Big scandals at big banks are costing them billions of dollars. Knowing when a bad potential bad apple is about to join is integral to stop the slew of negative headlines – which have emerged in the past 24 hours again like an awful early Christmas present. But a Big Brother situation is emerging. If you’re involved in any kind of behaviour that contravenes your employer’s code of ethics, this could hurt your career in the long term.
Wall Street executives and regulators have been discussing a proposal to catalogue bankers’ misdeeds by name on a private registry for hiring managers, according to Bloomberg. It would be a naughty list that potential employers could cross-reference before hiring someone.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York president William Dudley and other U.S. officials want to stop offenders from moving easily between banks. Any examples of traders or bank executives violating their firm’s ethics or conduct rules would be listed on a central database when they leave that bank, letting other financial institutions see their records before deciding whether to bring them on board. That could make it harder for financial services professionals with a spotty record to stay in the industry. One anonymous detractor worries that such a registry would be “terrifying for bankers if strict due process and privacy standards aren’t met.”
Separately, the financial services industry in the UK employees hundreds of thousands of people and contributes 11% of total income tax receipts. The same cannot be said for corporation tax, however. The British arms of seven of the biggest investment banks – J.P. Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Nomura Holdings, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and UBS – paid little or no corporation tax. That’s despite reporting billions of dollars in profits and employing 30,000 people between them.
On the same day, Deutsche Bank completed an internal investigation into its Russian business’s transactions and identified $10b of suspicious trades, significantly more than the $6b the bank had previously estimated.
An investment banker built an empire by charging head-first into government businesses as a way to fuel the growth of BTG Pactual, but now those dealings feature in prosecutors’ investigations and led to the arrest of André Esteves, per the Wall Street Journal.
Even social media has become a battleground. A journalist is accusing Bank of America Merrill Lynch of coercing Twitter into deleting some of his tweets, alleging copyright violations.
Meanwhile, former Morgan Stanley financial adviser Galen Marsh avoided prison time, instead getting a three-year probation sentence for illegally tapping into the wirehouse’s computer system and downloading client information.
Because scandals at large global banks haven’t let up and continue to do harm to the industry’s reputation, Wall Street executives and regulators have been discussing a proposal to catalogue bankers’ misdeeds by name on a private registry for hiring managers, according to Bloomberg.
Meanwhile:
Risk and compliance professionals want more money and bigger teams. (WSJ)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens shatters box-office records. Disney’s stock still falling (WSJ)
Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse analysts at odds on oil market predictions. (Bloomberg)
“A database engineer in San Francisco is courted by recruiters every single day,” said Ian Siegel, co-founder and CEO at ZipRecruiter said. “That person will never look for a job again for the rest of their career, jobs will go to them. There’s too much interest.” (Workforce)
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic made a series of pessimistic workplace predictions related to areas where our jobs will not improve in the coming year, saying that he was prioritizing accuracy over optimism. (Forbes)
Wall Street’s August volatility was “a striking example of sudden market turmoil that also reveals the structural limitations of trading U.S. shares.” (Financial Times)
McKinsey said in a new report that many sectors are not investing enough in digitization, with the U.S. economy as a whole only reaching 18% of its digital potential. However, the financial services industry performed relatively well. (NetworkWorld)
Vernon Hill, the founder and former chairman and president of Commerce Bank, who was fired before that company was acquired by TD Financial, is now preparing to take Metro Bank public as soon as Q1 despite conflict-of-interest concerns involving a vendor that his wife owns. (Financial Times)
There are at least three things you should be doing now before you start actively looking for a new job. (Huffington Post)
Aside from hedge funds, most financial services firms have have dialed back the extravagance of their holiday parties this year. Silicon Valleyhas had big bashes featuring everything from artisan donuts and Champagne towers to cocktails prepared by chief executives. (Bloomberg)
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