, with only a few new roles created in Europe. 40 people will be added in Paris. The largest European office will be Blackrock’s technology office in Hungary. (Reuters)

Kweku Adoboli is to be deported after he lost his appeal and the judge described him as, ” someone “whose honesty is seriously in question”. (Sky)

Christian Byfield, a Colombian former investment banker and consultant, left a string of well-paid but “not fulfilling jobs” in banking and insurance, and started travelling around the world. “A lot of things started to happen because I started to follow my heart.” (BBC)

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Remember the days where you performed better than the rest of the market and increased profits by 44%, and you got a pay rise? UBS’s investment bankers may well recall them with fondness. They just did all of that, and their average pay has still been cut by 10%.

UBS reported its third quarter results today. Compared to Deutsche Bank’s, the results are excellent. Compared to Barclays’, they’re good. Compared to most U.S. investment banks they’re also good. UBS appears to be taking market share in equities and fixed income sales and trading and in M&A. Witness the chart below.

Nor is UBS’s strength just about revenues: the Swiss bank’s investment bank also achieved a 44% year-on-year increase in pre-tax operating profits in the third quarter and a return on equity of 19.4% (up from 11.6% one year earlier). Rabbits have indeed been pulled from hats.

And yet, for all the exceptionalism, UBS doesn’t seem to be lavishing rewards upon its staff. Compensation spending in the investment bank fell nearly 7% in the third quarter, whilst headcount rose nearly 3%. The upshot was a nearly 10% drop in average pay per head compared to 2017 for Q3. So much for pay for performance.

The truth of the matter won’t be known until UBS announces its bonuses in early 2018. For the moment though, average compensation per head at UBS’s investment bank for the entire first nine months of 2018 is tracking at an average of CHF469k, down from an average of CHF476k in the same period of last year. Compensation at the Swiss bank looks pretty impressive, but is still falling.

UBS didn’t comment on compensation in the materials accompanying its results. The cause could be something other than mounting stinginess – if an increased proportion of previous years’ bonuses were paid in cash at the time, there would be less to expense now (although there was little mention of this in the bank’s last compensation report). Equally, UBS may have changed its headcount mix in favour of employees in cheap locations or young people (something that is certainly possible given that 179 people were added to the investment bank in the past three months, which is when graduate trainees traditionally arrive).

Even so, it’s hard not to conclude that something has changed. Just as J.P. Morgan and Citigroup’s results showed banks squeezing costs as revenues rose, so do UBS’s. When revenues increase now, it seems that banks are trying to reward shareholders rather than employees. Unsurprisingly, the expectation at most banks seems to be that bonuses will fall this year. If you seriously outperform, the very best you can hope for might be that you are paid flat on 2017.

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With sales and old-school trading jobs disappearing, quants, or quantitative analysts, have taken on huge roles at investment banks, including Goldman Sachs. So too have “strats,” a role originally born at Goldman that acts as a fusion of technologists and quants. Strats already account for 25% of the firm’s total headcount in its fixed income, currencies and commodities division, and Goldman has indicated that it plans to add more talent across multiple divisions. So what’s the best way in?

With the role that quants and strats play being so fluid, there isn’t one specific master’s program that opens doors for candidates, though hybrid degrees like financial engineering, computational finance and quant economics tend to be attractive. However, other quants and strats have more traditional postgraduate degrees in computer science, math, statistics and engineering. A thorough dive into the crop of current quants and strats at Goldman suggests that majoring in one of the aforementioned areas of study doesn’t necessarily provide a leg up over another. But the name of the school on the diploma does.

We searched through the public profiles over 200 current quants and strats at Goldman Sachs and cross-referenced them by top universities. While there were certainly several one-offs here and there, the ten universities below represent a significant percentage of Goldman’s hybrid engineering and trading talent. Note the rankings are solely based on the number of graduates who are currently employed at Goldman. The size of the programs couldn’t be taken into account as the degrees were so varied across departments and focus areas.

If you live in the West, the name that tops the list is likely a surprise. But the Indian Institute of Technology appears to be Goldman’s biggest global feeder of quants and strats, and the research suggests that the competition isn’t even close. The Indian Institute of Technology is massive – spread across more than 20 campuses throughout India. More than 80% work out of Goldman’s IIT strats work in the Bengaluru office, though several count New York as home. Most graduated from the university’s six-year duel bachelor’s and master’s in technology program.

Imperial College London, Princeton, Columbia and Oxford round out the top half before a somewhat significant drop to the final five schools. The degrees of Imperial College London graduates vary significantly, including math, finance, advanced computing, engineering computing, and electrical and electronic engineering, among others. At Princeton and Columbia, degrees in operations research and financial engineering were quite popular among current Goldman quants and strats. Different variations of mathematics degrees were big at Oxford.

One interesting thing to note is that graduates of France’s École Polytechnique don’t seem to stick around the area. Yes, they’re in the Paris office, but they are also spread across London, New York and Hong Kong. Meanwhile, two schools that didn’t make the list but should be on the radar of potential students are China’s Peking University and Williams College in the U.S. At least seven former bachelor’s degree holders from Peking University are current strats or quants at Goldman, though six of them went on to obtain their master’s degree from a different school before joining the bank. While not making the list, Williams College may come off as the most impressive school of the bunch. At least five Goldman strats or quants received their undergraduate degree from Williams and none of those who came up in our research have their master’s degree, typically a prerequisite for the role.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

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I’m a banker who works for a leading French bank in Paris. I’ve have been here for over a decade and I feel it is my duty to warn London bankers who think Paris is a dream world of chansons and baguettes that life here is not like that. Personally, I would do almost anything to get out.

There was a previous article on this site written by a French banker who left this country over two decades ago. While I agree with a lot of what he wrote, I’d also say he’s wrong – Paris today is worse than the Paris he portrayed. He complained a lot about taxes, but taxes are only one of my many problems here.

France has done a wonderful job of marketing itself. Paris lives off the nostalgic glow of what it was like in the past, but today’s Paris is a place of serious social strife with terrible transport links and dreadful pay. There is a lack of social stability which is encouraging educated people to get out. It’s not just me. – This year’s annual survey of professionals in Paris found that 84% of people want to leave.

In the past 18 months, I myself have been subject to aggression three times in Paris, on one occasion at 6pm at night in the centre of town. Being a banker in this city is far more dangerous than it used to be because French banks have moved their offices to campuses on the periphery – in areas people used to avoid. BNP Paribas, for example, now has a campus on Boulevard Macdonald in the 18th arrondissement and another in Pantin in the North Eastern suburbs. Credit Agricole has a new(ish) head office in Montrouge in the fifteenth arrondissement. These places used to be no-go zones. BNP’s site is next to a huge car wrecking yard. People just don’t like working in these places – they don’t feel safe and get their phones stolen on the way in and out of the office.

Of course, it will probably be better if you end up working for – say – Bank of America in its new office in the 8th arrondissement, which is very central. But even this can cause problems – there are moves afoot to ensure “mixité” in schools, which means that even if you live in the 8th arrondissement, your children may need to be schooled elsewhere because the local mayor wants to ensure fairness. Unless, of course, you have your children educated privately.

Personally, I live around 7km south of Notre Dame. That’s not far out. However, it still takes me over an hour every day to get to work. Public transport here is very slow and often delayed.

Life in Paris is also expensive. Housing here is not cheap. And the pay here is terrible. When I came to Paris (for personal reasons) I took a 30% pay cut. Over a decade later, I am still earning less than I earned overseas before I came to France. I would find a new job, but it’s not easy. – This is not an Anglo Saxon country; the labour market here is almost completely immobile.

There’s also the work culture, and then the public culture. When you work in France, you need to be prepared for an environment that’s autocratic, hierarchical and sclerotic. Promotions are done on the basis of “copinage” – you need friends. Preferably you also need to have been to a grande ecole or to HEC and then you’ll be promoted irrespective of your performance. In public life, the bureaucracy is slow and overwhelming. – For example, I need a new medical certificate; I’ve asked for one three times and have been send the wrong documentation three times. It’s as if the French public sector makes a habit of doing as little work as possible. When you’re on the receiving end, it sucks up a lot of your free time.

Of course, there are some upsides. Paris is a city of culture. But as a non-French banker who’s been here for over a decade, I also see the serious downsides. Yes, Macron is trying to change things but this is a country that has deep problems which have not been tackled for many years and Macron’s support is already falling. So, if you’re asked to go to Paris, move with your eyes open. Or, preferably, I would say don’t move at all – once you’re in France, it’s almost impossible to get out. Resist! Resist before it’s too late!

Ivanna Bélanger is the pseudonym of a senior employee at a French bank in Paris.

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Have you heard of Sam Morgan? If you’re a fixed income currencies and commodities (FICC) salesperson who aspires to work for Goldman Sachs in Europe, you might want to familiarize yourself with the name. Morgan was recently made co-head of FICC sales for Goldman in Europe. That’s pretty impressive given that he’s only 35.

Morgan joined Goldman 12 years ago, two years after graduating in economics from Cambridge University. To begin with, he thought he wanted to be a barrister, but the Bar’s loss appears to have been Goldman’s gain. Morgan was promoted to MD in 2013 and then partner in 2016. A macro salesman by trade, colleagues describe him as an, “exceptional producer,” whose promotion is very well-deserved.

Morgan’s ascension seems all the more well-deserved in light of the historic problems in Goldman’s fixed income trading business. Following quarter upon quarter of declining revenues, the firm announced a year ago that it would be reorienting away from hedge fund clients and towards corporate clients and institutional investors. With a background in hedge fund sales, Morgan might well have found himself on the wrong side of the fence – were it not for his history as a big-biller with exceptionally strong client relationships.

Morgan’s ascension should also be reassuring for other salespeople. As all banks reconfigure sales teams to become more data-oriented and fixed income sales teams to become more like equity sales, sales staff everywhere are having to adapt a world in which clients have access to visualizations as a source of trade ideas and the sales role becomes one of selling a bank’s broader execution capabilities. Some salespeople are voluntarily leaving the industry as a result.

Morgan, who was promoted after his boss, Carl Faker, retired, shows you can still make it in sales. A new generation of salespeople, that combines deep client relationships with an understanding of the new technologies, is ready to take the helm.

Banks in Hong Kong are ramping up their recruitment in technology and increasingly running into strong competition for talent from tech companies.

But who are the senior managers in charge of banks’ technology strategy (and hiring)? Here’s a selection of some of the top locally-based technologists you need to know if you’re searching for an IT job in Hong Kong.

Charles Gillet, APAC CIO for corporate and institutional banking, BNP Paribas

Gillet was until recently Societe Generale’s chief information officer (CIO) for Asia Pacific, but as we reported earlier this month, he has now jumped to French rival BNP Paribas. Gillet was a SocGen veteran who joined the bank in Paris in 1997 and was based in New York between 2000 and 2005, first as global head of equity cash technology and then (from 2003) as head of business analysis equity and derivatives. He relocated to Hong Kong in 2005 to become head of equity and derivatives technology for APAC and worked in three other Asian jobs, including APAC head of front office technology, before becoming SocGen’s CIO in 2014.

Evangelos Kotsovinos, Asia CIO, Morgan Stanley

Kotsovinos has been with Morgan Stanley for 11 years, but only got his current CIO job in June, according to his online profile. As a research associate at the University of Cambridge between 2001 and 2005, Kotsovinos led the research that developed XenoServers, “the first experimental cloud computing platform”. He then spent two years as a senior research scientist at Deutsche Telekom in Berlin, before moving to Morgan Stanley in London as a vice president in enterprise computing engineering. Kotsovinos relocated to Asia in 2014 and became Asia head of infrastructure and China CIO.

Sophia Leung, APAC CIO, JP Morgan

Leung joined JP Morgan in 2011 after a 20-year career at Morgan Stanley. Recruitment is high on her agenda – JP Morgan has been hiring “a few thousand technologists across Asia Pacific”, she told us previously. “My career has taken me around the world to roles in the UK, US and Hong Kong. A career in technology was attractive to me as it provided a broad platform that would challenge me and put me on a path of continual professional development,” she said.

Julian Simon, Asia Pacific ex-Japan CIO, Goldman Sachs

Simon has been a Goldmanite for almost a quarter of a century – he joined the bank in late 1992, according to his online profile. In September 2008 he left his job as head of securities technology for Asia to become Goldman’s CIO for Australia, a position he held until June 2013 when he took on his current regional CIO role. Goldman is currently hiring for its FAST team in Hong Kong, which turns data-driven insights into action points for the front office.

Max Nam-Storm, global CIO, CLSA

Nam-Storm joined CLSA in January 2014 to spearhead its technology strategy following the firm’s sale to CITIC Securities by Credit Agricole the previous year. His profile is full of senior IT roles at global banks, beginning with a seven-year stint at JP Morgan, where he eventually became head of Asia FI technology. He joined Nomura in 2008 as head of equities and prime IT for APAC before a stint at UBS from 2011 to 2013. Earlier this year, Nam-Storm founded AlphaLabs, a CLSA-backed Hong Kong based venture capital fund investing in early-stage fintech companies.

CK Chan, CIO retail banking and wealth management Asia Pacific, HSBC

Chan got his first job back in 1975 as a product engineer at a semiconductor company. He then spent 12 years at Hong Kong Telecom and two years as an IT lecturer at the City University of Hong Kong. Chan moved to Vancouver in 1990 and joined HSBC, eventually becoming a senior director in front-end systems. In 2007 Chan returned to Hong Kong and he has held several senior roles with HSBC since then, including head of channel systems for Asia Pacific. He was promoted to his current position in February this year.

Paul Gresham, chief information officer, Credit Suisse

Veteran technologist Gresham worked for firms including Barclays, Cantor Fitzgerald and BNP Paribas between 1987 and 2006, and then joined CLSA as head of client and research technology. Gresham, who was briefly head of IT for Samsung Securities, left the banking sector in 2012 to work for maritime firm Wallem Innovative Solutions for three and a half years. He joined Credit Suisse in 2016. In an interview with us last year, Gresham described his approach to recruitment as “tech first”, meaning he’s open to candidates not currently working in finance so long as they are “passionate about technology”.

Alexandre Godingen, Asia head of equities technology, Citi

Godingen is driving the tech behind Citi’s strongly-performing Asian equities business and managing more than 350 staff across Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Pune, and Shanghai. His remit spans cash equities, equity derivatives, electronic execution and delta one. Godingen joined Citi in 2016 after a four-year stint at financial software firm Fidessa, latterly as Asia head of business development and product management. He was Asia head of trading technologies and production services at CLSA from 2007 to 2012 and spent the previous nine years at Euronext, including three years as Japan chief technology officer, according to his profile.

Didier Sabardu, APAC CTO, Societe Generale

Sabardu boasts more than 20 years in financial technology and joined SocGen in 2008. He held four Paris-based jobs at the bank, including head of IT group infrastructure performance and global head of market data and middleware. Sabardu cut his teeth at Reuters, where he worked for 14 years from 1994, most recently as development group manager in the firm’s financial software department.

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Image credit: ansonmiao, Getty

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