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So, BNP Paribas’ corporate and investment bank (CIB) didn’t have a great third quarter. The French bank announced its quarterly results today and revealed that CIB revenues fell 8.4% year-on-year in the three months to September. They also fell 9.6% year-on-year in the first nine months of 2018 compared to the same period one year earlier. It’s not entirely pretty.

Of course, BNP’s corporate and investment bank isn’t the only one with issues. Revenues were also down 13% at Deutsche Bank’s corporate and investment bank (CIB) in the third quarter, and by 9% in the first nine months. BNP Paribas isn’t the only one shrinking.

BNP Paribas is, however, the only one with its head deep in the sand about the shrinkage that’s taking place. Although the head of Deutsche’s investment bank Garth Ritchie claimed yesterday that the bank has been adding market share whilst losing revenues, Deutsche does at least have a programme of cost cutting. BNP Paribas, by comparison, is publicly sticking to its 2020 strategy plan in which revenues in the corporate and investment bank are supposed to grow at a minimum compound average rate of 4.5% a year between 2017 and 2020 and obviate the need for big cuts.

This is already a problem. As the chart below shows, in the first nine months of 2018 revenues at BNP’s CIB are already 14% below target. If the current trajectory continues next year, they will be 25% below target and in 2020 they will be 35% below target. BNP will not be outgrowing the need for cost cutting after all.

Although the bank has said little publicly about its plans going awry, increased cost cutting looks like a tacit admission that things aren’t right. Under plan 2020, BNP is supposed to be cutting costs at its investment bank by an average of 1.5% each year. But in the first nine months of operating expenses, it’s reduced operating expenses by nearly 9% in an apparent attempt to match the fall in revenues. Moreover, while plan 2020 focuses on cutting costs through efficiencies and digitalisation, BNP has been quietly making redundancies. Earlier this month, the Times reported that BNP was cutting 40 people from its investment bank in London. Insiders say it’s more like 150 globally.

Most at risk would seem to be the French bank’s fixed income salespeople and traders who have now presided over falling revenues for six consecutive quarters. It doesn’t help that BNP’s often brilliant macro trading team has been stymied by a weak environment for rates trading in Europe. Nor, though, does it help that BNP’s fixed income trading business ranks between seventh and ninth in Europe and between 10th and 12th in the U.S. according to Coalition. The French bank is a bit-player in a market that’s increasingly subject to consolidation.

So, what next? This is for BNP CEO Jean-Laurent Bonnafé to determine. In the meantime, though, it might help if Bonnafé admitted his plan isn’t working out. It could only be more painful in the long run if he doesn’t.

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Do you work in finance? Are you successful and rewarded well for your hard work? For a lot of you the answer will be yes. Are you also enjoying the high life? And has your lifestyle grown in parallel with your income and your success? Are you able to treat both yourself and your family to a luxurious lifestyle? Do you drive luxury cars that you upgrade every 3 years, have a nice big house which costs a fortune to decorate and maintain? Enjoy several 5-star holidays each year? Wear designer clothes and eat at the finest restaurants? Of course!

For many people in finance, the retort is always, “Why not?” – What’s the harm in splashing cash on stuff you enjoy and which makes you look and feel good? – After all, you can’t take it with you, and spending often feels great. But what happened to all those big dreams you had of running your own business, or doing something totally different when you had enough money in the bank? Was this really what you had planned?

Less than ten years into a finance career, many people find themselves trapped by golden handcuffs which squeeze tighter and tighter as time goes on. Their wiggle room is taken by their spending habits and they have to do whatever is necessary to keep generating that six figure (or maybe even seven figure) income each year.

The telling moment is usually when you’re out with friends and they ask how it’s going at work. You say something like, “I would love to do something else, but no other job pays this well and my job isn’t really that bad.”

Deep down though, plenty of people are hoping that this isn’t it until they retire.Is this really living? The more this question looms large, the more that people become unhappy and anxious at work. Anxiety and unhappiness becomes anger and resentment and this starts to effect your performance and ultimately the much-needed bonus.

You start to bring your emotions home and your family notice and worry.

What else can you do? Is this really the life you want? How long are you going to pretend to everyone you are happy?

Maybe it’s time to stop making excuses and to start prioritizing money over happiness. How? There are three things you can do right now.

Firstly, give yourself a break. You’re successful at what you do and you have a well-paid job. This gives you time to figure out your next steps, time to plan and time to take action in a low risk way.

Secondly, tell your family what you’re really thinking. Talk to your partner and children and tell them how you feel. From experience, it will take a large weight of your shoulders and together you can work out a way forward that will help you loosen the lifestyle handcuffs.

Thirdly, work towards clarity on what you really want next. Knowing that you want to do something different is not the same as knowing what that thing is. You might think you want to run your own company, but is this really the best moment for that? Do you want to it now or in 10 years’ time? Maybe, it’s just a change you need? How about swapping jobs internally?

Most of all, you need to take action. Action is what makes all the difference. Don’t just take the easy road and try continuing as you are. It will become a harder road as time goes on. Step up, take action and prioritize your happiness. You honestly deserve it.

Nick Foster is a former director at an investment bank and leadership & life coach who specializes in helping leaders in banking and finance thrive, not just survive in both their life and their career. For more info, visit – https://nicholas-foster.com

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Marie was keen to get a head start in a career in banking and ESSEC’s Master in Finance (MiF) provided the springboard she needed.

After completing a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Finance, Marie was keen to dig deeper into the subject.

“The Bachelor’s degree gave a very holistic view of financial concepts and culture, but I wanted to gain more specialised and in-depth knowledge about the different fields in finance, and that made me pursue an MiF,” she says.

ESSEC’s programme stood out for Marie for a number of reasons, not least of which was its strong academic credentials, placed third in the world in the Financial Times 2017 Master of Finance ranking.

“ESSEC offers many top-ranked courses, of which the MiF is one of the most highly ranked in the world, and it is especially recognised in the banking industry, which is where I wanted to be.

“I knew I could leverage on this to help me get a head start in a career in finance, as I know it is quite competitive among graduates,” Marie says.

After studying in Singapore for her first degree, Marie was also keen to get some international exposure. “I wanted to interact with people from different cultures. Most of my classmates were from France and different countries in Europe, and the teaching faculty was very diverse as well.

“It really broadened my knowledge of different work cultures and how an Asian work culture differed from a European one,” she says.

ESSEC’s MiF consists of 21 core subjects and 29 elective courses, enabling students to tailor the programme to their individual interests and career goals.

Students choose to follow one of three specialised tracks in either corporate finance, financial markets or asset management, to match their professional ambitions. Marie chose the corporate finance track.

“Having the option to specialise really helped me delve into very technical concepts. It allowed me to focus on what I really wanted to learn, especially through the electives, which covered very niche areas of knowledge that I had never touched on before,” she says.

Marie adds that ESSEC also provided many specialised workshops and career seminars on corporate finance. Even though she specialised in corporate finance, she still had the chance to take modules from the other tracks.

The courses Marie found most beneficial were on financial risk management and fixed income. “These were helpful because they provided me with the foundation knowledge that I need to know in my job.

“More importantly, the professors who were teaching the courses were practitioners in the finance industry, so they were able to provide us with market knowledge and real-life examples,” she says.

Besides the academic courses, one thing that stood out for Marie was a seminar organised by ESSEC alumni to help students understand how to secure a job in the banking industry and how to prepare for interviews and assessments.

“They provided very specialised and in-depth knowledge on what is needed for these interviews. They also advised us how to do well at networking sessions, how to put ourselves out there to let employers get to know us and discover our strengths,” she says.

Another aspect of the programme Marie enjoyed was the international study trip, for which she travelled to Hong Kong. “It was really fun because we got to visit many different banks. It was very helpful because we met many ESSEC alumni in different banks. It really helped me understand more about the industry and the area I wanted to specialise in,” she says.

A key part of the MiF programme for Marie was a 10-week long internship she did with UBS, which ultimately helped her land a job at the bank.

“It was very rewarding and my first experience working at a bank. The culture at UBS is very friendly and supportive, where colleagues from different departments are very open to interns and junior staff. They always encourage us to ask questions,” she says.

Marie’s manager assigned her to a project to help her gain more in-depth knowledge about each desk within the team.

“It was a very enriching experience because I got to work with other departments outside of my team and helped to close some general knowledge gaps. I presented my findings from the project, and people showed interest by raising questions. This meant I was able to make a tangible contribution, even as an intern.”

Marie’s manager was so impressed with her that when her internship ended, she placed Marie on UBS’s Graduate Talent Programme.

Marie thinks doing her MiF and internship was a crucial step in getting on to this programme. “It is beneficial for anyone who wants to start in the banking industry because it is a very well-structured programme,” she says.

Last time we checked in with boutique investment bank PJT Partners, things were going quite well. The firm had just boosted its revenues by 20% during the second quarter and was rewarding its employees for their efforts. Fast-forward three months and PJT Partners and its bankers have even more reason to celebrate. Revenues were up a massive 79% during Q3 as the firm’s advisory business nearly doubled the fees it generated compared to a year ago. PJT bankers are set up for a huge year.

As a smaller firm than other big-name boutiques like Evercore and Moelis, PJT Partners maintained a massive 73.6% compensation-to-revenue ratio through the first nine months of the year, more than 13 percentage points higher than at Evercore. With only around 520 employees, pay per head through three quarters is roughly $571k. Assuming a strong fourth quarter performance, the average PJT employee may take home just shy of $750k for the year. In comparison, pay-per-head through the first nine months of the year at Evercore stands at $437k.

Of course, not everyone at PJT will be earning three-quarters of a million dollars this year. The biggest slice of the pie will go to its partners, of which there were only 34 as of the end of September. They should be particularly jolly come the holidays.

While somewhat diminutive compared to other boutiques, PJT is still relatively new and continues to hire aggressively. The firm had around 470 employees at the end of 2017, meaning it has increased headcount by roughly 50 over the first three quarters of the year, including the addition of seven new partners. Now appears a great time to get your foot in the door at PJT, though it will take some effort. The firm finished atop a recent ranking of the investment banks with the hardest interviews. Boutiques accounted for the top seven spots on the list.

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If you’re planning a job search when banks’ hiring budgets open up again in Q1 2019 – or if you’re looking for a new role now – chances are that you’re talking to recruitment consultants.

But in the competitive job markets of Singapore and Hong Kong, how do you know that recruiters are actually experts in your sector? While the majority will be up to scratch, there are still a few cowboy recruiters operating in Hong Kong and Singapore. Here’s how to weed them out so you only work with the best.

1. Recoil against the ‘hard sell’

Beware recruiters who begin meetings by giving you the hard sell about the job on offer. “The very basic rule of thumb in the recruitment industry is to listen to candidates first and talk next. There’s nothing to ‘sell’ until you first understand the candidate,” says Vince Natteri, director of recruitment at search firm Pinpoint Asia in Hong Kong.

2. Make sure they ask for your consent

“Make sure your recruiter asks your permission before they even discuss your details with a bank, let alone send your resume for new roles,” says a recruiter in Singapore who asked not to be named. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve briefed a candidate about a job and got their go-ahead, but found that another recruiter had sent their details to the same bank without checking. So tell your recruiter upfront that they need your permission.”

3. Test out recruiters with some specialist terms

“Recruiters not speaking the same language as candidates is a common problem. For example, when an IT candidate talks about Unix, Linux, Java, AJAX or J2EE, and the recruiter doesn’t understand him, this recruiter won’t be able to represent him as well as someone who does,” says Natteri.

4. Ask them targeted questions about banks

“Use a specialist recruiter in your particular field. They’ll have better relationships with hiring managers at banks, know who’s in their teams, and potentially be the only person dealing with that vacancy,” says Richard Aldridge, a director at recruiters Black Swan Group in Singapore. “Asking targeted questions about all of the above should reveal the real specialists.”

5. Strike up a chat about the job market

“Try to work with recruiters who give you a competitive edge: colour on hiring trends, market feedback on your weak points, and detailed backgrounds on prospective employers,” says Nick Wells, director at search firm Webber Chase in Singapore. “Avoid those who just offer social media ‘shout-outs’ for job ads.”

6. Ask them about “team dynamics”

“A good recruiter can fill you in on the ‘dynamics’ of the role, over and above the job description. For example, team dynamics, company culture, and personalities and big egos within the team,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting Group in Singapore. “Then you can go for interviews better prepped. Bad recruiters just tell you to refer to the JD.”

7. Be concerned if they harass you to close the deal

“A senior IB candidate recently told us that he once dealt with a recruitment firm and received an offer from one of their banking clients,” says Natteri from Pinpoint Asia. “When he told the consultant he needed some time to think about it, he received further calls, about 20 minutes apart and lasting until midnight, from different managers in the firm telling him to take the offer. Their motivations were only focused on their fee and not what was best for the candidate and the bank.”

8. And be concerned if you’re called by a different person each time

“The bad recruitment firms have a high turnover of staff,” says Wells from Webber Chase. “You will always be called by a different recruiter rather than someone who has taken the time to build up a strong understanding of your needs – both personal and professional – to whom you are more than just a resume.”

9. See if they give you good career advice during the meeting

“A lot of recruiters simply aren’t experienced enough to provide good career advice,” says the anonymous Singapore recruiter. “Some will simply ‘advise’ you to take the role they have on offer, so it’s best to already know what kind of job you want, otherwise you could find yourself getting talked into something that’s not in your best interests.”

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

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Private bankers in Singapore and Hong Kong are becoming more cautious about travelling to China, after a UBS relationship manager was asked to delay her departure from Beijing earlier this month to meet with local officials.

UBS has lifted a 24-hour ban on staff trips to China and is now playing down the incident. CEO Sergio Ermotti said on Thursday that the Chinese request was unrelated to the bank or the unnamed Singapore-based employee. But the fact that Chinese authorities have upset an RM’s travel plans has still sent jitters throughout private banks in Asia, which increasingly view the mainland as a lucrative and largely untapped market, estimated by McKinsey to be worth about US$6 trillion in investable assets by 2022.

“Whatever the actual reasons for the UBS incident, travel to China by offshore bankers in Singapore and Hong Kong is coming under some extra scrutiny in the wake of it – and not just at UBS,” says Benjamin Quinlan, a former UBS banker, now a consultant in Hong Kong.

More specifically, the UBS news has renewed bankers’ concerns about the tough stance taken by Chinese authorities on the selling of offshore products by visiting bankers, according to two private bankers we spoke with in Singapore, both of whom asked not to be named. This is despite there being no suggestion that the UBS banker is suspected of breaking any onshore selling rules.

Although China is liberalising its finance sector, currency controls still make it difficult for mainlanders to move money overseas, and to invest in certain types of securities products, such as private equity funds. “Violation of Chinese regulations can lead to serious consequences for the bank, not just its staff,” says Liu San Li, a former private banker, now a business partner at wealth management firm Avallis.

Bankers in Hong Kong and Singapore are growing increasingly wary of Chinese regulations, because they could potentially breach them just by carrying the wrong documents, even if they never tried to sell offshore products while in China.

“As a banker, I was told never to have any marketing material, account-opening documents, or client portfolios with me on business trips. That way I wouldn’t have ‘incriminating’ documents in case of an immigration search at the airport,” says former Merrill Lynch private banker Rahul Sen, now a partner at search firm Boyden. “Going forward, I think bankers who aren’t Chinese nationals will be advised not to carry any official documents with them in China.”

None of these travel concerns, however, will hinder the hiring of China coverage RMs, who are currently mainly based in Hong Kong and Singapore. “China is a huge contributor to private banks’ AUM and revenue in Asia, so RMs will definitely still be attracted to working on their China desks,” says Lucas Yeo, head of banking and finance at recruiters Tangspac in Singapore.

“RMs who are currently covering China from offshore won’t switch markets just like that – it’s their rice bowl and they’ve built networks there,” says Liu from Avallis. “And cross-border selling restrictions aren’t unique to China. Just about every other country – Indonesia, Taiwan and Malaysia, to name a few – has implemented them as well.”

Over the long term, it’s likely that banks will need fewer offshore RMs. More China-coverage jobs are expected to move onshore as Western banks take advantage of the recent introduction of majority ownership in their mainland joint ventures. UBS has already applied to up its JV stake to 51%. “UBS is pushing its onshore joint venture partly because it doesn’t want the type of problems that can happen when bankers have to travel to China,” says Quinlan.

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

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It’s Halloween and Morgan Stanley has got a slightly scary new hire. The latest C-Suite position at the bank is going to Dr. David Stark, Morgan Stanley’s new Chief Medical Officer. The press release announcing his appointment tries to make it sound heartwarming, with a lot of statistics about the cost of healthcare and the extent to which MS cares about the “wellness” of its employees. There’s also a tech angle to it (medical technology at a financial institution is presumably “finmedtech” and might be the hottest IPO trend of next year), as the CMO title is going to be combined with “Head of HR Data and Analytics” and Dr Stark comes to Morgan Stanley from “Lab100” a clinic-of-the-future project in a medical school.

… which is where it all starts to get a bit uncomfortable. The post of Chief Medical Officer isn’t actually there to run a general practitioner’s office for investment bankers, or even to bring the cutting edge of medical science to the Morgan Stanley health benefits program. He’s going to “leverage data and technology to unlock value-based care” (this sounds like it means cut costs, fair enough) but also to “harness our HR data” and to “generate data-driven insights” to “foster innovation in wellness”. It all sounds a bit Orwellian, particularly as banks like J.P. Morgan have already been using Palantir’s data techniques to unearth disgruntled employees – presumably Morgan Stanley’s medical data will be its own source of competitive advantage.

The thing about massive unspecific data-gathering exercises is that once the data is gathered, it can be put to a variety of uses. Some people at Morgan Stanley do other things that are bad for them, like smoke, drink and eat unhealthy food. Some of these people might think that these habits are none of their employer’s business as long as they do their job, but they might be wrong. Or in an even more dystopian vein, the health data could be used to reverse-engineer around the central health problem of the industry; Morgan Stanley could start selecting people for long term promotion on the basis of predictions about how physically robust they are going to be after ten years working 80 hour weeks. It doesn’t take long to come up with all sorts of alarming things that might pop out of a “wellness analytics” project which also presents an opportunity to gather large amounts of personal health data on employees.

You also don’t need a medical degree to know that a significant proportion of Morgan Stanley employees (like all bankers) probably do one thing that’s well known to be bad for your health in the long term – they fail to get enough sleep. We don’t have access to anyone’s HR data, but it’s not much of a stretch to assume that if we did, we’d find that this well-known medical fact would show up clear links between working practices and employee health. But the long-hours culture in finance is deeply embedded and has survived many previous attempts to alter it. To put it bluntly, banks don’t need to hire someone from Sinai to tell them that they’re working juniors beyond healthy norms, and if that’s what the Chief Medical Officer does in fact tell them, they’re unlikely to be impressed.

Separately, the kings of building up mountains of creepy personal data have historically been the hedge fund philosophers at Bridgewater. Given that, this profile of Karen Karniol-Tambour seems surprisngly normal. Ms Karniol-Tambour is quite shockingly young (confirmed as an “idea generator” at 23 and promoted last year to Head of Investment Research at the age of 31), obviously incredibly intelligent, but unlike so many of her senior colleagues at Bridgewater, she manages to get through a whole profile without straying into esoteric management theory. A colleague is even quoted as saying that she is “kind” and “cares about others”, although since this is Bridgewater they are quick to say that they mean kind and caring in a ruthless sort of way. Ms Karniel-Tambour has the job of prioritising dozens of research projects and setting teams of people to come up with answers, and her speciality is apparently in “joining the dots”. If you read down to the end of the profile, there are some more or less mainstream views on China, but some really interesting and nuanced thoughts about the relationship between the USA, emerging markets and the future.

Meanwhile

At the UBS France whistle-blower trial, the judge appears to have lost patience with the bank’s strategy of discrediting successive witnesses as disgruntled and underperforming employees, many of whom have subsequently been convicted of offences. “There appears to have been quite a serious hiring problem”, noted Judge Christine Mee. It’s a valid point to make; banks are often very quick to suddenly discover that inconvenient employees were bad apples all along (Bloomberg)

Millennium and Citadel, two of the only major hedge fund groups who have kept their reputation over the last few years, are putting their track record to work, with longer lock-ups and higher fees. Both firms are returning cash to investors, and only allowing them to reinvest it in new share classes with worse terms. Noticeably, Izzy Englander is no longer listed as a “key man” in the Millennium documentation (WSJ)

Cabaret at the European Commodities Exchange agriculture futures conference in Rouen this week featured dancers in thongs and rhinestone-studded bras. A small number of those present gave unconvincing quotes about the Moulin Rouge and how France is much more sophisticated about these things (Bloomberg)

A well-informed opinion piece on the strategic dilemmas facing UBS post-Orcel… (Financial News)

… as the bank opens up a fourth Indian offshore centre …(Finews)

… and considers asset management acquisitions and partnerships, possibly in the USA or UK… (Bloomberg)

… and announces Phillipe Drouin, who joined from BAML four years ago, as its new head of consumer and retail IBD (Financial News)

JP Morgan has hired Foster + Partners, most famous for the Apple HQ, to build their new skyscraper in New York (Bloomberg)

Tattoos officially won’t hurt your job prospects, although maybe keep your sleeves rolled down during ECM pitches (Harvard Business Review)

In a scene that will be oddly familiar to many workers on trading floors, a Russian scientist has stabbed a colleague with whom he was trapped at an Antarctic base, who kept telling him the ending of the books he was trying to read. (Daily Mirror)

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As Brexit approaches, it seems that banks’ European recruiters, who are mostly still based in London, have overlooked a few things about the German hiring market. Recruiting in Frankfurt is not easy. Their omissions are leading to concern that hiring won’t happen in time.

“Many more new hires need to be made on the open market,” says Thore Behrens, a headhunter at Banking Consult in Frankfurt. Despite the time pressure, Behrens says London-based personnel departments seem to be taking it easy. “I do not understand it at all…. Many just do not understand that it’s not so easy to find staff here.”

At the root of the problem is Germany’s odd protocol for leaving an existing job. German employment contracts stipulate that financial services employees have three month notice periods starting from the end of the nearest quarter. In some cases, notice periods are as long as six months. Behrens says the whole thing adds a complexity that British-based recruiters aren’t used to. “Most bankers in Frankfurt have a three-month notice period to the end of the quarter,” he says, noting that people who resign at the end of December won’t be able to start until the 1st of April. And if banks miss the December resignation slot, they will next be able to add staff in Frankfurt on…July 1st.

In the circumstances, speed is of the essence and among those who know the German market, the lack of urgency is astonishing.

Mike Boetticher from headhunters Match in Frankfurt says London-based recruitment managers seem to presume that Frankfurt is similar to the City. “They first have to experience that everything is more complicated here and notice periods are longer and the willingness to move is lower,” says Boetticher. “They say: In one week I’ll be in Frankfurt, it would be nice if we could meet one or two candidates.” Frankfurt isn’t like that.

Thomas von Ciriacy-Wantrup, a partner at recruitment firm Fricke Finance & Legal, says it’s not just a matter of notice periods: “We already participated in a call to which a bank invited three different recruitment consultants,” says Ciriacy-Wantrup. “This would never happen in Germany. It violates the usual confidentiality principles.”

Even without German foibles, Frankfurt recruiters say that finding enough risk and regulation experts to satisfy BaFin by March 29th will be difficult. “Everyone is looking for the same profiles with the same experience,” says Ciriacy-Wantrup. “The domestic banks are also looking for these profiles. BaFin has just ordered German banks to expand their internal audit teams.”

Demand is such that Ciriacy-Wantrup says banks that want to fill positions soon are having to offer big pay rises to secure staff. There are tales of compliance professionals with three years’ experience being offered €90k plus a bonus, something previously unthinkable in Frankfurt. “The banks are willing to pay such salaries just to get the necessary staff,” Ciriacy-Wantrup says.

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If you work in finance and you don’t know how to code, you can be forgiven for feeling the angst. Goldman Sachs seems to have doubled its demand for technology graduates in the past two years and J.P. Morgan is putting hundreds of its new analysts through coding lessons. If you don’t know how to code, you risk being left behind. So why not spend a month (or so) attending an intensive coding bootcamp? – Particularly if you’re on gardening leave or out of the market?

One senior fixed income trader who did just that says coding bootcamps are absolutely worthwhile. He attended the popular Le Wagon nine-week coding bootcamp in London last year and says it was, “excellent and worthwhile,” with a workload that was “tough and heavy.” Although he doesn’t use his coding knowledge in his day job, he says the bootcamp has given him the ability to build a minimum viable product on his own or as part of a team, and to play around with ideas he already had.

Scratch the surface though, and not everyone is super-stoked about their bootcamp experience – particularly if they’re in a place saturated with camp graduates. In the U.S. coding bootcamps have gone wild and are now a $260m industry churning out 23,000+ developers a year. Some of those graduates are annoyed at having spent thousands of dollars to transform their careers, without much success.

“I completed a coding bootcamp called Actualize two years ago,” says one aspiring programmer based in San Francisco. “It taught me valuable web-development skills, but it didn’t cover enough of the important algorithmic skills required to land me a job. Many of my friends have completed similar bootcamps and I’d say 90% of them have had the same experience,” he complains. Actualize didn’t respond to a request to comment on its employment record, but the company does now include algorithm analysis and optimization in its 12-week course, and says it’s placed people everywhere from Amazon, to Salesforce, and Bank of America.

A former private equity associate who’s just started a bootcamp (also Le Wagon) says it’s wrong to approach bootcamps as a guaranteed route into a shiny new technology job. “Everyone knows the results are up to you as an individual,” he says. “This is no golden ticket and it is certainly not marketed as such.”

The London coding bootcamp Makers Academy does guarantee a job to its graduates, but if you’ve worked in finance previously the ticket might seem more nickel than gold. Adele Barlow, head of partnerships at Makers Academy, says the average starting salary for its graduates tends to be around £32k. With first-year juniors in investment banking divisions (IBD) earning £72k ($101k) and first-year technology analysts in banks earning £50k+, Makers’ promise would simply seem to underscore the discrepancy between pay in finance and pay everywhere else.

Bootcamps are clearly more appealing if you haven’t worked in finance previously and weren’t already earning a big salary before embarking upon one. In this case, it might be argued that £32k in the first year is a good return on a 12-week course and an £8k investment in fees. “I was working an admin job that I hated, went on the Makers Academy coding boot camp, and four weeks after the end of the course I’m working as a junior developer earning double what I was before,” one of its graduates tells us. “It’s definitely made a difference to me.”

Meanwhile, the credit trader who completed the Le Wagon bootcamp, says that for him it’s been less about immediately monetizing the skills he learned and more about improving his technical knowledge and building a foundation upon which to pick up other programming languages. For anyone with free time who fantasizes about leaving finance to work on a start-up, or who simply wants an ability to converse meaningfully about product development with trading floor technologists (a skill banks deem increasingly worthwhile), this sounds like a good thing. Just don’t expect a big pay rise as a result.

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Remember Chris Yoshida? He’s the former head of global rates distribution at Deutsche Bank who was last seen here advocating against banking careers in favour of, “solving problems with a social purpose” instead. He’s just joined private equity firm The Carlyle Group in London as a full time senior advisor.

In normal circumstances, it would be unusual for a senior global markets professional to move into private equity. However, Yoshida isn’t the average ex-rates sales professional.

He left Deutsche Bank after less than two years in March 2016, and has spent the intervening years as an advisor to the Kairos Society (which helps discover young innovators who are solving problems through for-profit business models) and gust network (which enables interaction between top talent and employers over a decentralized blockchain protocol). In April 2017, Yoshida joined trueEX LLC, a swap execution facility, as chief strategy, sales and marketing office. .

Yoshida will be working with Mark Jenkins, Carlyle’s global head of credit, with whom he worked when began his career in 2000 as an analyst in Goldman Sachs’ investment banking division. Yoshida told us previously that he didn’t much enjoy investmentbanking: “I was an investment banking analyst in energy and power M&A and I never really left my cubicle for 12 hours a day – I was there making pitch books.” Like some other juniors in investment banking divisions, Yoshida suggested the work in IBD was fundamentally tedious. “The learning curve isn’t nearly as steep as you expect it to be. You get taught Excel and you learn how to be a grunt and survive it and you learn how to get yourself noticed by senior management,” he reflected.

His move into private equity comes at an interesting time, with funds in London waiting to see what impact Brexit will have upon their investments.

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Want to enjoy the gravitas of working at a hedge fund but don’t have any experience trading or building complex algorithms? There are still a few options, some more off-the-wall than others. We did a deep dive through the career sites of some of the world’s biggest hedge funds to find out what they’re currently looking for, other than investing talent.

Bridgewater needs people to reconfigure their space

Driven by its mantra of “radical transparency,” Bridgewater Associates is well known for its unique workplace culture. Founder Ray Dalio’s love of the social sciences may have been the inspiration for a ‘workplace strategist’, which sounds like a facilities job that’s a hybrid of an interior designer and a data analyst.

The workplace strategist will help reconfigure Bridgewater offices to improve employee productivity and enhance company culture through work pattern analysis. The right candidate will “provide data-rich, evidence-based measures of workplace performance” that inform new office designs and policies. The firm is also looking for a space planner to do more of the hands-on office reconfigurations. You can’t say Bridgewater doesn’t put a lot of thought into everything it does. This is not your typical open-office vs. closed office debate. Both jobs are permanent, full-time roles.

AQR is looking for a compensation specialist

Being an associate who helps decide how much your fellow employees make likely won’t win you any popularity contests. But this is an interesting role that mixes data analytics, budgeting and human capital management. AQR wants someone who can build compensation models and budgeting/forecasting reports as well as facilitate year-end salary and bonus plans and present them to senior management.

Man Group wants an operations liaison person

The client operations representative will manage the relationship with both service providers and investors for one of the firm’s bigger quant funds. Perhaps the most eye-catching aspect of the posting is the first responsibility listed: “Participate in the management of the team’s email inbox on a daily basis, ensuring that all emails are responded to appropriately.” Of course, there’s more to the role than just that, but you can likely pass on applying if you still have an AOL account.

Two Sigma is eyeing a branding specialist

In most industries, a brand marketing director is far from an “odd” job. But in the traditionally secretive hedge fund world, it is – or at least it was. This senior-level person will be charged with building brand identity through content, marketing campaigns and events. The role shows how even very successful hedge funds need to openly compete for capital and talent in the current environment. Just a few years ago, most hedge funds had just a one-page website that didn’t even explain what they did.

Everyone under the sun needs an EA

The Internet contains more postings for executive assistants than almost every other hedge fund job combined. The salaries are larger than you might expect, ranging from $85k to $110k, with one anonymous posting offering as much as $150k plus bonus to be the “gatekeeper” for a partner at a Greenwich, Connecticut hedge fund. A New York recruiter told us there’s a reason for all the openings, despite the hefty pay packages. “There’s a lot of turnover with EAs,” he said. “Hedge fund managers are often temperamental and hard to deal with,” he added, referencing one in particular who tends to go through one or two EAs a year. “They either end up fired or get fed up and quit.”

While several hard skills are required, the “gatekeeper” posting uses some interesting language to describe what the partner is looking for. “Need a very even keeled, accessible, trustworthy, pleasant and loyal individual.”

Several funds are considering entry-level hires

Typically speaking, most hedge funds don’t do all that much entry-level hiring, preferring instead to pick off analysts from the sell-side with a couple years of experience. However, several firms appear open to recent grads that weren’t brought up through their internship programs. Two Sigma, for example, runs a big graduate program and is looking for campus hires to join its Business Innovation & Growth (“BIG”) team, which seems to cover a variety of projects ranging from investment sourcing to crafting internal messaging.

Meanwhile, an anonymous hedge fund is looking for bachelor’s degree holders with 0-2 years of experience to perform fairly basic tasks including preparing daily accounting reports, income statements and reconciliations. The role pays $24.56 per hour. Not an eye-opening salary, but it’s one way to get in the door. It appears that some hedge funds are now more willing to do the training themselves and cut costs.

One fund is searching for a caffeine originator, ‘latte art experience preferred’

Traders need that patented foamed milk swirl. (h/t @HFObserver)

Barista

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It’s nearly seven months since Christian Sewing took over from John Cryan as CEO of Deutsche Bank. Depending upon who you listen to, his tenure is either going swimmingly or he is floundering about in the deep end.

Sewing’s advocates point to the former retail banker’s apparent popularity among employees in the corporate and investment bank (CIB). A town hall in Asia this week is said to have gone brilliantly, with attendees praising Sewing’s vigour. “It was the best town hall in 20 years,” says one DB insider. “Everyone knows there’s work to do here and he’s got the dynamism to get it done.” To his fans, Sewing’s expletive-ridden outburst on an internal call was a sign of his mettle (“people were clapping and cheering him”). He is the right man for the right moment.

To his detractors, however, Sewing is out of his depth. There are complaints that Deutsche Bank has lost many of its best producers, and that too many of those who remain are expensive also-rans who won’t bring in the growth Deutsche now needs to outrun its 95% third quarter cost ratio.

“Some of the best people on the platform have gone since Sewing became CEO,” says a vice president in the London equities division. “He has no real understanding of the business.” It’s a complaint echoed by senior people in the investment banking division. “A lot of the top producers have gone,” says one. “But most of the top managers are still here. The people who most needed to go have somehow convinced Sewing that they are indispensable. They are all long time Deutsche Bank employees. They know where the bodies are buried and they all look after each other.”

Deutsche Bank declined to comment for this article, but the griping reflects the tough task that Sewing – an outsider in the investment bank – faces in his attempt to squeeze costs below €23bn. Between the first and third quarters of 2018, Deutsche Bank cut front office headcount in its investment bank by 1,047 people, a net figure that masks the addition of graduate trainees during the same period. 25% of equities headcount has gone, entire investment banking teams have been removed, and the head of the corporate finance business for EMEA has left for his home in the country. But there have also been numerous voluntary exits as Deutsche Bankers like (most recently) Conor Hennebry have decided to try their luck elsewhere.

As Sewing has set about deciding where and whom to cut, gripers suggest he’s been too reliant on an executive team close to his own comfort zone. Sewing’s COO, Frank Kuhnke, also has a background in Deutsche’s retail arm. Meanwhile, the recent promotion of Stefan Hoops, a former co-head of Institutional & Treasury Coverage and ex-global markets professional as head of global transaction banking, is perceived by some as Sewing’s willingness to elevate his favourites. The Financial Times describes 38 year-old Hoops as a “close confidant” of Sewing. “He’s been promoted extremely fast for someone so young,” complains one Deutsche MD. “Someone has clearly marked him for the top.”

Those casting aspersions on the appropriateness of Sewing’s cuts will not have long to wait for vindication. In last week’s conference call, Sewing repeatedly said that Deutsche is now going for growth in its investment bank. Surviving staff have a license to chase revenues. If they’re successful, it should become apparent in the coming quarters.

For the moment, the head of the investment bank, Garth Ritchie, insists that Deutsche is doing fine, despite the bank reporting its worst third quarter revenues in eight years. There may be some truth in this to the extent that Deutsche’s large credit business now ranks 1st globally according to Coalition, up from second globally at the end of the 2017, and that Deutsche’s sales and trading revenues were only down 7% quarter-on-quarter in the three months to September, compared to – say – a decline of 13% at Goldman Sachs. It’s not exactly growth, but it might be an increase in market share.

And if the growth doesn’t happen as planned? Sewing may need to look again at some of Deutsche’s remaining managing directors. One investment banking headhunter, speaking off the record, says the German bank is still very top-heavy: “They carry more senior people than almost any other platform. A lot of people there could go and it would make no difference.”

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HSBC has made a senior appointment to its private bank in Singapore as part of ambitious plans to ramp up headcount across the division in Asia. Roy Teo has joined HSBC Private Banking as head of FX advisory, according to his public profile. He was previously an executive director at LGT, a firm he transitioned to in May last year when it purchased the Asian and the Middle East private banking business of his former employer, ABN AMRO.

Teo has moved to HSBC at a time of growth for its private bank. HSBC announced in September that it wants to add more than 1,300 jobs in Asian wealth management – mainly positions based in Hong Kong and Singapore – by 2022, with about half of these in private banking and the rest in retail. This longer-term headcount goal is in addition to HSBC’s plans, revealed in August, to boost its global private banking headcount by 240 by spring 2019, with most of the new hires based in Asia.

HSBC is already the fourth largest private bank by assets under management in Asia, but until now it has not been recruiting aggressively. Its Asian workforce of relationship managers increased by only 20 (from 450 to 470) between 2012 and 2017, according to Asian Private Banker. CEO John Flint and new head of global private banking Antonio Simoes are now trying to change HSBC’s “conservative” approach to hiring in Asian wealth, says former HSBC private banker Rahul Sen, now a partner at search firm Boyden.

Teo’s appointment shows that HSBC’s recruitment spree isn’t restricted to RMs. “FX advisory plays an important role in a private bank in two main ways: trading FX, and using FX as an investment by moving excess cash from one currency to another depending on the exchange forecast,” says Sen. “FX advisory teams work with RMs and clients to generate trading ideas and also advise clients on holding various FX deposits.”

HSBC is currently trying to generate private banking revenues from a broad range of products, including FX. Its third quarter earnings report, released on Monday, stressed that 60% of net new money inflows in its global private banking division were from “collaboration” with the bank’s other global businesses. The report also reconfirmed HSBC’s commitment to recruiting in Asian private banking: “We continue to invest in our Asian franchise and are maintaining the hiring and investment plans.”

New HSBC recruit Teo was at ABN AMRO for almost seven years, latterly as a senior FX strategist in group economics. He was a “key member of the FX research team that was ranked by Bloomberg as the most accurate forecaster for Asian currencies for several quarters in 2014 and 2015”, according to ABN’s website.

Teo, who graduated from NUS in 1999, worked in financial institutional sales for Commonwealth Bank in Singapore between 2007 and 2009.

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Do you work for Standard Chartered in Asia? Should you feel concerned or content about your future at the firm? That largely depends on which division you’re in. Stan Chart’s third quarter results, released as the bank looks to keep a lid on costs, point to both buoyant and underperforming job functions in Singapore and Hong Kong, its two main Asian hubs.

Stan Chart’s Q3 numbers for Asia look good on the face of it. Its Asian operating income stood at $7,678m (68% of its global total) in the nine months to end-September – an 8% year-on-year increase. By contrast, revenues from Africa and the Middle East, the bank’s second largest region, fell 5% over the same period.

As we noted last week, however, the danger on the horizon for staff in Singapore and Hong Kong is that the bank is looking to cut its operating expenses in the current quarter (costs were up 5% year on year, according to Stan Chart’s results). Stan Chart needs to hit a $10.2bn cost target for 2018, and this could involve cutting senior jobs in high-cost markets, according to an October 5 management email from CFO Andy Halford. Meanwhile, CEO Bill Winters, speaking to analysts after the results were released, said the firm will get “tougher” on discretionary costs to made sure it meets this target, although he made no specific mention of redundancies.

What, then, can we infer about jobs at Stan Chart in Asia from Winter’s presentation and the bank’s financial report? Here’s what you need to know.

Technology: make sure you’re business facing

Standard Chartered is channelling a “greater proportion” of its investments into “strategic initiatives including digital capabilities”, according to its Q3 report. Winters said he’s confident that these investments will drive earnings growth “in the medium term” and he highlighted the recent launch of a new digital wealth management platform in Singapore, which will soon be rolled out in Hong Kong. Stan Chart therefore appears primed to keep on expanding its tech team.

But while Singapore is a key development centre for the bank, the increased investment doesn’t necessarily mean that all tech jobs in the city state are safe. “I’ve heard that the senior-level job gutting in Singapore will include tech, and that some more tech roles are moving offshore,” says a headhunter in Singapore who works with the bank. “SCB is also moving software development roles from Singapore to India, especially those that aren’t business facing. The jobs that are business facing will always stay in Singapore, and there remain pockets of tech hiring in Q4.” In India, Stan Chart has invested in robotics process automation systems to speed up client onboarding, Winters said during the earnings call. A spokesperson for Stan Chart in Singapore chose not to provide further comment on technology jobs.

Corporate finance is underperforming

While nine-month revenue for the corporate and institutional banking division was up 5% year on year, this was driven by transaction banking (see below). Other parts of CIB fared less well. Stan Chart noted “lower income from corporate finance due to margin compression offsetting improving deal activity”. The performance in financial markets “was flat because of lower client activity in the period”.

Transaction banking: sales roles appear secure; managerial ones less so

Bread-and-butter transaction banking may be the safest place within CIB – at least if you’re in a client-facing role. There was “good growth in transaction banking, driven by a strong performance in cash management, wealth management and retail products”, according to the bank’s report, which also noted “good growth in Singapore notably in transaction banking”. The function is still vulnerable to job cuts at a senior level, however, with non-sales managerial positions under threat in the coming months, says a source close to Stan Chart in Singapore.

Compliance: work in financial crime

Winters highlighted an “almost ten-fold increase in our annual financial crime compliance spending and a more than seven-fold increase in headcount dedicated to this” since 2012. While some of the bank’s financial crime expansion has been driven by the need to cooperate with US authorities on resolving the Iran sanctions probe, recruiters in Singapore say financial crime is a key local focus for the firm, even as overall compliance hiring plateaus at Stan Chart and across the banking sector.

Wealth management: serve mass-affluent clients

Winters singled out “affluent” clients (the emerging rich, who don’t yet qualify for high-net-worth private banking services) as a key segment for Stan Chart which is experiencing double-digit growth. This suggests more relationship manager jobs may soon open up within priority banking in Singapore and Hong Kong, two key centres for affluent clients. As revenue generators, RMs are also unlikely to be the target of job cuts.

Choose Hong Kong over Singapore?

Stan Chart may employ more of its global heads in Singapore, but its North Asia business (which is headquartered in Hong Kong) is larger and growing more rapidly. Greater China and North Asia generated $4,647m (up 11%) in revenues for the first nine months, compared with $3,031m (up 4%) in ASEAN and South Asia. While the rise came from all of the firm’s divisions, there was particular “momentum” in cash management, wealth management and deposits products.

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It’s not just Christmas that gets earlier every year – this year the private equity recruiting season has begun in the same week as Halloween. The Wall Street Journal reports that buyout firm Thoma Bravo LLC made offers at the weekend to first year analysts at a number of Wall Street banks, who will complete the program then start up in private equity land in 2020. This opened the floodgates and everywhere from Blackstone Group, Apollo Global Management,Carlyle Group and TPG promptly did much the same.

This has raised a few eyebrows for a variety of reasons, not the least of them being that the talented youngsters in question are being offered private equity salaries in excess of $300k, despite having only just figured out where the coffee machines are, let alone developed any meaningful track record of working on actual deals.

Private equity firms’ enthusiasm for banking juniors is nothing new. The system whereby financial-sponsor clients are effectively allowed to free-ride off the bulge bracket’s ability to attract and recruit the top graduates from the most prestigious universities has been going on for years, with the banks in the position of being unhappy about it, but aware that there is little they can do.

Banks have at least tried to fight back. Most have made attempts to cut working hours, introduce better conditions for juniors and implement “fast track” systems to give the most talented hires more visibility about their promotion prospects, but the fundamental problem can’t be solved – there’s no such thing as indentured labour in banking, and the private equity recruitment process looks attractive to young graduates precisely because it’s a high-stakes competition just like the Wall Street recruitment process itself, and the elite university process before it.

At some point, though, surely the private equity firms themselves are going to start worrying about the extent to which they are reliant on the banks to channel the right kind of employees their way. The investment banks themselves are in the early stages of trying to “stop the madness” when it comes to making early internship offers to students in their first year at university, but it remains the case that the 2020 private equity associate class will be made up of the 2018 investment banking analyst class, who received their offers on the basis of their 2017 summer internships, which they got after their 2016 internships, for which they could have been interviewing as early as the autumn of 2015. In other words, the pool of talent was fixed at the age of 19 and everything since then has been a matter of boiling it down.

As a less publicly visible industry, private equity has less of a need to be seen to care about diversity than investment banking, but there’s a clear danger that at some point, you’re attracting people who are really ambitious and good at passing interviews rather than having any breadth of experience. That danger becomes much greater when the offers are made without even the benefit of any real-world test of how the juniors have performed on a single live deal.

But it’s an arms race. None of the private equity employers want to feel like they’re getting second choice, so when one starts to make offers, the rest feel like they have to follow suit. Perhaps the only long term solution might be for bigger buyout players to show up on campus and run their own graduate schemes.

Elsewhere, on the tenth anniversary of the original Bitcoin white paper, Peter Stephens, the Head of Blockchain at UBS has left the bank to take a CIO role at a tech startup called DrumG. He had been showing possible signs of discontent as long as a year earlier in an interview talking about the “hype cycle” and contrasting “the slow hard yards of making something work” with “pontificating in a conference and drawing Powerpoints”. It’s hard to tell whether this move represents a failure of banking to adapt its culture to the technological world, or a failure of blockchain technology to deliver the goods, but there seems to be a bit of a trend here; several “heads of innovation” such as Elly Hardwick at Deutsche, Julio Faura at Santander and Alex Batlin at BNY Mellon have been moving back to Shoreditch from Canary Wharf. There’s not currently much clarity over whether these roles are being replaced or whether the investment banking industry is beginning to quietly row back on the high profile investments made last year.

Meanwhile …

Akiko Naka demonstrates that not all career paths are as simple as university to banking to private equity; after a job in sales at Goldman, she tried to make a career as a manga illustrator, before taking a job at Facebook and now showing up with a recruitment startup called Wantedly (Bloomberg via Japan Times)

One in three millennials talk about pay with coworkers, according to a survey from Bankrate, compared to one sixth of older workers. (Bloomberg)

Piers Constable, an MD at Deutsche in New York who has apparently taken business trips to over 60 countries, has the top tip of taking a morning run as the first thing in a new city to see sights you would otherwise miss. (Business Insider)

Standard Chartered has announced that it will unveil a new business plan with its next set of full year results, turning it into a simpler and faster bank. This is likely to involve job losses, the CFO has confirmed.(FT)

A think-piece from fintech guru Richard Gendal Brown might explain why the investment banking industry’s blockchain projects have been so slow in delivering; they’re not engineered from the bottom up (Coinbase)

Richard DeVaul has resigned from Alphabet, after growing employee protests that he was continuing at the company after a harassment complaint was found to be “more likely than not”. (New York Times)

Barclays is seeking court permission to move $250bn worth of assets from its UK operation to its Dublin subsidiary, following the announcement last week that 200 jobs would be shifted. (Irish Times)

And UBS has recruited from Deutsche and Nomura to its financial sponsors team, perhaps showing that experience does count for something. (Financial News)

What went right for Credit Suisse’s traders in the third quarter? Not much. What went wrong? Pretty much everything.

The Swiss bank reported its third quarter results today and in the global markets division they were a sight to behold. There was a CHF96m loss as costs exceeded revenues by nearly 10%. There was a 27% quarter-on-quarter decline in revenues, and the return on the regulatory capital invested in the business fell to -3%. And all this in a division which, at the last investor day in November 2017, was deemed to have been “successfully restructured.” It seems there might be more to do.

Ok, so there were some bright spots. In equity derivatives, the bank said revenues were up 70% year-on-year in the third quarter thanks to collaboration with its International Trading Solutions (ITS) which exposes private banking clients to global markets solutions. It probably helps too that Mike Stewart, who was hired to run Credit Suisse’s global equities business in 2017, is an equity derivatives specialist.

Elsewhere though, it was unremittingly bad, bad and bad again. In fixed income, all of the Swiss bank’s best businesses seemed to be off-colour. – Securitization was affected by, ‘significantly lower trading activity, primarily due to more challenging market conditions, which resulted in reduced client activity.’ Global credit products were affected by, ‘lower leveraged finance trading activity’ (even though Credit Suisse was growing its leveraged finance business last time we looked). And Credit Suisse’s emerging markets revenues fell – blame Brazil. The only bright spot was macro trading, which is in any case a husk of its former self following cuts in recent years.

The woes are being heavily downplayed. In the presentation accompanying its results, Credit Suisse suggested its shriveled fixed income trading revenues were partly intentional following the “right-sizing” of its emerging markets business (equities and fixed income) and yet more trimming of macro teams. Adjusting for these effects, the bank said equities sales and trading revenues would in fact have have risen 6% year-on-year in the third quarter (instead of 1% as reported) and that fixed income revenues would have fallen 15% (instead of 27% as reported).

Even so, it’s hard to downplay the bleakness of the past three months for Credit Suisse’s fixed income traders. A fall of 15% would still put the bank’s performance on a par with that of Deutsche Bank – which has its own excuses for shrinking in the form of the reduction in its U.S. repo business. At last November’s investor day, Credit Suisse said it was aiming for CHF6bn in global markets revenues this year. That now looks out of the question – with global markets revenues down 9% in the first nine months, Credit Suisse will be lucky to replicate its revenues in 2017. Accordingly, CEO Tidjane Thiam – rarely one to acknowledge a mistake – said today that the revenue target has been delayed a year.

Until then, the good news is that Credit Suisse’s traders will seemingly be paid higher bonuses despite the lamentable performance of the global markets division. Credit Suisse said today that “discretionary compensation expenses” for its salespeople and traders were higher in the third quarter of 2018 than one year previously. Equity derivatives traders are likely to be at the front of the queue.

Overall compensation spending in the global markets division was, however, lower as the bank spent less on salaries and less on paying bonuses deferred from previous years. The was despite the addition of around 500 new (and presumably very cheap) people (likely at graduate level and in emerging markets) in the past year. The implication seems to be that Credit Suisse’s global markets division is hiking 2018 bonuses in the front office and squeezing pay everywhere else.

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If you go to a top business school, the money you’ll make during a summer internship probably shouldn’t be the biggest factor taken into consideration. But it is a factor, particularly if you are working in an expensive city like New York, London or San Francisco and haven’t yet decided the path you’d like to take. Knowing the industry average of students from top MBA programs should also provide a better window into what you can expect.

To compile the numbers in the chart below, we sorted through the latest MBA internship salary data from three of the biggest feeders of high-paying postgraduate jobs: Harvard, Wharton and Stanford. We then averaged the median salaries across seven different industries: investment banking, consulting, hedge funds, private equity, investment management, venture capital and tech. The schools report the median salaries by month, so we prorated them across a year’s time to make them more easily digestible.

In what may be a surprise to some, consulting firms pay their interns more than any other industry – at least those attending top-ranked business schools. Hedge funds, investment banks and investment management firms are packed tightly together, but then there’s a precipitous drop to private equity firms and tech companies. Falling well behind all other industries are venture capital firms, which only pay their MBA interns a prorated salary of $71k, or just shy of $6k a month before taxes. Private equity and VC firms have become increasingly popular among finance-minded graduates as investment banks have lost some of their luster, but you’re not going to break the bank the minute you walk in the door. Compensation is known to be rather top-heavy.

Digging deeper into the numbers, a few trends emerge. Companies that recruit from top business schools appear extremely consistent with what they pay their interns. The average salary for consultants was exactly $12,250 at all three schools, which is eye-opening considering the large sample size. More than 120 students from Harvard Business School alone took a consulting internship in 2018. The only statistically significant difference was in private equity, where Wharton MBAs averaged a little over a $1k per month more than students at the other two schools.

Although the average tech salary is quite consistent between all three schools, the data from Stanford, which breaks down the industry into multiple buckets, shines a light on the big reason why the average salary is only $90k. People who took internships at fintech firms – startups that can offer equity but less cash – only paid their interns a prorated salary of $56k. If the numbers are similar at Harvard and Wharton, and there’s no reason to assume they aren’t, the average pay for tech internships at more solidified companies would inch up toward the middle of the pack. The only industry to pay its interns worse than fintech firms was the non-profit sector.

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AQR Capital Management has hired the leader of Facebook’s artificial intelligence research team to head up its own research engineering department. Howard Mansell started at Connecticut-based AQR earlier this month as a managing director.

Like investment banks, hedge funds are competing with big tech firms like Facebook and Google over AI and machine learning talent. Mansell’s defection comes just a month after J.P. Morgan hired away its new head of artificial intelligence from Google, who then poached a senior AI engineer from Facebook after just 10 days on the job.

Mansell is no stranger to the hedge fund industry. He spent four years leading quant strategies at BlueMountain Capital Management before leaving for Facebook in 2016, according to LinkedIn. He also had a short stint at Goldman Sachs following 15 years at Credit Suisse in New York.

A well-known quant fund, AQR appears to be investing heavily in new tech talent. Earlier this month, the firm hired Marcos López de Prado as its head of machine learning. Named a principal at AQR, de Prado most recently led Guggenheim Partners’ quantitative investment strategies business. The company said in the release announcing de Prado’s hire that it would look to bring on more resources to further develop its machine learning tools. Additional hires seem imminent.

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When was the last time you saw a big group of bankers joining together in solidarity on a rainy lunchtime, waving placards, hugging each other and generally bonding over disgruntlement with their employer? The answer is precisely never. The closest a group of bankers has come to today’s Google walkout ( #GoogleWalkout) was probably a team move to a rival firm offering them a guaranteed bonus. Bankers don’t do organized rebellion.

Googlers, however, do. And today they’ve been downing tools in support of female colleagues following the Google sex scandal, which has seen 48 people terminated for sexual harassment in two years, and – most controversially – Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android mobile software, given a $90m severance payment despite harassment allegations against him.

Google’s male and female employees alike are on temporary strike, many of them senior. “Walking out of work in solidarity with other Xers and Googlers and contractors to protest sexual harassment, misconduct, lack of transparency, and a workplace culture that’s not working for everyone,” tweeted Obi Felton, Google’s San Francisco-based head of moonshots. “I cancelled my meeting, which was for an OSS project. The work will wait until next week,” tweeted Evan Anderson, a staff software engineer at Google in Seattle. “- Hard to balance consideration and taking a stand.” The contrast with finance couldn’t be more stark: even after UBS’s alleged rape claim and alleged cover-up and despite unsubstantiated allegations of wider disaffection there hasn’t been a peep from its employees.

It’s partly a question of expectations: no one really goes into banking expecting to build a better world, whereas the likes of Anderson and Felton joined Google in 2004 and 2012 respectively, back when the company seemed something special. Instead, Google is increasingly ordinary, with its own issues of internal politics and biases, and senior male executives who allegedly proposition younger female colleagues in an abuse of their power.

Anyone who thinks that Google is a happy place need only look at Glassdoor for the full retinue of employees’ dissatisfaction. Behind the free food and the free buses and the office slide are multiple complaints about long hours, poor pay, high pressure and a Googley culture (particularly in the growing cloud computing unit) that’s being eroded by incomers from the likes of Microsoft and IBM. The negative reviews follow an article in the London Times in February, which accused Google of Amazon-like compensation Dublin, where it was allegedly paying staff as little as €11.06 an hour – less than the €11.70 allegedly on offer at local discount supermarkets. Contractors in particular are allegedly treated like second class citizens by Google’s legions of Ivy League MBAs and top PhDs.

Organized rebellion feels good. The more that Google appears to eschew its principles and the more that Google employees who thought they’d signed up to save the world realize that they’re mostly running a bureaucratic ad optimization platform, the more that rebellions are likely to happen. Management might even want to encourage them – they’re good for morale. Banks, however, don’t have the same problem: rightly or wrongly, people usually go into finance with lower cultural expectations.

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It’s November. At this time of year, it’s not normal for banks to hire managing directors with big bonus expectations who will expect to be compensated for walking away from a full year’s bonus. Unless, of course, they’re a bit desperate. This might be the case when it comes to senior quants.

Morgan Stanley just hired Grégoire Debray, the former chief market risk quant for EMEA equities at J.P. Morgan. Debray is joining Morgan Stanley as head of risk analytics for Europe. He previously spent five years at JPM and nearly five years at Credit Suisse, having begun his career as a quant at Credit Lyonnais.

Debray’s move reflects the popularity of risk analytics professionals this year. In September, for example, hedge fund BlueCrest poached John Elder, the former head of market risk methodology for EMEA and APAC at Credit Suisse, as a quantitative risk modeler in London.

Debray, like many a quant, is French, and has a diploma from the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Économique” (ENSAE). Morgan Stanley is building out new analytics & visualisation suite to provide traders with pricing, analytics, signal generation and visualization tools. The bank’s EMEA market risk analytics team monitors the performance of risk models and comprises 11 people in London and Budapest.

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1. Recoil against the ‘hard sell’

2. Make sure they ask for your consent

3. Test out recruiters with some specialist terms

4. Ask them targeted questions about banks

5. Strike up a chat about the job market

6. Ask them about “team dynamics”

7. Be concerned if they harass you to close the deal

8. And be concerned if you’re called by a different person each time

9. See if they give you good career advice during the meeting

Related articles:

Meanwhile

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Technology: make sure you’re business facing

Corporate finance is underperforming

Transaction banking: sales roles appear secure; managerial ones less so

Compliance: work in financial crime

Wealth management: serve mass-affluent clients

Choose Hong Kong over Singapore?

Related articles:

Meanwhile …

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

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