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Working at a European investment bank might seem like a cross to bear right now. After all, they’re losing business to their U.S. contemporaries and most have slashed their bonus pools to the bone this year. How do their employees stick it out?

Well, mid-ranking bankers may have got stiffed with their bonuses, but a big uptick in salaries for senior staff means top performers could end up earning more than those working at American rivals. The difference in base may seem small – a director level employee at a London-based European bank gets a base salary of £175k ($212k) compared to £170k ($206k) at U.S. bank, according to Emolument data cited by Bloomberg. But the point is that by hiking up salaries European bank, they have much less flexibility on pay and chopping bonuses doesn’t matter as much.

Bloomberg’s analysis shows that UBS has a compensation ratio of 40%, compared to 27.1% at J.P. Morgan (even if it does lump corporate bankers in with its investment bankers in its accounts), so pay is still a big drag for European banks. UBS might have cut its bonus pool by 17%, for example, but as we pointed out last week, it’s cash bonuses are only down 8%, more of the annual bonus is available in the first year and it’s still offering sign on bonuses to the right people.

Not that it’s all rosy at European banks. Plenty of people have already moved on this year so far and Alan Johnson, managing director of pay consulting firm Johnson Associates, says it’s not pay satisfaction that’s making people stay put, but a lack of jobs. “There are many people who would move if there are jobs they could get,” he said.

Separately, investment banking is still bad for you. About 25% of those in banking responding to a Banking Standard Board survey said that their job “has a negative impact on [their] health and wellbeing”. This is not news to anyone who has followed the various studies on the health destroying qualities of working brutal investment banking hours.

However, in a study of 13,000 college graduates on Poets and Quants, it’s that evident working in banking – and to a slightly lesser degree private equity – will require you to work much harder than just about everywhere else. Junior investment bankers work an average of 74.7 hours a week, it suggests. Stripping out private equity – which in the early years is just investment banking lite – this means you work 33% longer in investment banking than the nearest job (accounting). And, of the top six jobs for working hours, five were in the financial sector.

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Meanwhile:

Quentin Andre, a former Goldman Sachs MD, is Citi’s new head of equities structuring (Financial News)

Thomas Patrick, the global head of equity trading at Deutsche Bank, is likely take over its U.S. operation (Reuters)

Investment consultant, Cambridge Associates, has laid off around 50 staff as it tries to reinvent itself as an investment manager (WSJ)

Male financial advisers are three times are likely to engage in serious misconduct than women. Female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their job as a result (Bloomberg)

The Central Bank of Ireland doesn’t have the staff to deal with Brexit move requests (Financial Times)

BAML’s Ireland Brexit move: “Dublin is an emergency, a default option that the bank has.” (Bloomberg)

MUFG and Mizuho are heading to Amsterdam (Bloomberg)

London mayor says that a hard Brexit will benefit New York and Hong Kong, not other European cities (WSJ)

Brexit is great if you’re an M&A banker – $70bn worth of UK deals in the first quarter (Times)

Research analysts’ job prospects just got even shakier (Bloomberg)

Struggling to learn something? Just upload it into your brain (Telegraph)

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Discretionary hedge funds are reeling from poor performance, pressure to cut fees and the rising tide of quant funds. Most are more likely to be firing than hiring, but Caxton Associates is one of the exceptions.

Caxton Associates has been building its London operations while a lot of rivals scale back. It now has 56 employees registered with the Financial Conduct Authority – up from 47 in February 2016.

The latest recruits at the $8bn New York-based hedge fund’s UK operation are GJ Prasad and James ter Haar, who both joined as portfolio managers from Millennium Capital Partners earlier this month.

Ter Haar has rejoined Caxton after six years working for various other hedge funds including JTH Capital Management, where he was CIO, and Lucius Capital Partners. He’s an associate partner and portfolio manager. He originally joined Caxton as a portfolio manager in April 2009, having previously been head of credit flow trading at now defunct investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort.

Prasad, meanwhile, is a senior analyst and portfolio manager at Caxton, and previously focused on European financials at Millennium. Before this, he worked at J.P. Morgan’s chief investment office as an executive director.

Caxton Associates has been hiring in senior employees over the past few months. It indulged in an end-of-year recruitment spree in December, poaching senior traders from the likes of Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and UBS.

Tom Frost, who was a managing director and head of UK insurance and pensions at Credit Suisse, joined Caxton as head of business development for Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, Tanya Laing, an emerging markets spot FX trader at Morgan Stanley, joined Caxton’s global macro fund and UBS executive director Dino Spinelli was also hired.

Christian Deazeley and Anil Kamath, both portfolio managers departing BTG Pactual’s shrinking London operation, also joined Caxton earlier this year.

Caxton Associates, which employs around 190 people globally, has not been immune from the pressures hitting hedge funds. In September, it took the decision to cut its fees after a period of poor performance for the industry.

Caxton has also lost some employees recently. Most significantly, Sushil Wadhwani, one of the UK’s best economists, ended his partnership with the hedge fund late last year. Caxton took a stake, thought to be worth millions of dollars, in his firm Wadhwani Asset Management back in 2011 and Wadhwani became a Caxton partner. However, he ended his employment there in January.

Meanwhile, execution trader Danny Choueiri left Caxton earlier this year and is now working as an emerging markets debt trader at J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

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Data science jobs in investment banks are the new hot thing. J.P. Morgan’s got a chief data science office. So does Morgan Stanley. So does Deutsche Bank. Banks that once wanted traders and salespeople now want data people with finance “domain knowledge” as an aside. As Bloomberg’s Matt Levine points out, finance is being reduced to a set of data challenges. All rise the data-crunchers.

Except, people in the industry suggest data science jobs aren’t as exciting as they seem. If you think you fancy being a data scientist, you might as well know the truth.

“Only around 10% of data science is science,” declares Dominic Connor, a veteran quant headhunter in London. “The rest of your time will be spent cleaning the data – sucking it out of whatever stupid format it comes in, and subjecting it to a sanity check so that it’s actually usable.”

People working at the data science coal face wholeheartedly agree.

“It’s universally true that data is crap,” says Jeff Holman, chief investment officer of San Francisco-based Sentient Technologies, the artificial intelligence (AI) company which has developed an AI trading system. “Most of your time is spent acquiring and cleaning data and trying to automate those two steps – and for whatever reasons, the responsibility for this lies in the lap of the data scientists who should be using the data to develop machine learning.”

The disconnect between the aspirations of data scientists and the reality can cause disappointment. Especially for data scientists who haven’t worked in the real world. “When people have done empirical work during their PhD they’re used to it,” says Holman. “When they’re coming from a theoretical perspective and are applying their techniques for the first time, they’re in for a shock.”

“It can be frustrating,” says Alexey Loganchuk, a former J.P. Morgan derivatives trader who now runs Upgrade Capital, a New York-based buy-side talent scout focused on big data. “When you look at the data programs at top universities you’ll find students who are very interested in complex modelling techniques, but when you look at the data jobs in hedge funds it’s usually about finding new data sets, evaluating them, and making them accessible.”

Loganchuk says the really critical piece of value creation in data science is this so-called “data wrangling,” which academic institutions don’t focus on. Anyone can scrape the web for easily accessible company data, but web scraping jobs are “commoditized” and the data they deliver rarely offers new insights. “The most valuable data sets for hedge funds are those no one is looking at and those are rarely easy to access and analyse,” says Loganchuk. “If you are looking at a data set that everyone else can access, there is not much of edge to be gained from it.”

For this reason, data science is less about complex modelling and machine learning and more about “data discovery” and wrangling. Classic examples include satellite data that tracks deliveries of raw materials to China before ships have even docked, or the number of cars parked alongside retail outlets and restaurants. “Our students looked at satellite imagery from RS Metrics and found that if you compare the number of cars parked in Chipotle parking lots with those parked alongside nearby rivals, you get an idea of competitor performance,” says Loganchuk. Even the most desirable hedge fund data jobs can be prosaic. Winton Capital, the systematic hedge fund, wrote a recent blog post about its use of DNS records as a proxy for technology leadership among S&P 1,500 companies, for example.

If hedge fund data jobs are unexciting, banks’ data jobs can be even less so. Connor points out that banks’ big need isn’t for data scientists to work on the trading floor, but for data scientists to work in compliance: “Banks have got to the stage where they urgently need to automate their compliance activities. There simply aren’t enough experienced compliance professionals out there.”

Loganchuk says data scientists at big banks are often the most disillusioned of all: “These tend to be very large organisations with limited opportunities for greenfield development.” He adds that every data scientists’ dream is to work with data to solve a problem no one has ever solved: “In a bank, you might be tasked with creating a slightly better model for predicting default risk in credit cards or with identifying instances of fraud. It’s certainly valuable work, but it won’t excite a Millennial with a dream of making the world a better place.”

None of this is likely to change any time soon. There’s no getting away from the fact that data science in finance is done for commercial ends – although hedge fund Two Sigma allows its data scientists to work on charitable and environmental data projects alongside their day jobs. Nor is there any avoiding the data discovery and data wrangling aspects of the role. Holman says that delegating these causes problems: “You make a lot of small assumptions along the way in how you handle and truncate the data. This needs to be done by the people who are going to be consuming the data and creating the models otherwise it doesn’t always work.” Loganchuk points out that more and more “exhaust data” is becoming available: “There is more data being created – everything has a sensor on it, from the clothes you wear to individual screws holding together oil rigs. It’s only a matter of time before these datasets become large enough for hedge funds to become interested.”

This isn’t to say that data science in finance isn’t interesting – as long as you go in with your eyes open. And the alternatives may not offer opportunities to use nice clean data to save the world either. Sentient’s use of machine learning and data science isn’t restricted to finance – it also applies its technologies to other sectors. One of these is healthcare, where Holman says they developed a system that accurately predicted sepsis in an intensive care unit. However, the biggest growth area is online shopping, where scientists busy themselves using data signals to encourage people to buy more. In this context, sifting through messy compliance data in a bank looks quite worthy after all.

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If you’re interviewing for an investment banking job, expect some curveball questions. Most Wall Street firms have pulled back from the so-called trick questions, but some questions can be be just plain bad – whether that’s deceptive, irrelevant, blasé or even offensive.

Here are some of the worst interview questions that Wall Street hiring managers ask, along with some suggestions for how to respond.

If you were an animal/color, what type of animal/color would you be?

The purpose of such as question is to test the creativity of the candidate.

“In a finance role, creativity is not necessarily what [hiring managers] are looking for,” said Christian Novissimo, managing partner of accounting and finance at Lucas Group, an executive search firm. “It might put a candidate under pressure and force them to think on their feet, but perhaps it’s not best suited for financial professionals who are more quantitative.”

Find a creative way to steer the conversation back to your skills and experience.

Why don’t you tell me a joke? What are your hobbies?

Most recruiters have never studied effective interviewing methodology and ask questions that might not seem relevant or go after indications of future success.

“Most managers are looking to solve a problem and don’t want to bash the potential solution with questions designed to have people fail,” said Peter Laughter, CEO of Wall Street Services. “If candidates get questions that are off topic, it is important to identify the concern behind the question and speak to that concern.”

If the question is “Why don’t you tell me a joke?” perhaps the concern is whether or not the candidate will be able to fit into an office culture that values humor. Oblige if you can, preferably something that ties into the particular role or the industry in general.

What is 13 cubed? What is the square root of 100,000?

In both of these examples, hiring managers care less about the candidate giving the correct answer and more about the approach the individual takes to solve it.

“Lately, firms have been asking more non-modeling questions,” said Simon Lewis, managing director and head of the banking & financial services practice of Page Executive and Michael Page. “They have been asking brain-teasers to see how candidates react to unexpected questions they wouldn’t otherwise prepare for.”

If you owned the George Washington Bridge, for how much would you sell it to me?

This or something similar sometimes crops up in an interview for a sales or IBD role at a financial institution.

The best way to respond would be to guesstimate the approximate value of the scrap metal that could be salvaged from the bridge.

“I would guess it wouldn’t help hiring managers too much,” Novissimo said. “Some are working off of a script and don’t always understand what they’re looking for.

What’s one of your weaknesses? What are you weak at?

The stock answer to this question always used to be, “I work too hard,” but nobody wants to hear that anymore.’

“They want you to be humble and honest,” Novissimo said. “Take the question and rephrase it, for example, ‘In the past, an area of improvement for me has been…’”

“Identify it, and say ‘This is what I’ve done to get better at it,’ acknowledging that you’re not perfect but that you’ve taken steps to become more perfect,” he said.

Taking a negative and rephrasing it to be a positive is a tried-and-true tactic for financial services candidates to respond well to potentially unflattering questions.

How many gas stations are there in the U.S.? How many ping pong balls could you fit into this room?

This is another common type of question that catches people off guard, and there are a lot of different ways to ask it. Financial services professionals need to be quantitative, so hiring managers want to gauge whether they can think on their feet and arrive at a good answer.

Start by estimating that a ping pong ball is approximately one inch by one inch, and go from there. Hiring managers want to see your ability to quantify a number and explain how you got that answer.

“Especially people in quantitative roles, it requires making assumptions, so sometimes you need to make educated assumptions, demonstrate the ability to think quickly on your feet and derive a good answer,” Novissimo said.

What negative things would co-workers say about you?

This is a tricky one. Always attribute the negatives to a few and not the entire group.

Career coach Jane Cranston suggests trying “I guess some may think I can be too passionate and a bit defensive when it comes to a project I’m working on.” And maybe that’s true from their perspective. Say something to the effect of: “In general, I get along with my co-workers, clients and vendors. We don’t always agree but we can work together to get the job done.”
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Remember Haroon Sana? He was head of global rates sales at Deutsche Bank back when Anshu Jain was still CEO and Deutsche was still paying bonuses. We have it on good authority that he’s about to stage a return.

Sana has spent the past 22 months toiling in relative obscurity at Scotiabank in London. He joined the Canadian house in mid-2015, two years after leaving Deutsche mid-year for reasons that were never made clear.

Now, the FCA Register shows that Sana left Scotiabank last week. Sources say he’s poised to join Standard Chartered as head of European sales and global head of rates sales. Standard Chartered was unable to confirm the appointment.

Standard Chartered isn’t exactly J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs (or Deutsche), but Sana’s new role would nonetheless mark a step back towards the limelight. Neh Thacker, Standard Chartered’s global head of rates, previously worked with Sana at Merrill Lynch and is thought to have been instrumental in appointing him.

As we reported yesterday, Standard Chartered’s sales and trading business struggled last year. Rates revenues fell 11% on 2015, compared to a 54% increase at HSBC. Sana’s arrival looks like an attempt to address this – although it’s not thought that he’s filling the gap left by Vinod Aachi, the global sales head who left last month.

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Last summer I was an intern at J.P. Morgan. At the end of the internship, I got a job offer. I did none of the things you’re supposed to do to get a “conversion”.

Firstly, I didn’t suck up. I made a point of speaking the truth. For example, countless traders asked me why I wanted to work there. HR people say you need to fit into the culture and show you believe in the firm’s values. I couldn’t disagree more. – If everyone does this, you’ll blend into the crowd. You’ll stand out by speaking your mind. This is why whenever a senior trader asked me what I was doing at J.P.M., I answered with complete brutality. “I just want to work in a cool environment and pocket a nice wage,” I told one senior trader. He was stunned and at first I thought I’d blown it, but then he grasped my hand and congratulated me on being the first intern to answer the question truthfully.

That trader actually turned out to be my most useful asset throughout the internship process. The moral of the story is, ‘don’t get sucked into the idea that banking is beautiful and that the values are at the front of all banker’s minds’. The industry still is, and will always be a dog-eat-dog meritocracy with very little room for those who answer questions in an ‘out-of-the-box’, generic fashion.

Secondly, I didn’t do face time. People will tell you that sitting at your desk until everyone else has gone and working unearthly hours gets you an offer. “You must be first in, last out”. Wrong. I was in the sales and trading division and can’t speak for everyone in the investment banking division (IBD), but I saw and heard of several of my colleagues ‘graft’ away until the early morning. Not one of these grafters converted their internship offers because they were working so hard they were unaware that the desks didn’t even have the headcount for them. With Brexit, desks were busy. Management’s concerns were with the business not the interns. Face time means nothing. No one in markets should be in at 4:30am and leave at 1am: it’ll make no difference to your chances of conversion.

Thirdly, instead of burying myself in the job I busied myself working out how to get hired. You can do great work as an intern and still walk away with nothing. It’s all about working out which desks actually have spaces available. For example, I could see my desk weren’t going to hire me after Brexit because they were cost cutting, so I jumped to another one. My old desk hired zero out of five interns.

What I did do was to be friendly and personable. I asked about the families of people around me. I showed them I was a human being and not another robot produced by the bank’s sausage-machine hiring process. I was myself. A fellow intern suggested I kerb my cockney accent. I ignored him and still got an offer. He didn’t get the job.

Dan Roberts is the pseudonym of a summer analyst at J.P. Morgan in the UK

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Interviewing at a hedge fund can be an unpleasant experience. Known for testing candidates’ resilience under pressure, hedge funds hire comparatively few people. Therefore, they’re either looking for raw potential, or for someone with a track record that speaks for itself.

However, according to hedge fund professionals and specialist recruiters, there are several types of interview questions that are practically guaranteed to come up every time. Here’s how to ensure you’re prepared.

1. Walk me through an idea you’d invest in

If you’re applying for an analyst or portfolio manager role with a hedge fund, you’ll need ideas. How can you develop ideas? Well, Bridgewater Associates lays out its theory of forming investment opinions in its 123-page principles document.

Hedge funds won’t want you to come up with boring ideas: it’s no good pitching AAPL, for example.

“What they don’t want to hear is why a huge commonly followed stock is your choice (unless you’re going against the consensus),” says Anthony Keizner, managing director at headhunters Odyssey Search Partners. “They want to hear good business logic and why the stock is over or under-valued, what the market is missing and what the catalyst is for the stock to hit your price target.”

The chances are that you’ll be asked to quantify the case for investing in a company or industry as well as trying to explain why the market is wrong about a particular stock. Before you step in, make sure you know everything there is to know about three different investment ideas and strategies. Tailor your ideas to the fund you’re applying to (it’s no good pitching emerging market stocks to a bond fund). Try to have one idea which involves going long and and another that involves going short. And be prepared to justify your ideas to the nth degree.

2. Why are you interested in a career in investing?

This is more aimed at junior recruits and suggests that it’s another opportunity to show what a great trader or portfolio manager you could become. In reality, it’s more of a ‘cultural fit’ question, a chance to prove that a career in a hedge fund is for you and that you’re in investing for the long-haul.

“You need to be succinct and demonstrate a passion for investing. You might have started trading on your personal account, or gained work experience from an early age,” says Barry Seath, managing director of hedge fund focused recruiters Mirage Recruitment.

3. Tell me about yourself / Walk me through your resume

Yes, this is an obvious question generic to any job interview, but it’s also a chance to sell yourself to the hedge fund. They want you to prove, by going through your skills and experience, that you can evaluate businesses, easily navigate your way through financial statements and analyst reports and, most importantly, have enough ability to be trusted with a large amount of money to put behind your trading ideas.

This should be a short pitch – MBAs, known for creating a process for every aspect of their job search, suggest 90 seconds for the concise version and three minutes when there’s potential for expansion.

4. How many golf balls are there in China?

The days of brain-teasers, designed to test candidates’ mathematical reasoning skills, are slowly coming to an end in hedge funds. “It’s been a while since clients have asked candidates how many glasses of water it takes to fill the Atlantic ocean,” says Seath. “What they want to see is logical and punchy answers, often with a mathematical reasoning, throughout.”

Essentially what this means is that if you linger too long on a point, or go off on a tangent that is likely to present a complex argument, the interviewer will pick up on this. Expect to be interrupted, have your thought processes questioned and argument torn apart. This, you’ve probably guessed, is less about the answer and more how you handle a stressful situation. The secret is to remain cool.

These types of questions come in a few guises, with one hedge fund CEO asking a candidate ‘How much money do I have in my pocket?’ After weighing up the pros and cons of answering based on assumptions and ethics, he instead went with ‘$500 +/- $500 ($0-1,000)’, which was the correct answer to a seemingly impossible question. The secret, say hedge fund professionals, is to always fall back on maths if a question seems a little leftfield.

5. Quantitative questions and programming-related questions

Finally, you need to be prepared for quant-related questions – especially (and self-evidently) if you’re applying to a fund with a quantitative focus. You might be asked, for example, to create a declarative algorithm from a recursive algorithm. You might be asked to reverse a string. You might be asked to estimate the square root of 5, to write a function that determines whether a number is prime or not, and to describe the logic you’d use if you were creating a chess game in Java.

Brush up on your programming languages before the interview. Especially if you’re a major in computer science.

6. Why this fund?

Finally, you’ll need to know everything that’s humanly possible about the fund you’re interviewing with. Hedge funds can be very secretive, but you can usually find information on sites like Hedge Fund Intelligence or Opalesque.

At the very least, you should have an idea of the hedge fund’s assets under management, sector focus and strategy. It will help if you also know the names of its top trader(s) and the nature of its investor base. Try talking to some other employees (or past employees) before the interview. Ask them what made it a good place to work.

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This will be a year characterized by the rapid growth of all things futuristic – artificial intelligence, the internet of value, virtual reality and blockchain. As financial institutions ramp up technology projects, they’ll need more technology experts, including software developers, system engineers, product designers and research analysts. But knowing the usual mix of C++ and Java programming languages may not be enough for banks focused on innovation.

We interviewed 200 senior financial services business and IT leaders on their priorities for 2017, and it’s clear that the momentum behind technology innovation and adoption will continue this year.

If you’re looking for a job in this area, this is both good and bad news. There might be plenty of positions available, but there’s simply not enough talent on the market for emerging technologies like blockchain and this has made it difficult for banks to find the talent they need.

From research, we found that 39.3% of respondents felt that blockchain technology talent is difficult to find, while 31.3% said that they are working with partners and vendors for supplements in talent.

As the technology is still relatively new to the market, the prevailing issue faced by employers is not only the lack of real-world practical experience developing with blockchain infrastructures such as Ethereal, Hyperledger and Ripple, but also the lack of industry domain knowledge to guide architecting these new applications in unchartered territories.

Demonstrate that you’re a quick study

Applicants looking to work with transformative new technologies like blockchain will be hard-pressed to tailor their resumes specifically for the position. Unless they were an early-adopter, very few candidates will have that experience. The best thing applicants can hope to do is highlight transferrable experience and look to focus on training for the job through continual education.

When we assembled our own blockchain team, we looked for individuals with transferrable skills, who were self-motivated, proactive and focused technical professionals. This would allow them to learn these new technical skills through lab work, training programs and real projects. As blockchain is a fast-evolving technology, we looked for quick learners with multiple, transferrable skills, be it .Net, Java or PHP proficiency.

AI is red hot

IT professionals interested in a career involving other transformative technologies like artificial intelligence also remains on the radar of industry executives and was among the top technology priorities survey respondents cited for 2017. In fact, financial institutions are taking inspiration from mainstream, consumer AI products like Siri and Alexa to integrate chatbots and voice recognition technologies into their systems.Hence, demand for AI software engineers clearly exists.

While artificial intelligence has been around for decades, advancements made with neural networks has brought on a new era of AI known as Deep Learning – which will require from candidates even deeper technical and domain knowledge than Expert Systems before. While algorithm marketplaces have made it easier to bypass certain requirements, a sound foundation in mathematics, statistics and computer science in addition to an understanding of financial markets are all required for a successful fintech career focused on AI.

Adapt or die

While having a stellar resume with relevant experience might just get you through the door, it is paramount that applicants demonstrate a desire to continue to build their technical skills. These are fast-changing fields and what is new today could be archaic six months from now, so be prepared to evolve skills and approaches and the technology continues to develop.

While fintech 25 years ago was largely associated with back-office applications, the last five-to-ten years have seen a huge surge in investment and excitement around innovation across the business. As we look into the future of fintech recruitment, we anticipate greater competition, which means job-seekers and applicants will need to refine their skillset as technologies become increasingly specialized while simultaneously mastering the financial side to balance both the financial and technology parts of fintech.

Tanveer Saulat is the co-founder and CPO of Synechron, a financial technology services provider.

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Whether you believe that the big banks are bluffing over moving jobs out of the UK after Brexit or not – they’re definitely not hiring in London.

There’s been a 17% drop in available jobs in the City compared to this time last year, according to the new London employment monitor from financial services recruiters Morgan McKinley. This might not seem huge considering the looming spectre of Brexit, but at this point last year just about every investment bank was rolling out redundancies after a torrid 2015, so it’s from a low base.

“Brexit has pushed institutions into two camps,” says Hakan Enver, operations director of Morgan McKinley Financial Services. “On one side we’ve got the ‘business as usual’ team, and on the other we have the institutions that are tired of the government’s hemming and hawing and have already begun to move jobs to other EU countries.”

The large investment banks are just getting on with moving jobs out of the UK, he suggests. “For many, it’s simply proving easier to get ahead of the worst case scenario and get out of London now,” he says.

The latest investment bank to speed its Brexit move up is UBS. Axel Webber, chairman of the Swiss bank, said yesterday that around 1,000 UK jobs were at risk because of Brexit, and that the two-year negotiation process for Brexit “simply would not work” for its relocation strategy.

Meanwhile, Bank of America Merrill Lynch is likely to choose Dublin as its new EU base and Japanese banks MUFC and Mizuho are heading to Amsterdam. What’s up for debate is the scale of job losses in London as a result of Brexit – while some estimates put it at 232,000, others believe banks are bluffing and will only move a few thousand. Barclays, for example, has said that just 150 of its 10,000 UK investment bank jobs were at risk.

“The data suggests that Brexit has had a fundamental depressing effect on City jobs. We’ve already witnessed, what was a handful of jobs leaving, become hundreds. How long before we’re looking at losing thousands, even millions?” said Enver.

Not surprisingly, candidates are hunkering down. There’s been a 38% drop in the number of people looking for a new finance job compared to last year, says Morgan Mckinley.

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Equity analysts who make calls on the best bank stocks to invest in aren’t in the business of advising on the best banks to work for. They don’t consider cultural differences between banks, or working hours, or promotional opportunities. However, to the extent that a bank’s share price reflects the strength of its strategy, analysts’ opinions on the relative merits of bank stocks are of value to job-seekers.- All the more so given that a substantial portion of bonuses at most banks are now paid in stock deferrals.

This all makes a new ranking of top bank stocks by the analysts at J.P. Morgan interesting. J.P. Morgan’s European financial services analysts were rated some of the best in the industry last year. Their opinions are not to be dismissed.

In a new note seen by Financial News J.P. Morgan’s analysts reportedly put American banks before European banks and Goldman Sachs before all else. Their order of preference goes: Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, UBS, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank. Credit Suisse’s elevated position comes despite (or maybe because of) the Swiss bank’s enfeebled markets business and ongoing cost cutting. Deutsche’s desultory position comes despite (or maybe because of) the new rights issue which is rebuilding its capital base. The sweet spot seems to be working for Goldman Sachs’ fixed income business. – J.P. Morgan’s analysts are also predicting a 34% increase in first quarter fixed income sales and trading revenues.

Separately, imagine you’re an excellent trader. And then imagine that everything that gives you your edge is codified and replicated by a machine. This is what seems to be happening over at Point 72 Asset Management. Bloomberg reports that Steve Cohen’s personal fund has “ramped up” its internal quant group and is scrutinizing the “DNA of trades.” This genetic material includes everything from position size to risk, leverage, hedging, timing, market liquidity and duration. The aim is to replicate the trading decisions of Point 72’s best portfolio managers after the fund had a dismal year. Whether the best portfolio managers will want to be replicated is another question.

Meanwhile:

The Wall Street bonus pool, tracked since 1987. (Office of the State Comptroller)

The average Wall Street bonus was up 1% to $138k last year. (Bloomberg)

Consolidation comes to high frequency trading. (WSJ)

Dublin has received 80 inquiries from finance firms thinking of setting up there after Brexit. (Reuters)

London’s mayor says banks have warned him they’ll need to start moving jobs as soon as Article 50 is triggered. “Those with a presence in Europe say it takes between a year and 18 months to get up and go. Others without a presence in a European city, it would take two years.” (Evening Standard)

UBS is threatening to move 1,500 jobs out of London, but it only pays a corporation tax rate of 6% anyway. (This is Money)

Christian Noyer, former governor of Bank of France: “With the UK outside the EU, maintaining the hyper-concentration of EU financial activity in London would be a permanent threat to our financial stability. No other major sovereign or monetary zone would allow itself to rely as predominantly on an offshore centre.” (Financial Times)

New trend on buy-side trading desks: liquidity analysis. (The Trade News)

If Marine Le Pen wins the French election French bank stocks could decline 25%. (Bloomberg)

J.P. Morgan’s luring students with pop-up cafes and made to order smoothies. (CNBC)

There’s a bronze chest filled with $1m of gold and gems hidden in the Rocky Mountains. (NPR)

How to get your AI algorithm noticed at Microsoft. ‘He stalked the VP who could make the decision, positioning himself next to the guy in buffet lines and synching his bathroom trips to hype his system from an adjoining urinal.’ (BackChannel)

How complacent are you? (Tyler Cowen)

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One of Bank of America’s highest-ranked female technologists has left the bank as part of an ongoing shake-up at the top in IT.

Bridget O’Connor, chief information officer for global banking and markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch left earlier this month. O’Connor moved to head up BAML’s investment banking technology in April 2015 after five years as CIO of its consumer bank. She worked at the bank for nearly seven years, having joined from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), where she was CTO, in 2010. She was also a managing director in technology at Barclays investment bank.

She will be replaced by David Reilly, BAML’s current chief technology officer.

This is a very senior exit at Bank of America, but a number of CTOs and managing directors lower down the ranks have also left in recent months. As we reported, Bob Hillier, head of fixed income currencies and commodities technology, left in October 2016 to start a home renovation firm in Texas. This followed the exit of Glenn Gribble, a managing director and head of developer architecture, who joined the bank in 2010 from Goldman Sachs, where he was a technology fellow, departed in April. Jason Petrone, another technology managing director responsible for building the Quartz risk platform and Michael Naunton, a managing director in New York and head of its GMT Quartz core also left. Peter Richard, CTO for markets and risk in London, left last year too and is now running his own fintech start-up, Cloudreach.

Bank of America didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Paul Bennie, managing director of technology headhunters Bennie MacLean, said he expects an internal promotion cycle will fill the void, rather than external hires. “Opportunities will be created layer or two below CIO as the new team is formed, however I am not expecting a wholesale transformation of their tech function,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of this article said that Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer, had left the bank. This is not true.

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If you work in sales in an investment bank, you’ll know all about sales credits. Sales credits are what determine your bonus. As Chris Fleming, the former head of global markets EMEA sales at Nomura, wrote here earlier in the week, credits can be a kind of obsession – to the detriment of cooperation between teams. MiFID II may be about to do something about that.

The MiFID II rules come into effect on January 3rd 2018. Alongside their other many provisions, regulatory consulting firm Laven Partners cautions that the rules contain remuneration guidelines which could impact sales staff in investment banks.

Contained in MiFID II 24(10) and MiFIR (article 27), the new rules prohibit salespeople from being remunerated in a way that conflicts with clients’ best interests. “Firms which are providing investment services to clients are effectively banned from paying remuneration directly linked to sales,” says Laven Partners, adding that benefits and career progression need to be disconnected from sales targets too. In future, says Laven, sales bonuses will need to be assessed on the basis of “qualitative criteria” like customer satisfaction instead of simply hard numbers.

In other words, bye bye sales credits, or at least – bye bye simplistic sales credits based on easily quantifiable targets set by the bank.

The FCA is in the process of incorporating the new guidelines into its handbook. They come at an already challenging time for banks’ salespeople who have seen the old order disrupted by the division of teams into high and low touch segments covering more and less lucrative clients with varying degrees of intensity. The skills required of sales staff are changing too. In January, Dixit Joshi, the former head of Deutsche Bank’s sales-focused Institutional Clients Group, wrote that salespeople increasingly need to be data-savvy and able to use data to generate trade ideas. Joshi has since moved into a treasury role at Deutsche, but there’s evidence of the rise of data-led sales staff elsewhere with the promotion Antonin Jullier at Citi, for example.

While the new guidelines threaten further changes to the way sales teams function, not everyone agrees they’ll be dramatic. Harry Eddis, a financial regulation partner at Linklaters in London, says they’re merely a continuation of the existing direction of travel: “I’m not sure it will change much. It’s effectively saying that individuals shouldn’t be remunerated in such a way that they’re incentivized to sell the most remunerative financial products to clients. This is in line with the FCA’s attempts to ensure remuneration is fair and that sales staff aren’t being incentivized to do anything they shouldn’t.”

Either way, Goldman Sachs appears to be ahead of the curve. The firm has been effecting a global “culture shift” in its fixed income sales team since last year. The emphasis at Goldman is no longer on maximizing sales during each call, but on fostering long term relationships. This seems to be what MiFID II has in mind, although it will be interesting to see how it combines with the push to increase cross-selling at the likes of Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse.

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For all the talk of the death of the equity research, investment banks want to hang on to their star analysts. The problem is, most of them are not happy.

“There’s a ‘seniorisation’ trend in research teams, and to survive investment banks need to retain and hire star analysts,” says Nicholas Mather, CEO of independent research house TS Lombard.

“But these senior people are not happy. They’re working incredibly hard, traveling around the world and putting out maintenance research, rather than doing the real thought-leadership pieces,” he says. “It’s getting to the point where a lot of these stars will looking for alternatives.”

Much of this is down to regulation. MiFID II requires sell-side firms to separate research costs from other trading fees. Investment banks are still struggling to price this correctly, and budgets are shrinking among buy-side firms. The new team structure for research in in investment banking is an over-worked senior ‘star’ supported by some 20-something juniors.

There are obvious routes out – a buy-side job, a switch into investor relations, starting their own business or retiring. But maybe it’s time to be bolder.

Mather estimates that around 15-20% the market for research is held by independent houses and believes this will get bigger. TS Lombard is an independent research house that focuses on macro trends – so to some extent he’s talking up his own book. But the firm also has a more interesting proposition to senior analysts.

Its division Trusted Sources Research Partners is building a “stable” of senior equity research analysts, where equity researchers will be given the chance to produce their own research, work flexibly and make money from the revenues their work generates without actually becoming an employee.

“A lot of senior analysts coming out of the sell-side have considerable value and huge investor following that they’ve had for years,” says Mather. “But they don’t want to be wage slaves, they want to take some control of their lives. We’re saying partner with us, generate valuable research for clients and we’ll provide all the regulatory, sales and infrastructure support. Revenues are split 50-50.”

TS Lombard has 22 analysts in its macro division supported by 18 sales staff and has been hiring. It took on Ken Wattret, a managing director and senior European economist at BNP Paribas, and Steven Blitz, the former head of fixed income at Lazard Asset Management, as managing directors. And Mather says that the “door is open” to senior analysts who want a change.

Independent research houses with flexible working models are one thing. But with hedge funds and asset managers relying more on huge swathes of external data and using machine learning techniques to crunch it, researchers need to find an edge elsewhere.

Mark Pacitti, a former Goldman Sachs researcher and quant at hedge fund Citadel, has recently launched his own research firm Woozle. It aims to provide insight by pushing its researchers into the real world – getting information by talking to the right people, and conducting on-the-ground investigations.

He believes that traditional equity research is dying and needs to evolve. Being independent and free of conflicts of interest is one thing, he says, but simply shoving out research to clients is not the way to go.

“On the one hand, clients do want differentiated data, but you need to answer their questions,” he says. “We work with them to solve a problem or a question they have, rather than simply creating research in isolation and hoping someone reads it.”

One example is that he was asked by a “multi-billion dollar hedge fund” to investigate the impact of some new Lidl stores. He also claims that his approach is differentiated from the trend of hedge funds just consuming large data sets.

“As an example, a lot of people thought Moss Bros was going to have a great quarter because sales receipts were going through the roof,” he says. “But we knew that they’d launched a new website, that people were buying suits online but sending them back because they didn’t fit properly. This wasn’t factored in by most investors.”

Woozle is hiring, but Pacitti says that most analysts are not up to the job. “We need people to get out there, to roll up their sleeves and get dirty. It’s more like a private investigator job,” he said.

There are other options. Berenberg, the mid-cap German bank, is continuing to build up both its equity research and sales team in London. David Mortlock, head of investment and corporate banking, says that it aims to provide “bottom up, single stock” research that’s both in-depth and on a larger scale than research boutiques.

“There are a lot of research boutiques out there focusing on the 200 biggest stocks in Europe,” he says. “That’s fair enough, but I don’t think they’ve evolved a lot in line with where the industry is going. We’re covering 650 stocks in Europe including 300 companies with a market capitalisation of less than €3bn – a lot of small and mid-caps in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Benelux.”

It sits between large banks and boutiques, he says. “We are a midsize merchant bank – there are not many banks of our size left in the market anymore that are not leaning on their balance sheet every day.”

Employment prospects for equity researchers remain shaky. Equity research teams were 50% smaller than pre-crisis levels in 2015, according to data from Edison Research, and another 300 have disappeared over the past 12 months. Further cuts look likely, particularly as buy-side budgets for research are getting smaller and most sell-side firms are still struggling to price their research accurately.

“Buy-side firms used to take global research from eight investment banks. Now they’re saying that they’ll take such research from three,” says Mather. “What I think will actually happen is that they will use four globally, but then also use sector-focused research from other firms or favour one bank over another regionally. Either way, it’s going to be painful for the banks.”

It’s tempting, like many senior analysts have already, simply to go for an easier life and start your own firm. But, despite doing so himself, Pacitti thinks the best option is to stick with the right bulge bracket bank.

“I still think it’s cyclical, rather then structural,” he says. “It’s tempting as a junior to leave and go and work for a tech firm, but if you can stick it out you’ll be well-placed when the market turns.”

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Banks are hiring for data science and they don’t mind if the data scientists they hire don’t have a finance background – just so long as they have an excellent quantitative pedigree.

The latest addition to J.P. Morgan’s London data science team personifies the description of a desirable data scientist. Jeffrey De Jong has a PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Alberta. He has conducted research into the identification of rare cosmic rays using neural networks at the University of Oxford. He’s spent the past three and a half years working as a senior data scientist at King, the games development company behind the Candy Crush Saga and Farm Heroes. At no point has he worked in finance.

This doesn’t matter. In a world where finance is reducible to data, the ability to manipulate data is all that matters.

De Jong’s joined J.P. Morgan’s Chief Data Office, run by Afsheen Afshar. Afshar arrived in January last year after spending five years at Goldman Sachs and has been building out the bank’s data function. Other recruits include Ganesh Chandrasekar, a former associate from Goldman Sachs, and Bruce (Guangyu) Wang, from HungryTickets.com. As we reported last month, J.P. Morgan has also hired Geoffrey Zweig from Microsoft to build a machine learning function.

While the suited Afshar blends in well with the J.P. Morgan look-book, De Jong is a bit more out there. Bald and with an impressive red beard, he’s more likely to be found in a colourful t-shirt than a grey suit. As banks build out their data teams with non-finance types, they may need to relax their dress codes.

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Before becoming the CEO and managing partner of Sunrise Capital Partners, a San Diego-based hedge fund, Jason Gerlach worked as an attorney for a decade. He worked with clients in the alternative asset management space, and eventually the lure of joining a buy-side firm was too tempting to pass up.

“I spent about 10 years practicing law, and I’ve always been really interested in the businesses that my clients were running – I’ve always been entrepreneurial, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on all sides of a business,” Gerlach said.

“I’d never go back to practicing law – if I can help it.”

Gerlach believes there’s much to be said for joining a hedge fund in California, instead of being clustered around Greenwich, Connecticut. As of September 2016, there were 949 California-based private capital fund managers, which includes private equity, venture capital and real estate closed-end fund managers, according to Preqin. That same report found that California hedge funds and private equity firms oversaw a combined $732bn.

The warm, sunny climate and proximity to the beach are recruitment draws, he says. “People say, ‘I’m a trader, or I’m in ops, sales or compliance, and I want to come out to California,’” Gerlach said. “We’re pretty much the only game in San Diego when it comes to hedge funds, so that’s a unique edge in recruiting and hiring.”

A quantitative macro manager, Sunrise Capital manages hundreds of millions of dollars with a small team of 10 in the San Diego headquarters, seven of which are on the investment side, plus a couple of reps in Japan, where the hedge fund has several large investors.

“At the moment there are only two roles that we’re looking to fill, but we’re always opportunistically looking for talent,” Gerlach said. “Technology is our friend, and the beauty of this business is that we could triple or quadruple our AUM and we’d probably only need to hire three or four more folks.”

“One of the industry developments in the industry is being able to do more with less, which is a blessing for managers but also a curse, because it makes it even harder for folks to get jobs at hedge funds,” he said. “Looking back to 10 years ago, hedge funds would have had more staff, but now some in-house jobs have been replaced by technology or outsourcing

Sunrise is looking to hire a really good investment associate who can help to enhance the firm’s current investment strategies, build new ones and implement them while overcoming challenges such as liquidity and execution time.

“We like folks with good trading and investment background, plus some quant skills and computer programming knowledge,” Gerlach said.

The hedge fund uses a wide range of programming languages, including the Microsoft family of languages and SQL.

“We want people who are facile in several different languages and can quickly come up to speed in a particular language – we typically hire people who know at least one or two,” Gerlach said. “A successful candidate once told me in an interview, I don’t know XYZ but I do know ABC and it’s pretty similar, so I can probably get up to speed in 200 hours.’”

“We give them assignments – ‘Please write a program that does such and such in this language,’ and it’s either ‘Yes, this is some good tight code’ or ‘This code is all over the place and maybe they’re not the best fit for this position.’”

On the investment side, Sunrise Capital likes to hire people with some experience – but not too much. The firm also hires recent graduates.

“We accept resumes from people who have worked at hedge funds, big banks and even the mutual fund side – you name it,” Gerlach said. “If someone worked at a great hedge fund, then I’ll give it a look, but it’s not a prerequisite – there are really great thinkers about trading and the markets who have never worked at a hedge fund.

While most quant hedge funds are falling all over themselves to hire PhDs, Sunrise takes a more cautious approach.

“Sometimes PhDs are incredibly smart and talented in the narrow thing they’ve focused on, but they can be very obtuse, and many aren’t market watchers,” Gerlach said. “They may be dialed into a specific phenomenon or area of expertise, but they do not have a lot of market sense or a broad market understanding, so we’ve generally shied away from them.

“We look for good communicators who can think on their feet, collaborate and who can share, communicate and defend their ideas,” he said. “We want people who are willing to be criticized and look at the other side of the issue, because markets are ruthless, and it’s a take-no-prisoners, unforgiving business – you can be wrong a lot, but how do you respond?

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It’s been one week. Seven days since the disappointment that was Deutsche Bank’s 2016 bonus day. Not only were performance bonuses all but wiped out for anyone above associate vice president level, but the remaining ‘firm-wide’ bonus pool was reportedly only half what everyone was expecting. Oh, and the sparsely distributed Deutsche retention bonuses come with some harsh conditions.

In the circumstances, it might be supposed that all kinds of people would have left Deutsche by now. In fact, the exits have been surprisingly modest. David Steckl, Deutsche’s co-head of structured rates sales in the U.S., quit last week for UBS. Now we understand that Said Boujnah and Igor Akulov have also left for destinations unknown.

Boujnah was a London-based director and head of FX and rates structuring for CEEMA & Latin America. Akulov was a New York-based managing director in emerging markets credit and rates derivatives trading. Deutsche Bank declined to comment on their disappearances.

The departures will leave Deutsche with holes in its rates team which under-performed the market in 2016 after a strong performance the previous year. Deutsche CEO John Cryan promised to bring the fun back to Deutsche when he announced an $8.5bn rights issue earlier this month. However, the German bank is still cutting costs and appears to be focusing on equities and the investment banking division (IBD) as opposed to fixed income trading. Earlier this week, it promoted Thomas Patrick, global head of equities, to run the U.S. business.

Both Deutsche’s equities trading business and its fixed income trading business under-performed the market in revenue terms last year.

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Photo credit: HIO Aachen 2012 by Deutsche Bank is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

What is worrying Goldman Sachs? Who is it hiring and how do you get in? Helpfully, Goldman Sachs has just released its 2016 annual report which contains some of this information. This is what you need to know.

1. Goldman Sachs’ traders and bankers are under pressure

Goldman Sachs is under pressure to cut fees. A new band of competitors are subjecting its business to “intense price competition” and could result in “pricing pressure” in its investment banking and client execution businesses, it said. Even with the recent elevation of automation-enthusiast Marty Chavez from CIO to CFO, Goldman is competing with a new tech-savvy competitors out to eat its lunch.

“For example, the increasing volume of trades executed electronically, through the internet and through alternative trading systems, has increased the pressure on trading commissions, in that commissions for electronic trading are generally lower than for non-electronic trading,” it says.

Goldman expects this to continue as “competitors seek to gain market share by further reducing prices”.

2. Goldman Sachs employees don’t leave

OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration – especially considering the big cuts last year – but Goldman insists that the majority of MDs have been with it since they graduated from university. 60% of partners and managing directors joined as analysts or on its associate programme, and the median tenure is 15 years.

3. But it’s harder than ever to get in

Goldman mentioned this last month, but last year it received 130,000 applications for its intern and graduate programme and hired 4% of them (up from 3% last year). This is an 11% uptick in applications on 2015. 5,000 people were hired into its programmes and 37% of them studied STEM subjects, which is reflective of its focus on recruiting quant and technology talent. It now has 9,000 people working in technology.

4. Goldman is extending its reach

Goldman Sachs started using HireVue, a machine learning driven online interview firm, to vet potential graduate and intern hires during the first round. It involves five questions, for which you’re given 30 seconds to prepare and three minutes to answer. The upside is that Goldman has cast the net wider – it’s now recruiting from 900, rather than 800, colleges for its 2017 internships. This isn’t always going down well – current Goldman employees have complained that it’s diluted the gene pool at the bank.

5. Salt Lake City is the place to be

Not for everyone, obviously. But Goldman has been focusing its recruitment efforts in Salt Lake City as part of its move to curtail costs. Over the past five years, it’s increased headcount there by 80%.

6. The biggest job cuts were outside the U.S

Maybe the Salt Lake City build-out has mitigated the cuts in Goldman’s New York office, but of the 2,400 staff who left last year, most were outside the U.S.

Goldman had 18,100 people in the Americas in 2016 and 16,300 elsewhere. U.S. headcount fell by 900 people, or 5% in 2016. Headcount elsewhere in the world was down 8%.

7. Goldman thinks hedge funds will bounce back

Hedge funds and active managers could bounce back this year, believes Goldman, and this will help its sales and trading teams “To the extent decreasing market correlations translate into a better backdrop for generating outsized performance, that should also support increasing levels of client activity.”

8. 360-degree appraisals are alive and well at Goldman

Last year, Goldman scrapped a nine-point scale that it uses to assess its employees, identify stars and weed out under-performers. Instead, it will allow managers to ask for feedback from colleagues – who can also offer this without solicitation. Goldman’s dreaded 360-degree review process – which involves senior staff from all parts of the organisation chipping in – remains. It’s “integral to our team approach”, says Goldman.

9. Goldman needs compliance staff

Predictably, Goldman says that it’s facing competition hiring and keeping hold of employees that “address the demands of new regulatory requirements”. This is particularly the case in “emerging and growth markets” where more established local players can be more appealing options.

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You work in banking for about 10 years, you spot a gap in the market, and you launch a start-up – that’s how you’re supposed to break into fintech. But Gerben Visser only got the first part right.

From 1999 to 2011 he worked in banking, initially for Citi in his native Holland and then for BAML and RBS in London. At RBS Visser reached director level in the global banking and markets division and was on course to make MD.

“But by 2011 I wanted to take control of my career and not have it dictated by an HR manager,” he says. “Banks had given me great exposure, but I needed to do something more meaningful.”

Visser decided he would move into fintech and move to Singapore, a country which at the time had “no fintech infrastructure to speak of”. “I arrived with a vision, but without a job or clear objectives.”

“I took an educated guess that because the Singapore government is pro-business and good at executing its plans, it would soon start pushing Singapore as a fintech hub, just as it had done in other industries. I wanted to get my hands in at an early stage,” he explains.

“I also moved here because Singapore is entrepreneurial, is a gateway into the region, and is a big city without many of the big-city problems you get in a place like London, such as bad public transport.”

Instead of launching his own specialist tech company, however, Visser wanted to play a wider role in putting Singapore on the global fintech map. “It was becoming apparent that fintech in the US and Europe was coming together as an ecosystem – I wanted to encourage a similar thing in Singapore,” he says.

In 2012 Vesser launched IncubAsia Ventures, an early-stage VC company which has invested in several tech start-ups across Asia Pacific. Two years later he co-founded the Singapore FinTech Consortium, an incubator platform which organises industry events, helps local fintech firms with research, and links them to government bodies, financial institutions, corporates, and investors.

“There are more than 300 start-ups in Singapore and global fintechs are moving here too – the consortium is a way to bring this sector together,” says Vesser.

He believes most Singapore start-ups should target Southeast Asia if they are to succeed long term. They should also play to Singapore’s current strengths as a financial centre: asset management and wealth management, for example, rather than investment banking.

“While Singapore only has 5m people, it can become a global fintech powerhouse because of its connections to Southeast Asia, which has 600m. Many consumers and companies there are under-banked and might naturally turn to mobile fintech rather than traditional lenders,” says Vesser.

“There’s now a broad range of start-ups here focused on financial inclusion, which is a real issue in Southeast Asia – whether that’s for SMEs or for handling remittance for migrant workers,” he adds.

Vesser doesn’t think Singapore is in competition with Hong Kong to become the preeminent centre for Asian fintech. “The better question is, how do the two cities work together to build cross-border businesses? Can the two regulators do more passporting, for example, so a fintech started in one market can easily set up operations in the other?”

The Singapore FinTech Consortium is recruiting this year, says Vesser. “We’re now in growth stage ourselves and are looking for people in roles such as business development, marketing and research.”

“In fintech, you need to find someone with the right personality – who’s prepared to share the pain of the business,” he adds. “But it’s becoming less difficult to hire in Singapore fintech as people understand that the big banks won’t always provide a secure long-term career.”

Vesser says moving from being a banker to an entrepreneur himself was still a “big change”. “You have to alter your mindset and accept failure – see it as ok.”

“When I was in IBD the landscape was pretty simple – 10 or so banks competing against each other. Now in fintech it’s totally different. It’s about open-sourced technology, it’s decentralised, and it’s about collaborating.”

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Brian Bissonette, the founder and CEO of WorkingGroupLink, a business-to-business financial technology company, rose to director in the investment banking division of Bank of America Merrill Lynch before starting his own software-as-a-service startup targeting commercial, corporate and investment bankers. We spoke to him about his career path leading up to his current venture and lessons learned along the way.

How did you start in investment banking? Why did you quit for fintech?

I was working in management consulting in the late ’90s, focused on healthcare, and I liked consulting well enough, but I wanted to do something more quantitative. As I was looking around, Montgomery Securities announced that they were bulking up in healthcare investment banking and had brought in two senior bankers from Morgan Stanley to lead the charge. So I cold-called them, and they hired me.

I worked straight through for 12 years – and two mergers – rising to director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and it was great, but it became clear to me that I needed to do something else.

Startups are always low probability, but there are some statistics that suggest that your best bet as a founder is to build a product for an industry that you worked in for a long time and that you would have paid for. I knew investment banking pretty well, and I knew that the means by which deal teams kept track of one another and communicated was hopelessly antiquated. I’d been thinking for some time about a software application to fix all that.

What are some of the worst parts of being an investment banking analyst?

The hours are long. Everyone knows that. But I talk to analysts all the time, and if there’s a common theme to what they don’t like, it actually isn’t the long hours, but the hours spent doing administrative or low value-added work. That demoralizes them.

Most junior bankers are smart, ambitious and have a ton of energy. If they’re in the office on a Saturday night working on a model, valuation, selling memo or something substantive, they’re generally going to be OK with that. It can even be a badge of honor.

If they’re in the office Saturday night typing 50 people’s names, phone numbers and emails into a Word document, on the other hand, that’s not a good for them, not good for their firm and not good for the client. And they know it.

What advice would you give to junior bankers now, especially if they’re thinking of moving to fintech?

Well, the great thing is that they aren’t mutually exclusive. Fintech is probably one of the easiest fields to lateral into from banking, for reasons that are probably obvious. I’m biased, but I think investment banking analyst programs are great. You learn so much so quickly, both hard and soft skills. They open a lot of doors, and if you decide to stick with banking or jump to fintech, you’ll be making a very informed decision.

What’s the secret to success in banking?

I’ll never forget a senior banker once asking me rhetorically, when I was a junior associate, what the VPs were doing that I couldn’t do. I could think of a few things, but in fact not many. Not because I was some superstar – trust me, I wasn’t – but because I knew what the VPs did, and there was no magic to it. I always tried to do 100% of my job and 25-50% of my boss’s job. People who do that will always find themselves in high demand, and the decision to promote them will be easy.

What does it take to get promoted at an investment bank?

I don’t think the path from analyst to director has gotten much harder or easier than it ever was, market vicissitudes notwithstanding. But there’s a general view, which I agree with, that it has become really hard to make MD. As banks’ returns on equity have come under pressure, they can’t afford for people to ramp up. So the bankers that make it I think have started building relationships and pipelines early in their VP years, so that they’re getting mandated as directors.

How do you describe WorkingGroupLink?

WorkingGroupLink is a digital, mobile and email/CRM-integrated working group list application, purpose-built for investment banks and their clients. It’s an elegant, obsessively user-friendly tool that makes life easier for bankers. In addition to making deal execution more efficient, we help banks with two things they tend correctly to obsess about: being more accessible to their clients and avoiding compliance and disclosure pitfalls.

Do you expect to do any hiring this year?

Yes. We’re hiring in engineering and account management – not tons of people, but probably another three-to-four by year end.

What are some of the challenges and opportunities of being a software/fintech entrepreneur in the current environment?

Well, fintech is getting a lot of focus right now from investors, and from banks that don’t want to be blindsided by technologies that can put them at a competitive disadvantage. So that helps, but it doesn’t wash away all sins.

Fundraising is hard, and getting customers to pay for things is hard. I can’t speak too intelligently to the consumer side of fintech, but it seems like young people are totally comfortable with things like robo-advisers, peer-to-peer lending, online payments and some of the other spaces that are growing rapidly.

On the enterprise side, where WorkingGroupLink plays, there’s a similar level of receptivity to new technologies, but the challenge that we and a lot of enterprise startups deal with is a long, long sales cycle. Fortunately, we kind of anticipated that and were careful with our capital, so we can work patiently with our customers. But I’ve seen several of our peers throw in the towel.

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Several former Goldman Sachs employees have joined the Trump administration, including the chief economic advisor to the president and former Goldman COO Gary Cohn; chief strategist Steve Bannon; treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin; Mnuchin’s deputy James Donovan; and deputy national security adviser Dina Powell.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein thinks this is OK. In his annual letter, he defended his firm’s tradition of sending alumni to government positions, as quoted in Business Insider:

“Gary was not the first person from Goldman Sachs to join the government, and we hope and expect that he will not be the last. Five of my most recent predecessors went into government service, and that has not been by happenstance. One ethic that has long pervaded Goldman Sachs is a commitment to public service if one is given the opportunity to serve. And that has been true over time and in many of the geographies in which we operate.

“We have been criticized for the fact that some of our colleagues, after long careers at the firm, have moved to work in the public sector. The charge is that Goldman Sachs is able to extract certain advantages that others cannot. In fact, the opposite is true. Those in government bend over backward to avoid any perception of favoritism.”

So what are these ex-Goldman execs up to?

Bannon got the press – the “opposition party” – to bite hook, line and sinker on a story linking his “fiery” right-wing populism to his father losing $100k by selling off his AT&T stock during the depths of the financial crisis.

Mnuchin, facing increasing fears that Trump’s “America First” economic platform could trigger a retaliatory series of damaging sanctions around the world, is doing damage control to assure everyone that the administration doesn’t want to start any trade wars.

Cohn has been advising Trump on which government programs to cut in his initial budget proposal.

All of them are making suggestions for the Federal Reserve’s vice chairman for supervision, a powerful Trump appointment that will signal just how much regulatory relief Wall Street can look forward to under his administration.

Separately, it’s well known that many employers on Wall Street and beyond “manage out” unwanted staff using a variety of tactics, often traumatic for those on the receiving end. However, they usually don’t admit to doing so.

“I am always looking for people I can manage out,” a vice president at the U.K. headquarters of a U.S. multinational financial services company told the Financial Times.

“Redundancies are a huge hassle and we did so much of this after the financial crisis that we are not doing these big programs anymore. But profits are not great … If I can get my team of 300 down to 250, my boss will love me.”

Meanwhile:

Upper-crust headmistress takes the banking industry to hand over its “patronizing, exploitative attitude to women who are seen as merely ‘diligent’ and ‘safe pairs of hands’ rather than as ‘great minds.’” (finews.com)

The former manager for one of two ex-Barclays swaps traders on trial in London for allegedly rigging a key interest rate benchmark wishes that he hadn’t written an email showing that he was well aware that his desk was trying to influence Libor. (Law360)

Goldman Sachs has become the largest buyer of severely delinquent home loans from mortgage giant Fannie Mae during a year-and-a-half $4.5bn binge. (WSJ)

Lloyd Banking Group is hiring for its investment bank (Bloomberg)

New father quits investment consulting role for former public sector job for better work-life balance (Financial News)

Deal-maker Kuo-Chuan Kung is setting up a new private-equity firm, Nexus Point, in Hong Kong, after leaving another firm he co-founded, MBK Partners, which has invested more than $10bn in Asia. (WSJ)

Companies are crunching lots of data about their employees to figure out who works best with whom. (WSJ)

Stress is caused not by other people or external events, but by your reactions to them – in the workplace, many people blame their high anxiety levels on a boss, job, deadlines, or competing commitments for their time, but peers who face the same challenges do so without stress. (Harvard Business Review)
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