eFinancialCareers » News & Analysis

UBS has boosted its headcount of Asia-based private bankers by 72 in just 12 months, its third quarter financial results reveal. The Swiss bank’s headcount of Asian ‘client advisors’ (the name it uses for relationship managers) stands at 1,110, compared with 1,028 at the end of Q3 last year.

While UBS has long been the largest private bank by headcount in Asia, the rise is still significant in terms of its recent history. UBS’s banker workforce reached similar heights (1,092) by the end of 2015, but it then trimmed underperformers and its numbers fell to 1,016 a year later.

The new figures show that UBS has now abandoned redundancies in favour of recruitment. Many of the additional RMs are based in Hong Kong, including in the firm’s second office there, in Kowloon, which opened in 2016, says a source with knowledge of the bank. UBS appears to be on track with its plans, announced in May last year, to recruit 100 Hong Kong-based private bankers in the two years to mid-2019. The Swiss firm has renewed its focus on mid-tier millionaires (high-net-worth people with investable assets of $2m and above) in Hong Kong. It is recruiting RMs to service this segment even as competitors like Standard Chartered raise their thresholds for private banking clients.

“UBS will continue concentrating on Greater China bankers, especially for the new Hong Kong office. It’s also hired in UHNW in Singapore for Southeast Asia coverage,” says former Merrill Lynch private banker Rahul Sen, now a partner at search firm Boyden.

UBS has actually added about 100 new private bankers during the past year – 72 is a net figure which also reflects exits from the firm, says the UBS source. Most of the new RMs have been poached from rival firms. “But UBS also moves bankers internally, from its investment bank,” says Sen.

The year-long hiring spree also marks out UBS as the most aggressive recruiter in the Asian private banking sector of late. Taking on 50 bankers within 12 months (as both Morgan Stanley and Deutsche did in 2017) is considered well above market average, given chronic talent shortages afflicting the sector – adding 72 is exceptional.

How has UBS done it? “It’s the largest private bank in Asia and globally. The ease of creating new products and investment ideas at UBS helps bankers concentrate more on managing their clients’ assets, and this attracts quite a few bankers to the platform,” says Sen.

But has UBS’s hiring paid off in terms of banker productivity? Yes, although only to a limited extent so far. Assets under management per banker (regional AUM divided by banker headcount) at UBS in Asia have increased 2% year on year, from $336bn to $343bn.

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

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: ChaiwatNK, Getty

Google and its employees were rocked this week by a bombshell article from the New York Times that details multiple past accusations of sexual misconduct and one eye-raising exit package given to one of the accused former executives. Google spent Thursday attempting to reassure its staff and the general public of the state of its workplace culture and policies.

At the heart of the exhaustive report, which Google CEO Sundar Pichai said was “difficult to read,” are details surrounding the employment and eventual departure of Andy Rubin, creator of Android mobile software, who left the company in 2014. Sources told the Times that a female member of the Android team, with whom Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, accused the executive of coercing her into performing oral sex in 2013, an incident that ended the relationship. The woman waited until 2014 to file a complaint with Google officials, which kickstarted an investigation that ultimately concluded that her claim “was credible,” according to the report.

Then-CEO Larry Page asked for Rubin’s resignation following the completion of the investigation. But it wasn’t as simple as having security walk him out to his car. Google reportedly agreed to pay Rubin $90 million as part of an exit package and “went out of its way” to make the split appear amicable, including a public farewell statement issued by Page. Google later invested in a venture firm that Rubin founded after leaving the search engine giant. A spokesperson for Rubin disputed the report, saying he had never been informed of any misconduct claims, any relationship he had with an employee was consensual and that he left on his own accord.

Meanwhile, a similar situation allegedly occurred in 2015, when a female employee accused a different executive of groping her at an offsite event. Google again found the accusations credible, according to the Times, but paid the executive millions as part of an exit package that included a provision that prevented him from working for a competitor. The executive’s exit was marked with a blog post in which he said he wanted to focus more on philanthropy and his family.

The story prompted Pichai on Thursday to send an internal memo to all Google employees, assuring them that sexual misconduct claims are treated seriously and that those found liable of misconduct or harassment aren’t provided with golden parachutes.

“In recent years, we’ve made a number of changes, including taking an increasingly hard line on inappropriate conduct by people in positions of authority: in the last two years, 48 people have been terminated for sexual harassment, including 13 who were senior managers and above,” the memo read. “None of these individuals received an exit package.”

Elsewhere, Deutsche Bank has cut 2,300 jobs since the second quarter, with plans to shed another 1,700 before the end of the year. Discussing the bank’s poor third quarter performance, Chief Executive Christian Sewing asked investors for something they tend not to enjoy providing: patience. Sewing warned that progress on revenues “will take a little longer.” Deutsche Bank stock fell nearly 5% by the end of the day.

Meanwhile:

UBS plans to cut costs by roughly $800 million over the next three years. Headcount and pay could both be cut to reach the goal. (Yahoo Finance)

Lazard CEO Ken Jacobs is open to the possibility of selling the firm’s asset management unit, if the price is right. Known mostly for its work in M&A, Lazard’s asset management business oversees $240 billion. (Bloomberg)

Will cryptocurrencies create profound change within capital markets? “40% chance crypto is a niche thing, 15% chance it goes huge, and 45% chance it collapses and goes away,” according to Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and a Bloomberg opinion columnist. (Bloomberg)

BlackRock is planning a massive expansion of its footprint in Atlanta. The money manager expects to increase headcount to 1,000 people by 2024, which is quite a lot considering only 15 employees currently call Atlanta home. It sounds like most the new hires will be in tech. (WSJ)

Wells Fargo’s chief administrative officer and chief auditor were put on leave after regulators expressed concerns about their failure to oversee problems that have recently haunted the bank. (WSJ)

Deutsche Bank has dismissed its asset management chief, Nicolas Moreau, and has replaced him with Asoka Woehrmann, head of the lender’s private-clients business in Germany. No reason has been given for Moreau dismissal. (WSJ)

U.K. regulators are investigating whether certain hedge funds have been buying market-moving exit polls and voter-opinion data from polling companies. (Bloomberg)

Want to have lunch with activist investor Bill Ackman? All you’ll need to do is beat the current bid of $4,500. The “estimated value” of the lunch is $10,000, so it’s kind of a bargain. (Charity Buzz)

@BeecherTuttle

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: btuttle@efinancialcareers.com
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by actual 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).

““

A good trading floor should in many ways be like a good dinner party – plenty of lively conversation and heated debate over issues of the day. But never presume that anything goes. Trading floors have a reputation for volatility (individuals not markets), and some subjects are out of bounds.

Sport, for example, should only be brought up if you’re capable of remaining civil about it. Politics and religion even more so. There are some disagreements which can get so passionate and out of hand that they risk damaging personal relationships forever. People have to work together after all. We’re better off not knowing things about our colleagues which might make it difficult to look them in the eye. But what happens when the issue can no longer be avoided? As students of Karl Marx (of whom there are often more on trading floors than you’d expect) will tell you, although you might choose to ignore politics, politics will not always ignore you.

Both of the capitals of the Anglo-Saxon financial world have this problem at the moment. In London, there’s Brexit; in New York, there’s Trump. In both cases, the combination of political risk and economic uncertainty are a large part of what is driving the market and creating a lot of issues for the industry itself. You can hardly pretend that they’re not happening. Particularly in the case of Brexit, people in the City of London have to organise themselves for the regulatory consequences, including making plans to move key functions to Frankfurt, Paris or Dublin and you can’t expect them to not mention from time to time that they’d rather not have to do that.

Overall, there seems to be a reasonable degree of consensus among the finance community that both Trump and Brexit are on balance not good things. For the first time since 2012, the balance of Wall Street political contributions favours Democratic candidates in the midterm elections, for example. But it’s more than likely that any given trading floor or IBD office contains at least a couple of Brexiteers or a few Trump voters. And even if there weren’t, there are always a couple of contrarians hanging around who love to challenge the consensus just because it’s the consensus.

So how do you deal with these matters without letting everything degenerate into an undignified shouting match which ends up tearing apart teams that could otherwise have gone on working together productively for years? Well, if there’s one thing that finance people ought to be better at than the majority of the population, it’s understanding that there’s a difference between what you want to happen and what you think will happen, and that there’s usually hardly any profit to be made in spending a lot of time talking about the first.

Everybody understands, for example, that the China strategist, even if he or she is upgrading estimates for GDP or predicting successful management of a financial crisis, is not by that token a Communist. It’s possible to have a view on the Tel Aviv or Dubai stock markets while being a member of any major world religion or none. If someone believes that financial deregulation and tax cuts are going to more than offset trade wars and be a net benefit to the US economy, for example, then we don’t need to assume that this makes them a supporter of Donald Trump personally (unless they retire from the industry to go and work for him). And even then, it turns out, we might find out we were wrong to make that assumption when they resign and write their memoirs.

So, even when the subject can’t be avoided, it makes sense to follow the dinner party rule to the greatest extent possible. Talk about whether things are good or bad for business, rather than good or evil for the people who believe in them. If someone genuinely holds abhorrent views, then sooner or later they will express them specifically, at which point they become a problem to be dealt with by human resources. Until then, we’re all likely to do better if we refrain from raising subjects for debate where we can guess that the answers are only likely to annoy us.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available.
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.)

When you’re a child who’s swapped schools, the biggest challenge is settling in and becoming part of the class. – It takes time to remember names, to get to know people and to become part of the class. But eventually you become integrated. If you’re an electronic trader, you are the new child forever.

Electronic sales traders – who sell banks’ electronic trading systems are still comparative newcomers. Cash sales trading and program trading have been around for years, but electronic trading is the comparative newcomer, especially in fixed income. It’s also the child who spoiled the party – everyone knows that electronic trading systems destroyed margins. Everyone knows that a lot of traders lost their jobs as a result. Because of this, no one wants to play.

When you’re the person selling electronic systems on a trading floor, no one wants to be your friend. You’re a threat. Who’s going to talk to you (let alone introduce you to their clients) when they know that you have the potential to erode their livelihood? No one.

Working in electronic trading can therefore be an uphill struggle with your cash colleagues. You always have to be extremely pleasant. You continuously need to gently remind them that if they don’t introduce you to their clients, then those clients are simply like to trade electronically with another broker instead.

None of this is easy. Cash sales people know their clients very, very well and are very protective. If you approach a client without checking with them first, they will find out. It’s like trying to pinch someone else’s friend at school.

As a result, in electronic sales trading, you will spend a lot of time waiting around in your party outfit and hoping for an invitation to go to the ball. It rarely comes. After 12 years in the industry, I’m still a pariah. Clients themselves are party to blame – they often segregate electronic trading so that only the e-business team can see what’s happening. This has effectively made it even harder for cash traders to accept us: not only are they giving their business away, but they are losing visibility on their flow.

Unless the teams are merged (which clients will seemingly never accept either), electronic traders are always going to feel like the newer kid on the bench – waiting for the rest of the playground to come and talk to them.

Greg Jones is the pseudonym of a VP in electronic trading

Nancy Cheng, Barclays’ Hong Kong-based head of global corporates coverage, has left the British bank after seven years to join Citi.

Cheng, who was featured last year in our list of Hong Kong’s leading corporate bankers, is now head of APAC financial technology, corporate banking, at Citi, according to her online profile.

Her move into fintech coverage banking appears well timed. Fintech is a growth sector for Citi’s corporate and investment bank, both in Asia and globally. In May, Citi hired Rahul Singla, the head of financial technology investment banking at Deutsche Bank in the US, as its managing director of fintech. Even as they compete with Asian tech firms (for example, Alibaba and Grab) in fields such as digital payments, global banks in Singapore and Hong Kong are increasingly trying to win advisory, listing and transaction-banking business from them as clients.

Cheng’s former firm, Barclays, pared back its Asian operations to just four markets (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and India) in 2016 and is now focused on connecting these countries to its core UK and US businesses, and vice versa. This has limited the ability of some of its bankers to work on intra-Asian deals.

Veteran Cheng began her career back in 1997 at Standard Chartered in New York as a relationship manager, focused on commodities and corporate banking. She moved to Bank of America in NYC as a VP-level relationship manager in international banking in 2002 and was promoted to SVP three years later, working in subsidiary banking and treasury management.

Cheng relocated to Hong Kong with BoA in 2010 to become a director in trade and supply chain finance. Barclays hired her the following year, according to her profile. Alongside her global corporates role at Barclays, Cheng was also global relationship director for Greater China.

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

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: winhorse, Getty

If you’re looking for a job at one of Singapore’s three local banks – DBS, OCBC and UOB – you stand a much better chance of getting in if you work in technology.

Our analysis of the banks’ careers websites shows that more than a quarter (27%) of current Singapore-based vacancies across all three firms are in tech-related roles, including digital banking and data jobs as well as those that require coding skills. DBS – which, perhaps a little optimistically, now calls itself a ‘23,000-person start-up’ – leads the pack when it comes to tech recruitment. Almost 40% of its openings are in this function, as the table below shows.

All three banks are hiring programmers, designers, project managers and other candidates as they launch new digital platforms and upgrade others. In August, OCBC rolled out its algorithm-based investment service, RoboInvest, to retail customers, while earlier this year UOB released a new forex app, Mighty FX. DBS and OCBC are also moving more development roles in-house instead of using technology vendors.

“The recent growth of our tech unit is crazy, but it still isn’t being resourced quickly enough to support the digital transformation objectives of the business,” says an insider at one of the banks, who asked not to be named.

DBS is trying to boost the speed and volume of its tech recruitment by running an annual hackathon in Singapore, Hack2Hire, in which techies work in teams to solve real-life business problems. The firm aims to take on about 100 people a year via this event – including scrum masters, mobile application developers, full stack developers, DevOps engineers, QA engineers, and UI/UX developers – with successful candidates offered jobs within the same day.

UOB announced a new hiring drive earlier this month aimed at increasing its 120-strong digital bank team by 50% over the next year. But none of the three firms are finding it straightforward to hire the tech talent they need, according to agency recruiters whose clients include DBS, OCBC and UOB.

Recruitment is challenging not just because volumes are increasing, but also because the tech jobs on offer at these banks typically now demand more specialist, hard-to-find skills than they did just two or three years ago. Business-as-usual vacancies focused on legacy systems or hardware infrastructure are declining in popularity as DBS, OCBC and UOB seek people in emerging fields such as machine learning and data science.

OCBC’s current vacancies, for example, include a blockchain analyst, cloud application specialist, and Hadoop big data product support expert, according to its careers site. Local talent in these areas – and others, such as cyber security – is thin on the ground because the supply of candidates has not caught up with recent surges in demand from banks. Employment Pass restrictions have also made it more difficult to hire technologists, in particular junior ones, from overseas.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s domestic banks are competing not just with each other for technologists but with global banks in the Republic, some of whom are now expanding in technology following years of offshoring to India and other lower-cost locations. JP Morgan, for example, employs 1,000 Singapore-based staff working in tech, and its recruitment is also focused on emerging technology, including robotics, machine learning and chatbots. Tech firms such as Google, Grab and AWS also sometimes recruit similar skillsets to DBS, OCBC and UOB – and some of their new local recruits have come from the banking sector.

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

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: manjik, Getty

Oh dear. Christian Sewing has been asking for patience from investors, but the stress seems to be straining his own ability to keep cool. On an internal conference call after the Q3 results, he apparently lost his temper with a manager, describing as “bullshit, bullshit” some fairly reasonable complaints that the uncertainty over Deutsche’s future – and the persistent rumours of a merger with Commerzbank – were having a negative effect on employee morale and customer perceptions.

On the call, Sewing described these concerns as an “excuse” for managers not meeting targets, but the damage being done to the Deutsche franchise is quite likely to be real; there are only so many times that a manager can tell his staff that it’s “business as usual” when every newspaper is openly speculating about the merger to come. It’s also noticeable that the question was asked twice on the call, by an investment banker in New York and then (the trigger for the outburst) by a retail manager from Postbank; the effect of the rumours is being felt across the whole business. In recent interviews, Sewing has suggested that the future for Deutsche might lie in a better balance between wholesale and retail and in the domestic German franchise, so it has to be particularly stressful to be faced with the fact that people are worrying in the Bonn retail banking market as much as in the bond market.

The official line from Deutsche is still that they would not so much as consider any M&A while the share price is so depressed, and that their priority is to improve revenues and restructure the investment bank. It’s even probably true that integrating a merger partner in Germany would be difficult to deliver when they haven’t even completed the integration of Postbank itself yet. But the fact is that companies with low share prices don’t always get to choose whether or not their valuation is too low. Deutsche and Commerzbank have a big common shareholder in Cerberus, and that shareholder is providing strategic “advice” to the board.

For the longest time, people have assumed that Deutsche is too much of a national champion to be forced to merge from a position of weakness. But Bloomberg notes that Sewing is on the back foot following last week’s miserable set of results and that ‘urgent questions about the future are becoming louder.’ The current state of the franchise is hardly a source of national pride to the G7 sovereign that shares the bank’s name, and from a national point of view, the Commerzbank merger might be necessary as a defensive measure against a non-German bid. It’s all very well for Christian Sewing to tell people to stop thinking about M&A and just do their job, but if he follows his own advice, he might end up spending less time in the CEO position than John Cryan did. Until then, Sewing’s outburst was initially greeted with laughter and applause by his bankers, according to the Financial Times – although the call’s moderator did attempt to note that, “no one can quote Christian on that.”

Life’s even tougher if you want to get a job in FinTech, apparently. According to Finews, candidates looking for a job at Revolut, the British neo-bank set up by an ex-Morgan Stanley trader who unapologetically demands crazy hours from staff, are being asked to demonstrate that they can sign up 200 new customers for the app, as part of the application process. Since they’re currently aiming to recruit “30 to 50” business development employees, that could mean that they’re turning the human resources department into a customer acquisition tool for as many as 10,000 new customers, at an initial acquisition cost of zero. And it could be even more; according to the company, out of 350 applicants for the post, only one of them flatly turned down the customer acquisition task, while the incumbent “head business developer” claims that he himself managed to recruit 5,000 clients before being hired.

This looks like the sort of thing that turns into a trend; it’s not that unusual for fintech firms to use unpaid internships as part of the recruitment process, so why not unpaid sales too? One has to wonder about the quality and persistence of customer relationships that have been sweated out of the friends and family of desperate job applicants, but every download counts toward the all-important growth numbers. And maybe Revolut does have a point when it says that anybody can claim to be great at influencing people over social media, but employers need somebody who can deliver the goods.

Meanwhile …

No sign of an end to the blockchain phenomenon in hiring; demand is up 400% and average salaries for blockchain engineers are now up to $175k, versus $135k for software engineers overall, according to Hired (Cointelegraph)

John Hennessy, former President of Stanford University and current chairman of Alphabet, gives a long interview about “the crisis of leadership in Silicon Valley”, suggesting that tech giants need more long-term thinking and to be more careful about the consequences of the “break things” model of development. He notes that Stanford now has a compulsory undergraduate course on ethics for the kinds of students who go on to tech leadership posts. (Wired)

Unsurprisingly given the choppy conditions, October has been a horrible month for trend-following quant funds, with AHL, Cantab, BlueTrend and Aspect all losing money (Bloomberg)

Crispin Odey is apparently (rather than going into politics himself) prepared to finance a campaign by Boris Johnson to become Prime Minister. (Daily Mail)

A profile of Sam Smith, founder of AIM brokers FinnCap, and how she sees it as her duty to stand up for women in finance … (Times)

… and also of Hanneke Smits, CEO of Newton, with advice on presentation and never saying sorry (Times)

A bad few days’ news for financial prosecutors, as the U.S, trial of the British forex traders who used the “Cartel” chatroom for market-rigging ends in acquittal after a single day’s deliberation …(FT)

… and the High Court refuses the Serious Fraud Office’s attempt to reinstate charges against Barclays over the 2008 Qatari capital raising (Financial News)

But the case over the UBS compliance officer alleged to have started an insider trading ring is still ongoing, with allegations of burner phones and meetings in Mayfair nightclubs (FT)

What do you do when your newly promoted boss is just no good? (New York Times)

““

Opher Yom-Tov, chief design officer at ANZ, believes design can be a powerful tool for business growth. He is particularly focused on human centred design, which emphasises understanding the customer and putting them at the heart of the design process.

He says: “Design is about a lot more than just aesthetics, it is actually a way of solving problems.” Human centred design was refined in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, with early examples including the design of Apple’s first computer mouse. It borrows techniques from psychology, anthropology, product design and other fields to really understand what customers need.

Yom-Tov, who has worked with the likes of Apple and Nike during his career, has experienced first-hand the importance of meeting customer needs as part of the design process.

He says: “Many of the successful products were not necessarily the smartest engineered or the most beautiful solutions, but they effectively addressed specific customer needs.

“I have battle scars that have proved to me how critical an approach like human centred design is.” Companies are beginning to wake up to the many benefits design can bring.

Research by the UK’s Council of Design found that firms that used and valued design had significantly improved sales, profits, turnover and growth compared with those that did not.

In fact, every £100 a ‘design-alert’ company spent on design increased the company’s turnover by an average of £225. But while the benefit of human centred design may be obvious for physical products, such as a mobile phone, Yom-Tov says it also has an important role to play in services.

He explains: “ANZ has recognised that in order to be a leader in financial services, one of the most effective levers is compelling and meaningful propositions and experiences.

He adds that in order to create these experiences, the bank must uncover what customers actually need, and this is where human centred design comes in.

Yom-Tov explains that human centred design is essentially about three things: collaboration, empathy and experimentation. He says: “Collaboration involves having a cross-functional team with people who represent different aspects of the final product or experience, focusing on the problem.”

Empathy involves this team going out and spending time with the various stakeholders who will use the product, which, in the case of a financial product, includes banking staff, advisers and the end customer.

“We need to understand the world from their perspective and see how financial services fit into their life,” Yom-Tov says. The third aspect of human centred design involves experimentation.

“The notion of experimentation is that you will not get it right first time, so you need to develop a range of potential solutions and simulate (or prototype) them very cheaply, so your customers can give you feedback on which options resonate for them,” Yom-Tov says.

He points out that doing this before you invest heavily in a product or service helps to remove substantial risk. “In the world of banking, failure is not generally tolerated, but this notion of failing often on a small scale prevents you from failing on a very large scale,” he says.

Yom-Tov explains that his vision for ANZ is that all staff truly understand the value and impact design can have on the bank’s business and its customers, and, as a result, they apply a human centred design approach to everything they do.

“Whether that is solving internal problems, like business processes that are slowing us down, or looking at ways to address new competitor threats, they should take a step back and approach it with this human centred design lens to craft better customer and staff experiences,” he says.

ANZ has already used human centred design for many things including customer application processes and completely rebuilding its banking app.

Yom-Tov says: “The process involved an incredible amount of time with customers and observing people using all manner of digital services to focus on what we needed to do to create the right mobile banking app.

“Ours is incredibly simple and straightforward. We have limited the features in it so that is very clear and resonates with customers’ daily routines.”

Another area in which human centred design has been applied is in home loans. “The home loan process, most of which is invisible to customers, is highly complex. We have been helping our teams to simplify our internal processes, to create a simpler experience for customers,” he says.

He concedes there will always be trade-offs when doing human centred design in a bank, with teams often encountering regulatory obstacles or constraints, but he says the trick is not to be daunted by these issues and to still come up with fantastic solutions for customers.

Yom-Tov says human centred design also often has a positive impact on staff. He has noticed that when people work in cross-functional teams and experiment with different ideas, they naturally bring more of their creativity to the workplace.

“I have worked with many people who have had an epiphany moment in their careers when they have found that human centred design has unlocked a lot more of their personal potential and made coming to work much more exciting and engaging.

“They feel like they are having a first-hand impact on the success of the company and the lives of their customers,” he says.

A senior equity researcher has left Bank of America Merrill (BAML).

David Hayes, a London-based equity research managing director, who was heading the European team covering consumer staples such as food, tobacco, and household items, left the bank earlier this month according to his LinkedIn profile.

His departure comes at a time when the threat of cuts in equity research looms large over investment banks due to MiFID II, which came into effect this January.

With asset managers now being charged for research under the new regulations, and research spending allegedly down by $300m this year, it is presumed that the cuts in equity research would be inevitable. However, according to Zaki Ahmed, director of equity-focused headhunter Financial Search Limited, big banks unexpectedly have kept their equity research teams intact so far.

Instead, researchers themselves have been leaving in fright and finding jobs on the buy-side or in investor relations. In May, for example, three senior equity researchers, Simon Weeden, Andrew Benson and Mike Tyndall, left Citigroup in London.

Hayes did not respond to a request for comment and it’s not clear what he plans to do next (although rumour has it he’s off to SocGen). He joined BAML in mid-2016 from Nomura after the Japanese bank cut its equities business in Europe. Hayes began his career in 1995 as a management consultant and moved to British Telecommunications as a corporate finance manager three years later. He joined Lehman Brothers in 2000 as a senior vice president and equity analyst and remained there till the firm filed bankruptcy in September 2008. A month later, he joined Nomura, where he spent seven and a half years before moving to BAML.

Equities revenues at Bank of America increased by 3% year-on-year in the third quarter. At Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley they were up 8% and 7% respectively.

““

Deutsche Bank has made a big hire for its electronic equities trading team.

The German bank hired James Rubinstein, UBS’ Americas head of algorithmic trading and analytics, as a managing director in New York earlier this month. Rubinstein, who has two decades of experience in algorithmic trading and quantitative research, is joining as Deutsche’s Americas head of electronic equities.

A graduate in Economics from Colgate University, Rubinstein started his career in 1998 as a manager of the trading research group at Instinet, a financial services firm owned by Nomura Group. After working there for four years, he took a break to pursue MBA from Dartmouth College. In 2004, he joined FlexTrade Systems as the vice president but moved to UBS in 2006 where he spent the next 12 and a half years.

Rubinstein’s arrival at Deutsche comes at a time when analysts fear that the German lender may have been caught in a downward spiral.

Deutsche Bank’s equities revenues fell 15% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2018, while Barclays’ equities revenues rose 36%. Earlier this year, the German lender sharply reduced its presence in U.S. equities as part of its strategy for cutting costs to €23bn in 2018 and focusing on core areas.

Deutsche has lost a few key people from electronic equities team including its EMEA head of equities product development Florian Miciu and the co-head of equities algorithm quants Taras Bondar, both of whom left the bank after the cost-cutting measures were announced. The bank also hired ex-Goldman Sachs partner Peter Selman to head its equities business earlier this year. Rubinstein appears to have been drafted in by Selman to help Deutsche strengthen its U.S. electronic equities team amid the slowdown.

““

If you want a job at Goldman Sachs when you leave university, it will help if you aspire to be an engineer. It seems that the Goldman has increased the intake of students to its engineering (ie. technology and strats) team by nearly 90% in just two years.

In a recently published post on its own site, Goldman says that at 850 people, this year’s class of trainee engineers is its bigger ever. Two years ago, in a similar post, Goldman said it had just 450 first year analysts (ie. recent graduate hires) going through its onboarding process for engineering trainees.

Goldman Sachs didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment on the apparent big increase in its appetite for technologists. It comes after Lloyd Blankfein, who was CEO at Goldman until October 2018, said earlier this year that the firm is heavily focused on hiring engineers and strats (quantitative programmers who work in jobs across the firm) and that strats already accounted for 25% of the headcount in Goldman’s fixed income trading division.

Goldman’s 850 new student hires this year have gone into engineering jobs everywhere from New York and London, to Salt Lake City, Warsaw, Bengaluru, Hong Kong and Tokyo. In Europe, the firm is increasingly focusing its technology jobs on Warsaw, where its headcount has gone from 30 people to 670 people in just three years, with plans to add another 300+ in the years to come. In a podcast released in August 2018, Brent Watson, head of Goldman’s Warsaw office, said the excellent technology talent in Warsaw had enabled Goldman to build a team of strats and technologists in the Polish city who have been “making an impact globally”.

Students who join Goldman’s engineering program don’t necessarily need to have studied computer science (although it probably helps). The firm puts its graduate technology hires through a seven week training program called ‘Gray Wolf’, in which recruits are trained in everything from Java, to Python, React, Angular, IntelliJ and VSCode (there’s no mention of Slang – Goldman’s proprietary programming language, which some say can be a career dead-end). One of these year’s technology hires (“Leslie” in Jersey City) has studied financial mathematics but didn’t know much about programming before arriving. Another, (“Cyrus” in London), appears to be a Cambridge University graduate in natural sciences, with a specialism in manufacturing systems.

““

Investment banks and hedge funds are actively fighting over quants, throwing salaries of well over six-figures at even entry-level engineers and data scientists that can build revenue-generating algorithmic trading strategies. Meanwhile, the demand for quants is only expected to increase as old-school traders continue to be shuffled out. So why would a quant voluntarily remove themselves from what appears to be an ideal job market? Some argue that the talented ones have the opportunity and leverage to do even better on their own.

“Every quant thinks they are worth more than they’re paid, and every hedge fund undervalues them” said Jared Broad, founder and CEO of QuantConnect, an open-source algorithmic trading platform. Broad’s answer to this potential disconnect was to try to create a quant meritocracy of sorts: an open marketplace of trading algorithms where hedge funds can shop and buy what they like. The better the algorithm, the more quants will get paid.

Broad said that QuantConnect currently has around 65k users back testing and building quantitative trading strategies on its platform – across equities, futures, options, cryptocurrencies, CFDs and FX markets. After a user-generated algorithm is greenlit by the team, it is then loaded into QuantConnect’s database and priced accordingly by the quant who developed it. Hedge funds will search for algorithms that fit their specific criteria and license them for a monthly fee of anywhere from $100 to $30k, of which quants earn 70%. The average fee is currently around $1k, according to Broad, who said that more than 100 hedge funds use QuantConnect’s LEAN platform for their algorithmic trading.

Currently, only around 5% of users consider their work with QuantConnect to be full-time, according to Broad. Rather, many algo traders use it to supplement their own hedge fund startups. One used QuantConnect’s platform to launch a fund out of his mom’s basement in New Jersey. “They don’t need to buy the technology and can use fees earned as a proxy for managed capital,” Broad said. Others simply utilize the open-source platform to create algorithms for their own strategies.

Broad hopes the system will eventually allow quants to make more money than they would at a hedge fund as the marketplace matures and algorithms develop longer track records. The firm is also on the precipice of evolving its pricing away from a subscription service toward an eBay-like bidding model where the algorithm goes to the fund that makes the highest offer, above a minimum threshold. Broad believes a bidding system will push up the price of the average licensing fee. “Quants also want to be decentralized; they don’t want to sign these massive legal agreements that lock up their IP for five years,” he said. He’s not the only one pushing this idea: Quantopian, Numerai, and Quantiacs are all doing something similar.

However, Broad feels the marketplace is also beneficial to hedge funds, which won’t have to screen, hire and onboard as many quants. He estimates that it costs around $500k to get a quant fully ramped up.

It will obviously take time to see if a marketplace concept can lure the best quants to leave their cushy hedge fund jobs to become a hired gun. That’s a lofty goal. But at worst, the system may provide an avenue for hopeful quants who were turned away by hedge funds for whatever reason. Just tell mom to get the basement ready.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

““

It happens at the best of banks: you work all year and think you’re gonna get paid but round about now – as we go into the fourth quarter, things start to come unstuck.

You know the signs.

Maybe she’s avoiding you. You know who – the one who will fight your corner in the bonus meetings. She’s not speaking to you: it’s like you’re invisible.

Trust me: I’ve seen this happening first hand to a friend at Goldman Sachs, and if it’s happening to you too it means you are probably going to get a donut. In the case of my friend, the boss simply started treating him as if he wasn’t there. And then behold, when he looked at his bonus pot in the New Year, it was empty.

It’s a bad sign too if you’re not being asked to important meetings. Meetings you used to go to. If this is you, your pot will not be full. Meeting exclusions can start in August. Fight back: get in that room now.

Or, what if you have literally no idea what you’re going to get in a few months’ time? If this is you too, then that’s bad. By now you should know what you’re going to get: you should have an idea of the P&L of your desk and division and you should understand how you fit into that. If you don’t, you may get taken advantage of. If you don’t have a clue, get one.

So what can you do if you’re seeing these signs?

The answer is, you can take back control. When you work in a bank, it’s no good playing the bonus lottery: waiting to see if you get the lucky ball. You need to handle this properly. Why work all year just to roll the dice?

If you want to maximize your bonus you need to start getting noticed and stop being invisible. Find a way to stand out, start a project, get a trade done. Even better get a client to say something nice about you. Anything to stand out.

You also need to ask the question. Ok, so don’t ask straight up about your bonus, but ask the senior people in your team how, ‘you’re doing.’ What can you do to improve? Be casual, but get the feedback. Feedback is critical.

While you’re busy with this, figure out who the key stakeholders are. There are a bunch of people responsible for getting you paid. These are the people who need to get in front of.

I was an MD at Goldman Sachs. While I was working for the firm in 2010 I started putting together a report card for myself. It was a beautiful thing: a single piece of paper with all my key accomplishments for the year.

I made sure I knew who my stakeholders were and I made sure they had it. That one piece of paper was worth thousands because it crystallized months of work and made everything clear.

It worked for me. It should work for you too – unless, of course, you’re happy to get a donut at bonus time. The choice is yours.

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

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

““

You can now add Bank of America to the long list of firms that are growing their equity derivatives business. Bofa just poached veteran banker Henri-Emmanuel Lewinger from BNP Paribas. He started earlier this month in New York as a managing director.

The move comes as no surprise considering the current landscape where clients are seeking to hedge against volatile equities markets. Banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays have been hiring senior-level equity derivatives traders all year, though in Goldman’s case, the additions helped make up for higher-than-normal turnover within the unit.

Meanwhile, Bank of America was hit with a series of resignations within its global equity derivatives business earlier this year. The flurry of departures was mostly in EMEA and reportedly resulted in the bank temporarily having no managing directors on its European equity derivatives trading desks. Now Bank of America is reloading, at least in the U.S. Lewinger’s defection from BNP may be particularly frustrating for the French bank as it too is said to be trying to expand its equity derivatives business. As with FX sales, hiring within equity derivatives trading seems more a game of musical chairs as banks continue to poach from each other.

Lewinger joins Bank of America after spending the last decade as a managing director at BNP in New York. He first cut his teeth at Societe Generale in Paris, according to LinkedIn.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

““

Are you going to lose your banking job before 2018 is out? Late-in-the-year redundancies are always a risk as banks indulge in their inevitable pre-bonus cuts, but this year’s layoffs could be particularly harsh as banks squeeze European costs to cover the expense of Brexit and squeeze front office costs to pay for technologists to automate jobs away in the future.

Which jobs are most likely to go? For this, it helps to look at the charts for comparative operating costs as a proportion of income that were put together by research firm Tricumen at the end of the second quarter. Tricumen has yet to release its third quarter charts, but in many cases it’s a case of plus ça change. We’ve posted the charts at the bottom of this page, but here are the quick takeaways.

1. Deutsche Bank, equities and fixed income staff should really be worried

At the end of the first half of 2018, Tricumen said that Deutsche Bank’s equities trading division and its fixed income trading division had the worst cost-income ratios of comparable businesses across every big bank.

Things might have changed. After all, CEO Christian Sewing cut 1,450 staff across the bank in the third quarter. Then again, Deutsche Bank also ended the third quarter with only 101 fewer front office bankers in its corporate and investment bank than it began – a reduction of less than 1%. This could be because it hired a lot of new graduates to replace all the senior bankers it let go, which should be good for costs, but it doesn’t bode well that costs consumed 95% of revenues at Deutsche’s corporate and investment bank in Q3, and 92% in the first nine months of the year.

If anyone is going to lose their jobs before the end of 2018, it therefore probably should be Deutsche Bank’s salespeople and traders. The good news is that Sewing has repeatedly promised that front office layoffs are over and the front office restructuring is “complete”. There may be a stay of execution.

2. Investment bankers at UBS, Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas should probably be worried

Looking back at banks’ performance in the six months to June 2018, Tricumen highlighted the cost ratios in the ‘banking’ divisions of the Swiss banks and BNP Paribas. Tricumen defines banking as debt capital markets bonds and loans, securitisation, equity capital markets, and M&A.

BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse are reporting their third quarter results this week, but UBS already reported last week. It had an excellent third quarter in M&A, but a less impressive three months in equity capital markets and debt capital markets. In light of the historically high cost base, UBS’s investment bankers might be exposed, particularly following the appointment of new heads of the investment bank (Robert Karofsky and Piero Novelli) following the recent departure of Andrea Orcel. Karofsky and Novelli might use the opportunity to shake things up.

3. Everyone at SocGen needs to watch their backs

SocGen will report its third quarter results on November 8th. Employees at its corporate and investment bank (CIB) need to hope that revenues have increased more than at – say – Deutsche Bank. At the end of the second quarter, Tricumen put SocGen behind the pack for cost efficiency in every single area of its investment bank. It probably doesn’t help that many of SocGen’s CIB staff are in Paris, where it’s hard to let people go – unless they get a very handsome redundancy payment to see them on their way.

Operating cost/income, banking, Q318

Tricumen banking Q318

Operating cost/income, fixed income currencies and commodities, Q318

Operating cost income Ficc q3 18

Operating cost/income, equities, Q318

Tricumen equities 2018

““

Julius Baer, one of the most aggressive recruiters within Asian private banking, has appointed a team head of intermediaries for Southeast Asia as it looks to win more business from external asset managers. Vianne Choo, one of a string of new senior recruits at the Swiss bank, has joined at executive director level, based in Singapore. She spent the previous four years as a senior financial products advisor at Vontobel and prior to that was at Credit Suisse for 13 years, latterly working in structured products.

Choo’s intermediaries desk, like those at other private banks, caters to the needs of external asset managers (EAM), a rapidly expanding sector in Asia that includes family offices and other firms making investments into banks on behalf of wealthy clients. In 2017, there were 160 EAMs in Singapore and Hong Kong, collectively managing $91.5bn in private wealth, according to Asian Private Banker.

Julius Baer is bulking up its intermediaries team to capture more of this market. As we reported last month, James Tan from Maybank joined the desk as a relationship manager. Rivals such as UBS and Credit Suisse are also growing their teams that service EAMs in Asia, and competition to hire people like Choo and Tan is heating up as a result. Sascha Zehnter, Credit Suisse’s APAC head of EAMs, told Citywire in June that his team is looking to grow its headcount in Hong Kong and Singapore following 40% revenue growth in 2017.

“Intermediaries teams have become very important in Asia over the past few years,” says former Merrill Lynch private banker Rahul Sen, now a partner at search firm Boyden. “Private banks are building dedicated desks catering to external firms, and attracting them and their clients with preferred pricing and better trading opportunities, such as direct access to traders and investors.”

Julius Baer, meanwhile, has been growing its workforce in Singapore beyond its intermediaries desk. During the first quarter, for example, it hired DBS banker Laurent Chevalley as a managing director and senior advisor, and recruited Winston Teo from Bank of Singapore as Southeast Asia team head. In May, Sundeep Dua joined from Standard Chartered as a director in Julius Baer’s Singapore-based Indian Subcontinent team. And as we noted in August, Sarah Lim, formerly of UBS, has joined the investment advisory team at Julius Baer as an executive director.

“JB has done a great job in transforming a relatively unknown boutique name in Asia into the present brand, which is no longer alien to RMs and their clients here,” says Liu San Li, a former private banker, now a business partner at wealth management firm Avallis. “It’s now focusing on hiring even more senior RMs, typically at minimum director level or above.”

The bank’s recent hires are now based in Julius Baer’s office within the $5.1bn Marina One business and residential development, which opened earlier this year and has been widely acclaimed as one of the most instagrammable places in Singapore thanks to its urban-oasis architecture and skybridges decked out in tropical greenery.

Between 2015 and 2017, Julius Baer’s headcount of Asia-based RMs shot up by 130 to reach 400 – the largest increase of any private bank not involved in an acquisition during that period. Its new office, which at 100,000 square feet is more than 40% larger than its previous one, suggests more expansion is on the cards in Singapore. Julius Baer employs about 800 people in the Republic (including non-RM staff), but its Marina One site can accommodate up to 1,000, according to Finews Asia.

New Julius Baer recruit Choo began her career in 1995 as an investment planner and FX dealer at UOB. She moved to Citi three years later as a senior relationship manager, before joining Credit Suisse in 2001.

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

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: ljubaphoto, Getty

A sweeping twilight photo of Guangzhou, a city in the heart of China’s Pearl River Delta region north of Hong Kong, adorns the first page of HSBC’s investor presentation which accompanies its third quarter results. The choice of image isn’t surprising: Asia accounted for 83% of HSBC’s pre-tax reported profits for the year to end-September, while the Pearl River Delta is core to the bank’s ongoing business pivot toward Asia.

Asian profits are also heading in the right direction – they’re up 19% year on year for the first nine months to $13,839m. But while HSBC is undoubtedly big overall in Asia, its Q3 results suggest some of the specific teams that are currently standing out from the pack in the region, particularly in Hong Kong. If you want to work for HSBC in Asia, these are the units you should apply to.

Technology

HSBC uses Hong Kong as one of its main centres for technology development, and it’s been hiring there, too. During the third quarter the bank “invested an additional $0.2bn in staff to support front-line growth and technology initiatives”, including in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. And in the year to end-September it made $0.4bn of investments in “digital capabilities”. HSBC appears to be building in front-office consumer tech – one of its strategic priorities is to use its increased digital spending to “deliver improved customer service”. HSBC’s second-half report, released in August, states that its Hong Kong-based PayMe app has acquired its millionth user and that the firm has expanded its use of Google Cloud technology, “increasing access to some of the leading machine learning and data analytics technology”.

Global banking and markets in China

HSBC has “made strategic hires” in global banking and markets, and continues to “invest in the securities joint venture in mainland China”, according to its Q3 earnings. The report is referring to HSBC Qianhai Securities, which was launched last December and was the first JV securities company in China to be majority owned by a foreign bank. Qianhai also hired new bankers in the first quarter.

Belt and Road bankers

Like many of its rivals, in particular Citi, HSBC has been hiring China-desk bankers and support staff in markets, including Hong Kong, which are likely to benefit from China’s Belt and Road (B&R) global infrastructure initiative. The bank recently opened new China desks in Thailand, Macau, Poland and Luxembourg, taking its total to 24, according to its 2017 results. In its Q3 results, HSBC has reiterated that B&R is one of its strategic priorities as it seeks to be the “leading bank to support drivers of global investment”.

Asian private banking (especially if you can cross sell)

Not an immediately obvious choice for this list: HSBC’s global private banking (GPB) division contributed only 1.6% of its pre-tax profits in the year to end-September, while Hong Kong-based private bankers suffered from lower brokerage and trading revenues. Nevertheless, HSBC is recruiting in Asian private banking, according to its Q3 report. “We continue to invest in our Asian franchise and are maintaining the hiring and investment plans to support the Asian Wealth Growth Initiative highlighted at the 2018 Investor Update.” HSBC announced last month that it wants to add more than 1,300 jobs in Asian wealth – mainly positions based in Hong Kong and Singapore – by 2022, with about half of these in GPB and the rest in retail.

HSBC’s Q3 report also stresses that 60% of net new money inflows in GPB was from collaboration with HSBC’s other global businesses. Like their counterparts at UBS and Credit Suisse, HSBC’s private bankers are being encouraged to sell global markets products to their clients.

Commercial banking RMs in Hong Kong

HSBC’s Q3 report is unusually explicit about recruitment with its commercial banking division (CMB): “We have made relationship manager hires, primarily in Hong Kong and mainland China”. Within CMB, global liquidity and cash management was the standout team – revenue increased by $0.7bn (21%) year-on-year for the first nine months, “notably in Asia reflecting wider margins in Hong Kong”.

Wealth management in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is the best place to base yourself within HSBC’s wealth management unit, which serves customers not rich enough to get the private banking treatment. Year-on-year revenue growth for the first nine months reflected higher investment distribution income, “mainly in Hong Kong, driven by increased investor confidence in the equity markets, higher mutual fund distribution and higher wealth insurance distribution”.

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

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: anzeletti, Getty

Spare a thought for the 18 or 19 year-old university student with an interest in working in an investment bank. Over years, the investment banking recruitment process has become incrementally more relentless. Once upon a time, it was possible to apply for an investment banking job early in the third year of university, before graduation. Not any more.

In the early 2000s, banks’ graduate recruitment process changed. It suddenly became necessary to get a summer internship in your second year and to use the internship as a vehicle for gaining a job offer upon graduation. So far, so standard. But then, around 2014, it changed again. In Europe, banks began offering spring internships to first year university students. It then wasn’t long before good first year students who completed these spring internships were offered second year internships and good students from second year internships were offered full-time places. – To maximize your chance of getting a banking job in London, it became necessary to get on the recruitment conveyor belt in the first term (or early second term) at university, when most students have barely settled in.

Something similar happened in the U.S, although it was more that second year summer internship applications opened earlier and earlier (and earlier). In March this year, Yale University’s blog complained that students with an inclination towards banking were being made to apply for their second year internships in spring of their first year (sophomore year). “It really started in 2015, we saw the timeline for financial services moving towards the fall of junior year, and then last summer we saw it move to the summer before junior year, and now suddenly we’re seeing it in the spring,” said Jeanine Dames, head of Yale University’s career services offices. In spring 2018, students were already being asked to apply for internships in summer 2019, with the result that they were effectively being tied into banking careers as early as possible. Dames suggested this might be one reason banks have such problems retaining their graduate recruits: students commit to banking careers without exploring the alternatives and then leave when they realize the industry is not for them.

Banks have taken note, at least in terms of summer internship timelines. There’s no indication that the spring internship process is being scrapped, but the Wall Street Journal says Goldman Sachs and Morgan have both committed to stop chasing sophomores to apply for summer internships a whole 15 months early. From now, summer intern applications will go back to taking place early in the junior year in which the internships take place.

“We were contributing to an environment that pressured students to choose rather than to explore,” said Dane Holmes, Goldman’s top human-resources executive. “I want people who want to be at Goldman Sachs, not people who felt they had to say yes to an offer.” Matt Mitro, JPMorgan’s head of campus recruiting, said: “We found it was disruptive to students doing what they were supposed to do, which is study.”

Naturally, banks also have their own reasons for delaying the U.S. recruitment timeline. The Wall Street Journal notes that many of the students who came through the expedited process in the U.S. were, ‘white men who had informal ties to finance through family or friends,’ and who knew they had to get their acts together early on. As banks try to diversify and recruit more women and minority candidates, this didn’t make a lot of sense.

Separately, Sergio Ermotti seems to feel pretty bullish about UBS. Reuters reports that the Swiss bank’s chief executive just bought CHF13.1m ($13m) of UBS stock. This is pretty much an entire year’s pay for Sergio, who as a former trader is clearly comfortable taking risks. UBS’s stock has fallen 25% this year. The bank reported a 32% rise in third quarter net profit thanks to a strong quarter at its investment bank.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs appointed George Lee, one of its top technology investment bankers, as co-CIO alongside Elisha Wiesel. Lee’s job will be to alert Goldman to new technologies which could be a threat or an opportunity. (Recode)

Garth Ritchie’s Deutsche Bank pep talk: “The franchise has not been impaired..In important areas for our franchise, we have been gaining market share,” he said. “We’re competitive.” (Bloomberg)

The U.K. plans to sell off its remaining stake in Royal Bank of Scotland by the end of the 2023-2024 tax year. (Bloomberg)

In M&A, HSBC sits 37th on Dealogic’s numbers. For a bank that made great play of hiring rainmakers such as John Studzinski (2003 to 2006) and Matthew Westerman (2016 to 2017), from Morgan Stanley and Goldman respectively, this looks like a failure. (Financial Times)

Women worry about me-too: “I’ve talked to men—well-meaning ones—who say they’re scared of being taken the wrong way by women, who don’t know how they should interact with female associates and colleagues. I’m afraid this will mean men will exclude us even more from relationship-building opportunities. If there’s a case that entails travel, they might think it’s safer to pick a male colleague than me.” (Law.com)

More than one in nine, or 11.4%, of the FCA’s approximately 3,700 staff left in the 12 months to April 2018. This is not good ahead of Brexit. (Financial News)

““

This time it’s not Nomura. Nor is it Mizuho. Insiders at MUFG say the Japanese bank has been busy pruning sales and trading headcount. Around 10 credit sales people are understood to have gone in New York London and Singapore.

MUFG Securities didn’t immediately comment on the layoffs, which appear to have been focused on costly senior staff. In New York, Thomas Daly, David Nixon, John Cahil and Tim Cavanaugh all left the Japanese bank on October 23rd according to their FINRA records. Daly had been with MUFG for five years after starting his career with Salomon Brothers in 1993. Nixon had been with the bank four years after starting his career with Morgan Stanley in 1987. Cahil had been there eight years after starting at Shearson in 1983. And Cavanaugh had been there seven years after beginning his career in 1997. It looks a lot like a clearing of the senior ranks.

In London, where MUFG Securities employs around 600 people, the bank is understood to have parted company with Yukhie Hau, a salesperson who joined four years ago, and with Nicholas Wright, a director in credit sales who joined from SocGen in 2015. Neither Hau nor Wright responded to a request to comment.

MUFG is also understood to have let go of a VP and a director in fixed income sales in Singapore.

The cuts come after rival Japanese bank Nomura cut 50 people across fixed income trading in July. Nomura has since started rehiring, but with a focus on structured instead of flow products. Most banks (UBS, Barclays and Citi excepted) experienced a slowdown in fixed income trading revenues in the third quarter, meaning there may be more redundancies to come. It doesn’t help that fixed income trading is increasingly taking place electronically and that most banks are focused on finding a new breed of electronic sales trader who can sell electronic trading capabilities rather talking to clients about individual trade ideas.

““

Outside of having a sterling resume and a strong network, the most important factor in landing a new job may be timing. Understanding when the market is hot and cold can create both opportunity and leverage, particularly with tech jobs at banks where the need for new talent seems to spike and soften rather suddenly. So when’s the best time of year to float your resume out there? And when might you be better off waiting it out?

To get a better idea, we looked at the total number of U.S. tech jobs that were posted across all corners of the Internet by big banks over the last year and broke them down by month, courtesy of analytics provider Burning Glass. We included data from Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Nomura and UBS. We defined tech postings as those that list at least one of a dozen different popular banking programming languages as a prerequisite, including Python, Java and C++. Job postings that listed multiple programming languages (of which there were many) were only counted once.

As you can see, the pattern isn’t at all random. Like with most industries, hiring slows down around the holidays. But in U.S. banking, the downturn in tech-related job postings begins sooner than one may think. Recruiting efforts also don’t pick up immediately after the New Year, bucking the general national trend. The ten banks collectively posted more jobs in December than they did in January. One New York headhunter who does retained tech searches for banks and hedge funds wasn’t surprised by the data.

“The job market in banking is quietly controlled by bonus schedules,” she said. “People often wait to leave until after their bonus is paid out.” Typically, banks announce bonuses in late January and pay them out in February or March, often sparking a mass exodus. Post-bonus turnover helps create the uptick in job postings that begins in February and steadily increases through the spring. Once autumn gives way to winter, most bonus-eligible bank employees are willing to wait until they receive their next big paycheck before jumping to a new gig or leaving the industry altogether

“If you’re a passive candidate, the best time to look is after the smoke from post-bonus defections clears,” the headhunter said. However, the trends are a bit different in tech. Banks tend to concentrate their early-year recruiting on filling revenue-generating positions before they prioritize senior tech hiring, she said. This explains why the spike in tech-related job postings doesn’t hit until July and lasts through September, before rapidly falling off in October.

“Desperation shifts from the front-office to the back-office in late spring/early summer,” she said. That’s the best time to turn up the heat on your job search.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

““

Here’s how UBS has quietly hired 72 new bankers in Asia

Morning Coffee: Behind the scenes at Google’s sex scandal. Deutsche Bank’s one big ask

Safe small-talk when you work in banking

COMMENT: I’m an electronic sales trader. My cash colleagues are getting me down

Citi has just hired one of Barclays’ top Hong Kong bankers

One in four current vacancies at Singapore banks are in a single job sector