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Why would Morgan Stanley hire a counter-terrorism expert from the Obama administration who has spent her entire career working for the U.S. military and parachute her in as a managing director?

The U.S. bank has just hired Jen Easterly as a managing director in risk technology. She was previously special assistant to President Obama and senior director for counterterrorism for the National Security Council. In other words, now that Trump is in, she’s come straight from the White House to Morgan Stanley.

The answer to why Morgan Stanley would hire someone who has no banking experience and appoint them as an MD is simple – cyber-security. More specifically, we understand that she’ll be assessing risks to the bank both from a cyber-security perspective and any other external risks that could threaten the technology within the bank.

She’s will not, sources inside Morgan Stanley are keen to point out, have anything to do with tackling terrorism within her new role at the bank.

Easterly’s resume is formidable and she’s generally regarded as something of a guru in the fight against terrorism. Before her last role, she was deputy associate for counter terrorism at the National Security Council, has worked as a commander with the Army Network Warfare Battalion and led the cryptologic support group for various forces in Iraq.

But since Trump’s inauguration large investment banks have taken the opportunity to hire from the Obama administration for cyber-security roles.

In February, Goldman Sachs hired Andy Ozment as a managing director and co-chief information officer. Before joining, Ozment spent nine years working in cyber-security for various U.S. government departments and was latterly assistant secretary for cyber-security and communications for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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When you go into a junior investment banking job, you give up on your personal life. Partners fall away, friends become distant and your apartment becomes a place to lay your head for a few hours every night. But what if you were married with a young child when you started out?

For Richard Atkins (a pseudonym), the choice of going into investment banking after graduating with an MBA from Chicago Booth Business School was a pretty simple one. For all the talk of MBAs falling out of love with banking, if you go to the right school, investment banking is still the main choice, he says.

“Consultants wanted to be bankers, bankers wanted to be consultants,” he says. “I’d say around 100 people ended up in banking from my class, and the vast majority had interned the previous year.”

But unlike the vast majority of new associates, Atkins has a wife and a young son. 80-plus hour weeks are expected from juniors working in IBD, but most of his contemporaries were young, free and single. After a few months in the role, Atkins quit his banking job in New York, but has stuck with finance by going into an audit job in Europe.

“The breaking point was when a family member got ill and I struggled to take time out to see them. My employer was understanding, but if you’re out of the office for any period of time it puts strain on the other juniors,” he says.

“I knew there would always be something that would keep me out of the office, and it’s difficult when everyone else is there the whole time. If my son got sick, I couldn’t take him to the doctors, or just simply not being able to help at home. So, I decided to quit,” he says.

Most MBAs going into investment banking are aware of the nature of the work, largely because the majority have interned previously, says Atkins. If you go to the right business school, investment banks are still rolling out the red carpet for top MBAs, offering various social events and putting forward senior bankers to sell the benefits of a banking career.

“It’s pretty cool, senior bankers tell you that you’re the cream of the crop, and that the future is in your hands,” he says. “You get to meet a lot of managing directors who tell you why they got into banking and why they still love it.”

But, of course, the working hours are brutal and banks’ efforts to reduce them are unlikely to change this. UBS, for example, has a ‘take two’ scheme that allows analysts to have two hours of personal time if they can find someone to cover for them. Or Barclays’ policy of protecting weekends for juniors ‘as much as possible’. You’re still not going to have a lot of free time.

“MDs can drop work on your desk at any moment. There might not be deals on all the time, but the pitch process is constant, and you never know when a client might demand something,” says Atkins. “It’s difficult to get away from this – the only way to stop it is to hire a lot more people.”

Atkins still thinks that investment banking is a great career, but the pace of working in audit is more conducive to a life outside of work.

“It’s a change. You have meetings ahead of other meetings and the pace of getting things done is so much slower than investment banking. But I get to see my family,” he says.

So, why not quit finance entirely for the red hot tech sector?

“In tech things are so unstructured and the career path relatively erratic that it’s actually difficult for MBAs unless you’ve started the company yourself. Finance offers a much more linear route,” he says.

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If you were hoping 2017 would be the year when banking revenues pick up, fueled by fixed income trading and a rush of Trump-inspired deal making, you’re probably wrong. A quick read of UBS’s latest annual report will unburden you of your optimism. UBS doesn’t think 2017 will be better than 2016: it says it will be the same, maybe worse.

Financial News notes that UBS is predicting ongoing industry-wide gloom in the preamble to its 2016 annual report. During 2017, the Swiss bank expects cost-cutting to “span all functions” of the business, revenues to remain subdued, cost pressures to stay elevated and banks to continue jettisoning existing operating models. UBS expects banks to retrench to “core markets” and to abandon “international expansion.” It also expects competition to intensify as banks each try gaining scale in the same markets. Worst – if you work in a support role – UBS’s 2016 reports repeats CEO Sergio Ermotti’s previously stated conviction that individual banks will split out their infrastructure functions into a few shared services companies which will work across the industry, implying the obliteration of thousands of contemporary back office jobs in the process. Time to get out your umbrella.

Separately, every young bankers’ idol has spoken of the moment he conceived of the business idea which would change his life. He was a 25 year-old analyst working for Morgan Stanley in London’s Canary Wharf. “Within the first five days of arriving in London, we realized we could not get food delivery,” William Shu, told the South China Morning Post, “For anyone who has lived in New York for a long time, this is something you take for granted.”

Shu is the ex-Morgan Stanley, ex-SAC Capital analyst who co-founded Deliveroo, the successful UK-based food delivery company with a valuation of around $600m and $200m of funding. In order to become an entrepreneur, he says he had to overcome the finance mentality: “In finance what you think a lot about is risk communication and hedging – especially at a hedge fund. When you are building a company, especially at the beginning you are not trying to mitigate risks otherwise you wouldn’t do anything.” You also have to make a leap of faith: “You have to really trust certain decisions that can seem really crazy sometimes.”

Meanwhile:

HSBC’s new chairman once played professional football for Wolverhampton Wanderers. (Financial Times)

John Cryan might stay on at Deutsche Bank past 2020. (Handelsblatt)

J.P. Morgan is building its ETF business outside the U.S. and has hired Byron Lake, formerly of Invesco, to help. (Financial News)

Theresa May tried to reassure Morgan Stanley about Brexit during an event at the British Museum. (Reuters)

“There are services that you have to leave in London simply because London is better at them,” said Hans-Peter Friedrich, head of the Brexit working group in Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led caucus in Berlin. (Bloomberg)

Frexit is an issue. “The Paris hub is hoping to become more competitive after the elections,” said Arnaud de Bresson, head of Europlace (the French group promoting Paris as a financial sector). (Bloomberg)

The European Union is still talking tough on post-Brexit equivalence rules. (Politico)

There’s a hedge fund event at Mar-a-Lago. (NY Times)

Ex-Deutsche fund manager with country-estate suffers “get of my land” syndrome. (Daily Mail)

Goldman Sachs is the 62nd best company to work for in the U.S. (Fortune)

The American airlines which offer the most leg room. (Busines Insider)

How to get a bottle of free champagne when you’re staying at a Marriott Hotel. (Quartz)

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Photo credit: rainbow by stu mayhew is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Point72 Asset Management might be bringing in junior talent through its Academy, but it’s still targeting investment banks’ analysts and associates.

In fact, Steve Cohen’s family office has managed to sway a Goldman Sachs analyst across to its ranks after just nine months of investment banking experience. Lexie Brackenridge, who joined the banks’ investment banking graduate programme in July last year, has just joined Point72 as an associate analyst in New York.

Meanwhile, Alexander Kostyra, who was an associate in Citigroup’s M&A healthcare team in New York, has also joined Point72 as an analyst.

Despite the highly-contested Academy scheme, which typically hires less than 1% of applicants, the investment banking divisions of big banks have been Point72’s most lucrative hunting grounds for junior talent. It doesn’t go for just any old IBD analysts. In February, it hired Kim Chatall, who was formerly an associate in Morgan Stanley’s IBD team. Chatall also had experience working as a quant and model developer for a hedge fund. Brackenridge’s experience also isn’t typical for an IBD analyst. She worked as a political intern on the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, as well as a research analyst in the economics department at Columbia University.

Kostyra has worked at Citi for nearly three years, but started out on the EMEA M&A team in London before moving to New York in July last year. Jack Ingles, who was an associate in FIG M&A at Goldman Sachs in London, also joined as a long/short equity analyst in October along with Lisa Jordan, a former analyst on HSBC’s macro trading team.

Point72 is increasingly relying on quantitative approaches to support its traditional discretionary investment approach. Now, all new analysts are required to undergo some training in basic data science and programming.

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You’ll earn more working for Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan than for other banks. This is especially true if you work for either bank in London. Goldman Sachs, for example, pays each of its Fleet Street staff 40% more than the average it pays its people worldwide. New research from banking intelligence firm Tricumen helps explain why.

Using its proprietary data, Tricumen has calculated the productivity per head of front office staff in different divisions of major investment banks in Europe the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and the U.S. The results are shown in the charts below.

Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan bankers are far more productive than bankers at other firms in EMEA

Tricumen’s research suggests Goldman Sachs bankers working across capital markets (defined as sales and trading and M&A and equity and debt origination) are around 2.8 and 1.6 times more productive than the market average. By comparison, EMEA capital markets professionals at Citi, RBS, SocGen, BNP, Credit Suisse, Deutsche and UBS are a lot less productive than the average (and need to shape up, or be cut back). And the productivity of capital markets professionals at Barclays and HSBC is about normal.

The huge productivity disparity makes it unsurprising that Goldman and J.P. Morgan are so generous in London. As the bar chart (based on pay for risk takers in 2015) shows, Goldman pays its London risk takers more than twice as much as Citi – which is hardly surprising given that Citi’s front capital markets staff each produce around a third as much in revenues.

Operating revenue / Front Office headcount (FTE, 2016), EMEA Capital Markets

Tricumen EMEA overall

Source: Tricumen

Source: Banks’ Pillar 3 reports

Bankers’ overall productivity is more equitable between banks in the Americas

If London bankers’ deserve the huge discrepancies in their pay, Tricumen’s research suggests big variations are much less justifiable in the Americas. Here, Goldman Sachs bankers are still super-productive and J.P. Morgan bankers are a bit more productive than the rest, but across U.S. capital markets overall bankers at most other players tend towards the average.

Operating revenue/front office headcount (FTE, 2016), Americas Capital Markets

Americas Tricumen

Source: Tricumen

Citigroup’s fixed income traders are the most productive in EMEA, J.P. Morgan’s are the most productive in the Americas

The high level discrepancies in capital markets productivity are also evident in fixed income currencies and commodities (FICC) sales and trading, where variations are again biggest in EMEA. Here, Tricumen says Citi’s fixed income traders are by far the most productive and that Morgan Stanley’s EMEA fixed income traders are by far the least. In the Americas, the fixed income productivity prize goes to J.P. Morgan and the loser is Citi.

Operating revenue / Front Office headcount (FTE, 2016), FICC EMEA

FICC bankers EMEA

Source: Tricumen

Operating revenue / Front Office headcount (FTE, 2016), FICC Americas

FICC Americas

Source: Tricumen

Morgan Stanley’s equities traders are super-productive everywhere. J.P. Morgan’s are pretty-productive in EMEA

Lastly, Morgan Stanley’s equities traders deserve to get paid even if its (European) fixed income traders don’t. As the charts below show, the U.S. bank’s equities traders are far more productive than the average everywhere. However, they’re especially productive in the Americas, where each Morgan Stanley equities traders generates revenues twice as high as the average. It’s unfortunate then that Morgan Stanley cut the bonus pool for its equities traders this year

Goldman Sachs’s equities traders are also super-productive. Credit Suisse, as usual, is the laggard.

Operating revenue / Front Office headcount (FTE, 2016), equities, EMEA

EQuities tricumen

Source: Tricumen

Operating revenue / Front Office headcount (FTE, 2016), equities, Americas

Morgan Stanley equities Americas

Source: Tricumen

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Last Thursday was Deutsche Bank’s non-bonus day. If Deutsche Bank were paying bonuses, Thursday was the day it would’ve splashed them out. In the event, Deutsche Bank’s bonus pool was down 80% and Thursday was a day of disappointment. People are free to leave.

At least one Deutsche Banker is said to have quit already. Insiders say David Steckl, Deutsche’s co-head of structured rates sales in the U.S., has gone to UBS. Steckl joined Deutsche from Credit Suisse in December 2012 as the bank set about growing its U.S. macro business. He’s the latest in a succession of exits from the U.S. rates team – Chris Yoshida, the New York-based global head of rates distribution, left last year, as did head of U.S. rates sales Bryan North-Clauss.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

In London, headhunters are joking about setting up shop in the Globe Pub on Moorgate – across the road from Deutsche’s office on London Wall. “People at Deutsche are much more receptive to approaches from headhunters than they used to be,” says one, claiming that senior Deutsche bankers are “bitter and depressed” and that juniors “just want to get out.”

This might be the case, but Steckl aside exits from Deutsche have been comparatively light. Two weeks ago, CEO John Cryan promised to bring the “fun” back to Deutsche after cutting another €3.1bn of non-front office costs and raising another €8bn of capital. At that time, headhunters said Deutsche staff were pulling together against the recent adversity.

Deutsche is also paying retention bonuses to a small number of the staff it values the most. However, as we reported previously, these come with punitive conditions attached and require Deutsche’s share price to rise by 26% between now and 2021.

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Having a Masters in Finance degree on your resume is becoming an increasingly important way of landing a graduate job in investment banking. Breaking into the buy-side is an altogether tougher proposition.

In the past couple of years hedge funds and private equity firms have started hiring graduates directly from university, but these places are still highly-contested and firms hire a handful of people. Even large asset managers, which have well-established graduate recruitment programmes, hire a few students into them – especially when compared to the banks.

If your career ambition is to work in the buy-side, is it worth staying longer at university – and paying thousands of dollars more in fees – to complete a specialist Masters in Finance course? We’ve trawled through the eFinancialCareers CV database, encompassing more than 1.5m resumes, to find out which universities are most likely to give you an edge over the competition.

The results suggest that at many schools a relatively small proportion of MSc in Finance graduates go on to get a job in hedge funds, private equity or asset management. At our top-ranked university, London Business School, 32% of graduates on our database are now working in one of the three buy-side sectors, but the percentage is much lower for most other institutions. Predictably, hedge funds and private equity firms – which tend to be smaller employers who hire raw undergraduates that they can mould into the employees they need – don’t recruit as many MSc Finance graduates as asset management firms do.

The overall rankings assigned to each school reflect the relative difficulty of securing buy-side jobs away from asset management. We’ve therefore given a higher weighting to the number of graduates working in hedge funds, followed by those who are employed in private equity. Universities with more private equity and hedge fund graduates tend to rank towards the top of our table as a result.

The more well-established Masters in Finance programmes based in the UK and Europe largely fare better than their US or Asian counterparts, with the exception of MIT’s course, which sits fourth in the rankings.

We don’t claim these rankings are all-encompassing – they don’t include earning potential, career progression or the number of students finding jobs immediately after graduation. But they do reflect the number of graduates from these schools going on to get a job in private equity, hedge funds and asset management.

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Some boutique investment banks on Wall Street have the reputation of being “sweatshops”. As an analyst who worked as a boutique, I can tell you that you’ll have to work 80, or even 100, hours a week during peak busy periods.

This is more brutal than some of the bulge brackets and burnout is common. The way to survive or thrive is finding a routine and sticking to it without fail. You suddenly go from screwing around in college and working as little as, say, three hours a week on school work to being staffed on deals requiring 80-plus active hours a week at your desk.

Here are some survival tips to avoid crashing and burning.

Boutique IB survival guide

Investment banking rarely gets boring because there’s no built in routine, but this can also cause a lot of stress as you can’t plan ahead around your work schedule. That can also cause your social life and personal relationships to suffer and lead to burnout. Based on three former colleagues working at boutiques, these are three good techniques for getting a bit of relaxation in your life.

The time to think approach: Person A said that he walks to work every morning – as long as he doesn’t wake up to an emergency email. This helps make up for the exercise that he no longer gets. At night, no matter how tired he is, he will read at least two chapters of a book. It doesn’t matter what genre. The point is to allow him to think about something else besides work so that work isn’t on his mind 24/7 and consumes him even when he’s away from the office trying to relax.

The light at the end of the tunnel approach: Person B says that everyone he knows in the industry is facing some level of depression and small mental breakdowns are unfortunately common. Therefore you need to have a positive attitude and find your own coping mechanisms to survive. His coping mechanism was thinking through a business plan for a future start-up. His positive attitude was predicated on the fact that he knew he was going to form his own start-up. He actually already had an offer to work at one after putting his two years as an investment banking analyst.

This is like my coping mechanism – booking a vacation well in advance so that I have something to look forward to, a light at the end of the tunnel.

The mandatory exercise approach: Person C told me that he forms his own routine by working out every morning at 7:30 a.m. every day, no matter how tired he is, unless he had to pull an all-nighter that goes past this time, obviously. This allows him to have some form of predictability and survive.

Lastly, as every associate knows but some analysts learn the hard way, don’t go ridiculous on the meal allowance, because that just destroys you. You will gain a ton of weight and your health will deteriorate. There are healthy options that my friends and I get on most days. At my firm, we get $35 dollars a day, so that can get bad really quickly. Most people combat this by buying dinner and lunch for the next day with the dinner allowance – healthy body, healthy mind.

Luke Williams (a pseudonym) works for a boutique investment bank in New York.

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Tim Throsby, the new boss of Barclays’ investment bank, has been about since the start of this year. So, is Throsby behind Barclays’ recent appointment of one of banking’s big beasts in automation and offshoring?

We don’t know, but anyone at Barclays investment bank who’s sitting in London or New York doing a job that could a) just as easily be done in Mumbai, or b) just as easily be done by a computer, has reason to fear this month’s arrival of Leon Macpherson.

A self-proclaimed specialist in, ‘digital, cost reduction, operating model design, industrialisation, rightshoring and transformation planning,’ Macpherson is an ex-strategy consultant who likes to shake things up. He cut his teeth at Accenture, where he was, ‘banking Industralisation lead’ for EMEA. He’s spent the past four years running his own consultancy, Corum, of which Barclays was a client. Now he’s come in-house at the bank, and he’s done so as a managing director – suggesting big things are expected of him.

Macpherson’s arrival comes after Barclays’ CEO Jes Staley promised to “fix the bank.” Staley’s strategy at Barclays involves sharing operations across Barclays’ divisions and (in Staley’s words during the Q4 investor call), “building Barclays on a foundation of world class operations and technology.” From this perspective, Macpherson may well be Staley’s rather than Throsby’s fixer.

In light of Macpherson’s expertise as a “location strategist” it’s also tempting to think he might get involved in Barclays’ preparations for Brexit. This may not be a big job, though: Barclays’ declared Brexit plans simply involve shifting 150 people to Dublin.

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Adam Leonard, the founder and CEO of blockchain-based fintech start BlockEx, has a plan to expand aggressively by adding headcount across three continents. His most recent move was to add a veteran bond trader most recently a managing director at Mizuho in the City.

Last month, James Godfrey joined BlockEx as managing director of capital markets. He worked trading sterling bonds at UBS for more than a decade, working his way up to director before joining Commerzbank to set up sterling and euro credit trading desks in London.

From there, he went on to join Nomura as a managing director running the credit trading desks for around eight years, then a brief stint at Daiwa Capital Markets before building up Mizuho’s credit trading in the City “from scratch”, but left last year due to illness.

“In 2014, I was very ill, and after stepping down the following year to get healthy, I decided to do something a bit different with my life, which is why I ended up here. I’m lucky to be here – it gives you a different outlook on life, he said. “I wanted to something more exciting than buying and selling bonds all day, and this is something new, which is fun. I’m sitting here in jeans drinking a beer on Friday afternoon and many of my contemporaries are miserable working at banks.”

BlockEx is hiring engineers, developers and more

Leonard describes BlockEx as a digital asset exchange platform, a pooled liquidity exchange and a high-frequency-trading matching engine built to meet the needs of buy-side and sell-side traders.

BlockEx executives have ambitions beyond the exchange platform. Leonard said people who are taking security seriously are coupling the Internet of things together with blockchain.

“Blockchain is a key part of our platform, but the vast majority of what we’re building at the moment is not blockchain-related – we do have a couple of blockchain experts with between five and seven years of experience., and we have a PhD coming in to lead the blockchain initiatives,” Leonard said. “The exchange portion is very traditional, and the reconciliation process very traditional – it’s the wallet infrastructure that allows us to interact with various types of blockchain and create digital assets, manage corporate accounts and do blockchain-based clearing.”

While financial services firms are obviously the core clientele for the exchange, Leonard claims to be in discussions to apply the firm’s technology to the supply chain.

“If we close these contracts, then we’ll probably have to hire another 100 developers,” Leonard said. “Our focus is on builds that leave behind a tradeable asset that can be put on the exchange.

“We’re don’t have any PhDs yet, but we have a PhD as an adviser and we’re making an effort to start hiring them soon,” he said. “For the most part, the engineers we have are very experienced – they all have computer science degrees, and most have 10 years or more experience in particular functions, a mix of developers from the trading world, the exchange world and banking.”

Blockchain’s impact on banking jobs

Blockchain won’t impact trading jobs, but it will likely decimate back-office functions.

“There will always be a human element – I started trading in the ’80s and there were certainly many more people buying and selling bonds and equities then than there are now,” Godfrey said. “Trading and sales teams won’t be badly hit by blockchain, but settlement and accountancy roles will, because a huge portion of your settlements department is no longer needed.

“The fact that it is self-reconciling and feeds directly into your accountancy software, that will hit accountancy departments as well,” he said. “Banks are going to try to buy this up and use it to cut costs, and it remains to be seen how revolutionary how this technology will be.”

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Goldman Sachs is to teamwork as Donald Trump is to tall towers: the two things are usually considered inseparable. Even so, sometimes even the most team-oriented organization needs a tweak to avoid the solipsism that comes of sitting in cubicles and staring at screens all day.

Goldman has gone for that tweak. Bloomberg reports that Goldman’s new Manhattan trading hub will apply a pseudo-revolutionary concept to encourage collaboration: employees will set next to each other.

This may sound like the kind of revelation school teachers had hundreds of years ago, but at Goldman it’s a novel concept. Bloomberg says the firm is redesigning the downtown Manhattan offices of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) so that some of its employees will get to sit “shoulder-to-shoulder” instead of at desks “scattered across three floors.” A Goldman spokesman says the new arrangement should “encourage greater collaboration” between GSAM’s investment teams and increase the “opportunities for and qualities of their interactions.” There will also be two pantries and a coffee bar to encourage further chatting, along with a conference room to house 70 people. It’s not all about the collaborative interface though: Goldman’s also throwing in a “bank of phone booths for holding private conversations.” Personability has its limits.

Separately, ex-J.P. Morgan MD Timothy Fletcher must rue the day he helped hire substandard 20 year-olds with important parents into J.P. Morgan. CNN reports that Fletcher is facing a $500k personal fine from the Federal Reserve, plus a permanent ban from the finance industry for his part in J.P. Morgan’s program to hire Chinese princelings to help grow its Asian business. Fletcher ran the program and was in charge of the junior HR group in Asia.

Meanwhile:

After cutting the performance component of 2016 to nothing for bankers above associate level, Deutsche has also cut the corporate portion of last year’s bonuses. – Employees only got 50% of the potential payout. (CityAm)

Goldman banker banned from finance for 10 years by Singaporean authorities:“will not tolerate conduct by any finance professional that threatens to undermine trust and confidence in Singapore’s financial system.”(Wall Street Journal)

UK management consultants are having a great time thanks to Brexit: their industry grew 7.5% last year. (Financial Times)

Industry lobby group, TheCityUK has created a steering committee led by managers at Barclays Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to explore potential trade and investment deals after Brexit. (Bloomberg)

This isn’t a good time to move into private equity. (Alphaville)

Citigroup hired Tom Regazzi from UBS as its new head of prime finance for North America. (Yahoo)

Words analysts say during results calls: “great quarter,” “good,” “great,” “strong.” (Bloomberg)

Goldman Sachs is hosting a two-day technology conference in London where 76 people are scheduled to speak. Just five of them are women. (Buzzfeed)

Reasons not to leave big banks for boutiques or hedge funds: maternity leave is less generous at smaller firms. (Financial News)

Why do people leave banking after they hit 40? They don’t: it’s 30. (Quora)

Eating ice cream first thing in the morning can actually be beneficial for the brain. (IBTimes)

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Brevan Howard has been losing and laying off portfolio managers on its struggling global macro fund. However, it’s just turned to J.P. Morgan’s chief investment office (CIO) for a new hire.

Michael Benchitrit, a rates and FX portfolio manager at J.P. Morgan’s CIO, just joined Brevan Howard in a similar role. He worked at J.P. Morgan for over seven years after brief stints at SocGen and broker Louis Capital Markets.

Brevan Howard has generally been losing staff over the past few months, particularly those with macro expertise.

In February, FX strategist Oliver Brennan departed after close to 10 years at the hedge fund, while Chris Rivelli, an FX portfolio manager, left in December to join HSBC’s FX option trading team. Mark Deniston, the former head of rates swaps at Goldman Sachs who joined Brevan Howard in 2013, also left to head up Royal Bank of Scotland’s GBP rates trading team.

Brevan Howard cut fees on its BH Macro fund in October and waived an operational service charge after months of investor redemptions. In February, 48% of investors took up an offer to exit the fund.

In its annual report to March 2016, published in January, Brevan Howard said it had cut 32% of headcount to 122 people. It currently has 71 people registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, down from 76 at the beginning of 2016.

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Berenberg has rolled out a consistent message over the past two years – we are hiring. While larger investment banks have cut back headcount, the small German bank has been happy to raid the ranks of their research analysts and has been aggressively growing in the UK. Now, says David Mortlock, its head of investment and corporate banking, Berenberg is turning its attention to the U.S.

Berenberg has continued to hire for its investment bank even as larger firms have undergone some pretty structural changes. Are you still recruiting in 2017?

Yes. The plan in the U.S. this year is to add about 30 people, 15 research analysts and five people in equity sales, as well as a handful of salestraders and traders. But there’s scope for a lot more hiring going into 2018 and beyond. Ultimately, we want our U.S. business to become a similar size to our UK and European businesses over the next three to five years.

So, that means you’re going to hire about a hundred people over that period of time?

Definitely. The U.S. is the biggest equities market globally with a revenue opportunity of $8.5bn, so it’s a huge opportunity for us.

In recent years, I spent a lot of time in the U.S. and spoke to domestic investors and people who had tried – and in some cases failed – to build success businesses there. We’re pretty clear about what we want to do and how many people we need. One of the main mistakes companies make is running before they can walk and committing to too high costs too early. We want to follow how we built in Europe – by building up costs in line with revenues.

What about the UK? Still hiring there?

In the UK there are three areas where we are looking to add people. Firstly in the sales and trading and everything across execution. This is a process now for two years in advance of the MiFID II implementation. We intend to add five to ten people on the execution side this year. The second area is our UK corporate business, where we will probably add five to ten people too. We are doing more UK ECM transactions and we are serving more corporate broking clients. We have to make sure that we are well resourced for what looks like a good opportunity for us.

The third area is our graduate scheme. We are doing in about 25 to 30 graduates every October. Irrespective of market conditions we are growing our own talent from the bottom up. Aside from the graduate scheme, it’s very much a selective recruitment. Those aggressive years of building up headcount in the UK are over.

What are the chances of you moving staff from London to Frankfurt after Brexit?

No chance. As a German bank we have a banking licence in the EU and we have a lot of clearing and settlement activities over there.

And if other banks lose good people as a result of their Brexit-related moves then that’s an opportunity for us to hire. And if firms use Brexit as an excuse to cut costs, then again that’s a chance for us to pick up good people.

Which kind of career advice would you give to young people who would like to make their way in equities research, sales and trading under this difficult market conditions?

I have been in the industry now for over 18 years. Every few years it seems it is the end of investment banking and the end of active fund management. Generally, financial services is a very adaptable industry. My advice to young people is: Enjoy the job for what it is. It is still a fabulous career with an incredibly fast pace, it is very intellectual and very challenging and you get exposure to all sorts of interesting people and data. You really need a core enthusiasm. If you got that you can still have really rewarding careers.

““

If you work in an investment banking division (IBD), you probably want to work for a private equity fund. You’re not the only one. Recruiters talk of huge numbers of people chasing every private equity job. Funds can afford to be choosy.

A new report on the state of the private equity industry from consulting firm Bain & Company offers some pointers on who private equity funds are likely to choose as they hire in 2017. Ex-bankers are still needed, but so are people with deep operational expertise.

1. PE funds need talented fund raisers

Fund raising hasn’t been a problem for private equity funds of late, but this could be about to change. Last year, Bain notes that more than 2,500 PE funds hit the road, looking to raise $890bn. However, as more funds joined them during the year, an additional $666bn was sought. For 2016 as a whole, therefore, capital sought exceeded capital raised by 2.4 times.

There are fears that the industry can’t sustain this pace of fund raising. Slowing exits, falling stock markets and a possible recession all have the potential to frighten investors away and make fund raisers’ job harder.

More than 300 buyout funds went on the road at the start of 2016, aiming to raise $244 billion

PE fund raising

Source: Bain & Co

2. PE funds need exceptional deal-makers

Private equity funds might’ve raised big money from investors, but that doesn’t mean they’ve done anything with it. As Bain & Co note, so-called “dry powder” (money that hasn’t been invested), is now at record levels in the private equity industry. Finding somewhere to invest it is a problem – Acquisition multiples in the U.S. and Europe are close to record highs at more than 10 times EBITDA. In the circumstances, it’s hard to see how assets bought at these prices will generate big returns – particularly if a recession takes place.

As a result, funds need to hire deal-makers who can sniff out good investments and see a way to making returns, even at high purchase prices.

Dry powder reached another record level in 2016

Private equity dry powder

Source: Bain & Co

3. Funds need deal-makers with experience of software companies

Deal-makers with experience of the software sector hold a particular allure for private equity funds. Bain notes that revenue growth in software companies tends to exceed other sectors: the five largest software public-to-private deals in 2015 and 2016 had average annual revenue growth of 22.6% vs. just 5.7% for the non-tech deals. However, this comes at a cost: the average price-to-EBITDA multiple for the software deals was 18.1 vs. 10.2 for non-tech deals.

As a result, funds particularly need deal-makers who can direct funds to the software investments which will make money despite their high cost.

Software and tech-enabled services account for about 80% of technology deals by count and value

Private equity software

Source: Bain & Co

4. Funds need people with operational experience in software companies

Once a software investment has been made, private equity funds need people with the operational expertise to make money from it. Bain says management teams at successful software companies have often neglected to “aggressively optimize costs.”

This makes it comparatively easy for experienced investors with software management expertise to optimize the companies invested in. Software businesses are expected to have EBITDA margins of 40% or higher. Most companies fall short of this, creating opportunities for people with experience of working in the software sector to add value.

5. PE funds need massive schmoozers

Before they can actually make the investment, private equity funds first need to identify the best targets. For this, they need to hire people who will get out there and see what’s on offer. This takes a lot of networking. Bain notes that for every 100 potential deal opportunities, only one or two deals usually close. As the chart below shows, Bain says managing directors in PE funds should be networking with 20-30 active deal targets, plus another 30 potentials. networking bain

Source: Bain & Co

6. They need experts in operational due diligence

With purchase prices high and funds needing to make operational improvements to the companies they invest in rather than simply flipping them on again, successful PE investing is about improving operating margins. This means funds need to conduct operational due diligence to establish how operations can be restructured before they make the purchase. The key is cutting costs and achieving top-line growth. This requires a deep understanding of how the business works and familiarity with direct competitors and industry standards.

7. Funds need data scientists

Investment banks and hedge funds aren’t the only ones chasing data scientists. Bain says private equity is starting to take advantage of “advanced analytical tools” too. The chart below shows the potential application of data to the PE investing process – data can be used for everything from analyzing customer reviews to looking at social media sentiment about a target.

Advanced analytics for use in PE

private equity data

Source: Bain & Co

8. PE funds need people who can prepare their investments for a strategic sale

Lastly, an investment is nothing without an exit. As the chart below from Bain’s report shows, exits peaked in 2014 before falling off again. Instead of initial public offerings (IPOs) and sales to other private equity companies (sponsor to sponsor), most exits now take the form of strategic sales to corporations. This has been the case since 2008.

Private equity investing is now far less about a “quick flip” and far more about investing in a company for the long term. In 2016 only 18% of all buyouts concerned investments held by private equity companies for less than three years – down from 44% in 2008. Private equity funds therefore need to hire people with both the operational expertise to turn companies around and with the deal-making expertise to find a trade buyer to sell the turnaround to.

Sales to strategic buyers remained the dominant channel, and IPO value halved from 2015

PE strategic sale

Source: Bain & Co

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

“”

By now, most people will have received their bonus, and as a former managing director in sales at Nomura, this time of year always draws me back to awkward conversations I had with some of the people I managed.

When I handed the bonus envelope across to directors and VPs in my team, it wasn’t just the figure that was discussed. The first question on pretty much everyone’s lips was “Why wasn’t I promoted when I was one of your biggest producers?”

Now, let’s understand their motivations here. Many sales staff are not interested in a promotion because they have aspirations to be a good manager, but because they can earn more money in a bigger role. Herein lies the problem.

I was lucky enough to get a good mentor at an early stage of my career and listened to advice from senior sales and trading professionals. It boils down to this: promotion comes from helping others.

Selfish behaviour is being managed out. A few years ago I witnessed a “top” salesman in New York hold up a sign saying ‘it’s all about me’ every time he booked a big trade. We don’t see that extreme now, but rather obviously, banks like big producers, and they get paid the most based on what they bring in. But this doesn’t mean that they should be promoted into a management role.

I managed my sales teams by de-emphasizing sales credits. I had managers who didn’t like this – they accused me of paying too little attention to my sales credit budget and concentrating too hard on individual career development and generating long-term client trust.

Sales teams at investment banks are currently being decimated as an increasing number of firms concentrate their client focus on those who bring in the bulk of the business. Sales staff are already paranoid people and they protect their clients like a mother eagle guarding her nest.

If you want to make it up the ranks, I believe that sales staff need to ‘gift’ their clients to their colleagues. This, whether they like it or not, is what management is – the best leaders and mentors scale out their experiences to their reports. Clients win, the firm wins, and ultimately the individual wins.

Very few people in sales can bring themselves to do this. They feel like they’re risking their job and their mortgage in the belief that their management team is only looking at how much money they’re bringing in. Sadly, this is true where the senior ranks of banks are still looking at sales credits alone, but this has to change if we want to permanently change culture for good.

If you work in sales, your default behaviour is to be selfish. I’ve seen so many occasions where a salesman wouldn’t risk gifting a client to a colleague far better qualified to help them because they didn’t want to lose money. These were personal decisions, probably driven by paranoia, when actually someone else would have made more money for the bank and better served the client.

Sales staff have to start being more selfless and believe that gifting clients to colleagues works. A lot of the CEOs and heads of HR I’ve reported to agree with me – they are the visionaries and, sadly, still in the minority. Giving up clients to focus on management might make you feel like a baby turtle heading for the sea, but if you want to make it to managing director, it’s what you have to do.

Chris Fleming is the former head of global markets EMEA sales at Nomura. He has held various senior positions including European head of interest rate sales at Royal Bank of Scotland and head of European government bond sales at UBS. Last year he launched mentorXchange, which is designed to put selfless mentors into a position where they can guide people and their company toward more rewarding, successful and satisfying careers. You can contact him at info@mentorexchange.co.uk

Image: Getty Images

““

Banks are desperate to hire cyber-security professionals and a shortage of talent means they’re looking outside of the financial services industry. Goldman Sachs turned to the White House for its new cyber-security lead, while Morgan Stanley hired a counter-terrorism expert and BNP Paribas recruited from consulting.

A new survey by Deloitte suggests that financial services organisations are both stepping up cyber-security initiatives and encouraging their staff to behave more ethically.

“Cyber talent continues to be in short supply, especially when it comes to quality hires and in areas like advanced threat management,” said Vikram Bhat, a principal and the head of the financial services cyber risk services team in the risk and financial advisory practice at Deloitte. “Firms are poaching from one another and the government. There are new areas emerging when it comes to talent needs in this area: analytics, data science and machine learning, among others,” he said.

Only 42% of Deloitte survey respondents said they considered their employer to be extremely or very effective in managing cyber-security risk. However, when asked which risk type would increase in importance for their firm over the next two years, respondents ranked cyber-security is the that most often – 41% – among the top three.

Financial services executives have been increasingly concerned about improving their firm’s management of cyber-security risks – in part because the issue has been receiving greater attention from regulators and policy-makers, says Deloitte.

The report notes the wide range of cyber-risks that banks and other financial services firms much contend with, including attacks on operating systems; locking users out of their computers and data; theft or corruption of data and systems; and release of confidential data, intellectual property or corporate strategy.

Banks, securities companies and asset management firms, including hedge funds, as well as payment and clearing systems, are prime targets for cyber-criminals looking to steal money or data, or compromise critical infrastructure. Deloitte reported that the large amounts of money involved and the increased use of online and mobile banking spur on such cyber-crime.

Deloitte estimates that the number of cyberattacks against financial institutions is around four times greater than those targeting companies in other industries.

Last year, the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) proposed “first-in-the-nation cyber-security regulation,” prescriptive cyber-security requirements for banks and insurers.

In addition, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) gave advanced notice of a rule-making proposal to require enhanced cyber risk management and resilience standards for large banks, which may lead to a more formal proposed rule in 2017.

The regulators in the European Union are expected to follow suit, meaning that banks on both sides of the pond will have to enhance their cybersecurity protections by adding headcount.

“There is an opportunity here for growing grassroots talent,” Bhat said. “There’s also the opportunity for cross-training in a meaningful way: Industry and government can do more, and do better, to create the environment and funding [to cultivate cybersecurity talent].”

Photo credit: BeeBright/GettyImages
““

This June, Bill Winters will have been CEO of Standard Chartered for two years. During that time, the ex head of J.P. Morgan’s markets division has made some big changes to the corporate and investment bank (CIB). He’s closed Standard Chartered’s equities business. He’s cut 25% of Standard Chartered’s managing directors (MDs). He’s laid off 10% of Standard Chartered’s CIB staff at all levels. And he’s hired in Roberto Hoornweg, a former senior fixed income trader at UBS, as head of global markets. So far, however, Winters’ efforts haven’t had the desired effect.

While other investment banks have been riding a recovery in fixed income sales and trading revenues, Standard Chartered has been languishing. Last year’s 7% profit rise in the corporate investment bank looks good – until you look across to J.P. Morgan, where CIB profits were up 36% on 2015, or Barclays where they were up 14%.

Although Winters was a fixed income trader by profession, Standard Chartered’s fixed income sales and trading businesses under-performed in 2016. FX revenues were down 18% on 2015. Rates revenues were down 11%. Credit revenues were stable. By comparison, credit trading revenues at Barclays were up 44% and macro (FX and rates) revenues were up 9%. At HSBC, rates revenues were up 54%, credit revenues were up 27% and FX revenues were up 4%. At Standard Chartered, something went wrong.

The blame for last year’s poor performance can’t be pinned on Hoornweg, who only turned up in December. However, Hoornweg will be expected to make amends in 2017. There are already signs that he’s shaking things up – a memo went out at the start of last month announcing that Vinod Aachi, global head of financial sales, was leaving and that Neh Thaker was becoming sole global head of rates, FX and credit. Six weeks later, however, insiders say a replacement for Aachi has yet to be announced. This is a shame: Deutsche says its fixed income trading business has enjoyed a buoyant start to the year. Standard Chartered risks losing out on a strong first half.

It’s not all bad. Stan Chart’s share price is up nearly 51% over the past year – more than HSBC’s (47%) or Barclays’ (39%). Bernstein analyst Chirantan Barua has got a buy rating on the bank’s stock, which he says should benefit from rising Asian trade volumes. Barua points out that Standard Chartered has “best in class” capital levels and that most of the “heavy lifting” has been done in removing costs. Even so, there are more costs to come out. Barua points out that spending at the bank went from ~$7.5bn in 2008 to around $11bn in 2014. Last year costs were trimmed to $10bn but Barua thinks a further $300m needs to go. The challenge for Winters – and for Hoornweg – is to achieve this while reinvigorating the CIB so that it benefits from the booming fixed income market. Replacing Aachi might be good place to start. – The question is, with whom: Standard Chartered insiders may not bring the requisite oomph, and big hires from big name banks may struggle to perform on Stan Chart’s more challenging platform.

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

An emerging markets focused bank, which is considering moving business out of the UK after Brexit, has just poached senior bankers from both Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan in London.

Russian investment bank VTB Capital, has hired Raymond O’Leary, the former head of CMTS, Turkey, Israel and Africa investment banking at Deutsche Bank, as head of origination for Africa.

O’Leary spent the best part of seven years working as an MD within Deutsche’s emerging markets investment banking team. He joined from investment manager Solent Capital Partners in June 2010.

O’Leary is not the only senior recruit at VTB Capital in London this year. Alvaro Baranda Molina, an executive director and head of Iberia strategic equity derivatives at J.P. Morgan, has also just joined the bank as a managing director in international origination and structured equity for EMEA. Molina worked at J.P. Morgan for 11 years.

Not many banks are signing off on big hires in London right now as the UK government gears up to serve Article 50 and start the country’s exit from the EU.

VTB Capital said in October that it was cutting back its London operations. VTB CEO Audrey Kostin told Bloomberg at the time that it was likely to reduce its UK business “for business reasons, not for political reasons”, but suggested that Brexit could impact the size of its London office. VTB was more likely to focus on high margin retail business, he said.

Since then, however, the bank has been keen to reduce speculation that it’s downsizing because of Brexit, with VTB Capital’s CEO, Alexei Yakovitsky, saying that London was “important because there’s human capital, there are clients, there are investors and this is really the centre, or one of the global centres, of international finance.”

VTB has been parting ways with senior bankers too. In November, Andrew Cornthwaite, its head of global banking, left and is now running a pub Hereford and Worcester called The Baiting House.

Follow @paultclarke

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Photo: Getty Images

““

Banking isn’t sexy any more. It’s a cliché, but as with all clichés it’s absolutely true. I’ve spent 14 years working in finance in NYC, latterly as a managing director. I’ve experienced the growing lack of sexiness first hand.

Ten years ago, when I went out on campus, students would flock to me. This was before the financial crisis. It was when banks still paid big money, and when up-and-coming 26-year-old associates like me were doing everyone’s fantasy job. The last time I went on campus – in fall 2016, I was ignored. People still came to our table at the careers fairs, but in much smaller numbers. For the first time, I had to go out there and search for students who might want to work for us – students who were congregating at tech firms and other industries. That’s a bad sign: these people are the lifeblood of banking’s future.

There’s a reason it’s got like this, and it’s not going to go away. Banks are trapped by their need to increase their return on equity. Most banks still aren’t covering their cost of equity and until they do, they can’t be real meritocracies in the style of Facebook or the buy-side. Their big priority is cutting costs.

This isn’t how it was in the old days. It used to be that you came into banking because you made $85k a year as an analyst and you tripled your compensation in the first three years. Nowadays, banks are simply giving their stars a 10% to 15% pay rise annually. The really high performing Millennials don’t want that – if they’re putting in the hours and the effort, they expect to get paid.

Nor does it help that today’s junior bankers look up and see a whole generation of older bankers who are kind of deflated. People like me are hanging on because we’ve got five years’ of deferred compensation and can’t see what else to do. Our pay falls every year: the guys who were on $3m are now on $1m and the link to performance has been eroded. There’s no incentive to go out and kill it now. There’s no swagger. We’re going through the motions. We should quit, but we don’t know what else to do.

This is why, when we do persuade the 21-year-olds over to our table at careers fairs and we get them through our door, they often don’t stay. Banks like mine have a huge problem keeping hold of second year analysts. These are the juniors doing the grunt work. There are fewer of them and they have to work harder than their predecessors. They look up and they see the guys like me blocking their progress. They see that they’re only going to get pay rises of 15% a year. There’s no upside in it any more. And so they go off and do something else instead. Something sexy, which banking isn’t. And that’s a shame.

Marty Smith is the pseudonym of an MD in the markets business of an international bank on Wall Street

Follow @MadameButcher
Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

““

When former UBS managing director Eric Sim was 14 he failed critical maths and English exams at his high school in Singapore. Sim may have been a self-described “terrible student” as a teenager, but these days he’s teaching the next generation of Asian bankers how to make it in the finance sector.

“My exam failure at that young age actually became a pivotal point in life,” says Sim, who recently left UBS to set up an adult learning school in Hong Kong. “Doing badly academically comes with a lot of stigma in Singapore, so from that point onward I resolved to be a high achiever.”

By 1994 Sim had an engineering degree from NUS and landed a job in the FX team at DBS in Singapore.

But despite improving his academics, he didn’t take naturally to banking at first. “I was from a humble background, was introverted and lacked social skills.”

“I didn’t even know how to book a restaurant for my manager – I’d always eaten in Singaporean hawker centres until then,” says Sim.“The first time I did it I said ‘I’d like a table for my boss and two clients’. My colleagues all laughed at me – as though the restaurant cared exactly who the table was for.”

But although Sim says he “underperformed” during his two years at DBS, both his social and his banking skills quickly got better.

“As an engineer by training, my love of technology started to help me,” he explains. “I’ve taught myself C++ and I once programmed Black-Scholes models on a Mac, which I have yet to hear being done before.”

After a stint at Standard Chartered, Sim was at Citi between 2001 and 2009, where he worked in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai and became head of structured solutions.

“One day, when I was a VP, the head of HR at Citi needed someone to do a career talk at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore – I volunteered,” says Sim. “The professor liked my presentation and invited me back to teach one of his financial engineering classes. I still teach it to this day.”

“I think failing those exams as a teenager actually helps me identify with where my students are coming from and what their problems are. It makes me more humble,” he adds.

Sim was head of corporate sales, global markets at ANZ in Singapore from 2009 to 2011. He then moved to Hong Kong to join UBS as an MD, advising Asian financial institutions and corporate clients across capital markets, M&A, FX, and financing.

But Sim also continued to teach – he became a guest lecturer in investment banking, financial derivatives, risk management and structured financing at Peking University in Beijing.

“Teaching had become my passion. I knew that eventually I wanted to do it full-time, but I decided I’d need to reach MD and work in that role for a while to gain more credibility. In Asia, students respect someone who’s been in a senior position.”

In January this year Sim left UBS to start Hong Kong ‘edtech’ company Institute of Life (IOL), which runs short courses aimed at educating 18 to 28-year-olds about careers in the financial sector. He’s also now an Adjunct Associate Professor of Finance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, teaching ‘key skills for finance professionals’.

“I’d been in banking for 22 years, so it felt like a good time to commit myself to teaching,” says Sim. “I was on the bus one day and I came up with a list of critical banking skills that you don’t typically learn at university or business school, but which are hugely beneficial to know before you start your first internship or job.”

Sim teaches Asia-focused finance skills – from M&A to fintech to Chinese financial institutions – in his two training programmes at IOL, which run for two and five days respectively in Hong Kong’s Cyberport office complex.

“It’s not just me teaching. My former senior colleagues also come in and share their knowledge of the industry,” he says. “We help you come into a bank already knowing the jargon – what leveraged finance really means, for example. Just seeing what a pitch book actually looks like makes a big difference.”

The course also hones in on the softer aspects of careers in finance, such as public speaking, dealing with office politics, time management, and negotiation skills.

“Ultimately, it will make you realise whether or not banking and finance is the job for you. It will get you thinking about what you should be doing in the future.”

Follow @simonmortlock

““

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Berenberg has continued to hire for its investment bank even as larger firms have undergone some pretty structural changes. Are you still recruiting in 2017?

So, that means you’re going to hire about a hundred people over that period of time?

What about the UK? Still hiring there?

What are the chances of you moving staff from London to Frankfurt after Brexit?

Which kind of career advice would you give to young people who would like to make their way in equities research, sales and trading under this difficult market conditions?

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1. PE funds need talented fund raisers

2. PE funds need exceptional deal-makers

3. Funds need deal-makers with experience of software companies

4. Funds need people with operational experience in software companies

5. PE funds need massive schmoozers

6. They need experts in operational due diligence

7. Funds need data scientists

8. PE funds need people who can prepare their investments for a strategic sale

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