eFinancialCareersInformation Services

On the face of it, I’ve had a textbook start to my investment banking career: finance degree from major US university completed; internships in the bag; job offer from global bank accepted; traineeship kicked off a few months ago.

But my path to my current job, as a first-year analyst in the global banking and markets team at HSBC in Hong Kong, hasn’t been entirely straightforward.

I loved (no exaggeration) my internship at HSBC – the work, the people, the firm – but I still hesitated (a lot) before accepting the bank’s offer of full-time work. And it was precisely because I enjoyed the internship so much that I wasn’t sure I wanted a job at HSBC. Let me explain…

Even as an intern, it soon became clear to me that the culture at HSBC is nicer, softer and less pushy than at most other investment banks in Hong Kong, especially the US ones.

Most HSBC summer interns in my 2016 cohort finished before midnight, even on busy days. I was part of a WeChat group for interns across banks in Hong Kong that year, so I know for a fact that my counterparts at J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley, for example, weren’t clocking off until 2am or 3am. The working hours are generally better at HSBC across all levels, not just for interns.

Here’s an example of what I mean by HSBC being ‘nice’. Unusually, one of my fellow interns once worked until 6am and sent an email to the team shortly before he logged off. When he came back to the office a few hours later, concerned colleagues (who’d seen the time on his email) asked why he’d worked so late, a senior manager bought him a coffee, and the team head called him aside and said that he must tell him if he ever felt overwhelmed by work again.

I don’t think you’d get such a sympathetic response at a lot of other banks, especially for a guy who was only an intern. As an intern myself, I found the senior managers were very approachable; it was clear that HSBC’s investment bank had a comparatively non-hierarchical culture.

But all the niceness I experienced as an intern was a double-edged sword for me when I had to decide whether to accept a permanent job offer from the firm.

I was very worried that it could be too much of a culture shock if I ever wanted to join another large investment bank. Could I cut it in the harsher environment of a Goldman Sachs after three or four years at HSBC? Equally, if I were competing with juniors from J.P. Morgan for a private equity job in the future, would I be disadvantaged coming from HSBC? Would I have the same hard-nosed attitude?

I wasn’t alone in having these concerns. Most of my fellow interns really enjoyed their summers at HSBC, but were worried that the bank was too much of a soft touch.

So why did I join as an analyst? It was partly because I already had a return offer from HSBC and if I rejected it, I’d have to apply from scratch to other banks – I might have ended up without a job.

I also concluded that while HSBC still doesn’t have the global brand name of a Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley or J.P. Morgan, it is still a reasonable career option here in Asia, where it makes almost all its money. HSBC is not just a big commercial bank in Asia – it’s also one of the dominant players in Asia Pacific DCM, and it’s been building in M&A, having recently worked on the ChemChina takeover of Syngenta, its largest deal in a decade.

Before making up my mind, I spent a lot of time looking at market league tables in Asia for the past five years, and I saw that HSBC had done a lot of meaningful deals. HSBC’s reasonable reputation in IBD and the risk of turning down the offer ultimately outweighed my worries about its softer culture.

I’m now hoping I can get the best of both worlds in my career. I’m certainly working at a bank I admire, and I’m hoping I can compete in the job market when I want to move on.

Abi Gwok (not her real name) is a first-year analyst at HSBC in Hong Kong.

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: kctony01, Getty

For all the diversity initiatives, for all the women’s networks, the coaching programs and the parading of senior role models, the newly released gender pay gap figures for banks in the UK are stark. If you are a woman in an investment bank, you are unlikely to progress beyond the lowest half of the bank’s earners.

The reality is most clearly illustrated in the figures released by Goldman Sachs and UBS. – Although Barclays and HSBC have issued figures of their own, theirs are skewed by large numbers of employees in retail networks, many of whom have historically been women. At Goldman Sachs and UBS, the figures are simply for people working on Fleet Street and Broadgate Circle. They’re therefore more comparable, and more damning.

As the charts below show, it’s not difficult to be a woman in banking – so long as you’re a woman who ranks among the bank’s lowest earners. It’s becoming a high earner in an investment bank that’s hard if you’re female. And becoming one of the highest earners looks almost impossible.

The figures for Goldman Sachs International, released on Friday suggest that in some ways Goldman is doing better than UBS. While UBS has more men than women at every pay level, Goldman has more women than men in its two lowest quartiles. While the proportion of women at UBS falls off significantly by the lower middle pay quartile, Goldman still has more women than men at this level. To the extent that pay is based on length of service, the implication is that Goldman Sachs is both recruiting high numbers of women and retaining them for several years, while UBS is struggling with both. For this, Goldman deserves to be applauded.

Beyond the lowest pay grades, however, Goldman looks equally – if not more culpable – as UBS at failing to include women in its highest earning cohorts. At UBS, 21% of people in the top earning quartile are women . At Goldman Sachs, just 17% are.

Goldman stressed on Friday that it’s a meritocracy: “…gender is not a factor in the way that we pay our people,” the bank said in a statement quoted by Bloomberg. “We pay women and men in the same way, using the same compensation criteria, including the nature of their role and their performance.” In a separate memo, CEO Lloyd Blankfein and CEO in waiting David Solomon, said the firm needs to hold itself accountable and to provide, “more opportunities for women and diverse professionals to rise to the highest levels of our firm.”

In a further attempt to remedy the situation, Goldman now aims to recruit equal numbers of women and man into its graduate class by 2021. However, the chart below implies that Goldman’s already doing a very good job at attracting women. – It’s keeping them much beyond the five year point that looks to be the issue.

Separately, Credit Suisse has promoted a youthful(ish) to head its UK advisory and corporate broking team. Financial News reports that Charles Donald joined CS as a graduate in 2005, making him somewhere in his mid-30s now. In his new role, Stewart will be responsible for managing relationships with large UK companies. If you want to get to the top young in banking, it helps to have a lot of visibility with clients.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs said in a memo to staff Thursday that it aims to have women make up half its workforce in the future, starting with an even split in its class of college graduates by 2021. (Bloomberg)

Hard times at another hedge fund as John Paulson becomes the latest to cut staff. (Bloomberg)

Berenberg now has the largest European equity sales team with more than 70 staff. Last year it hired 22 new research staff. (Financial Times)

Alex Wilmot-Sitwell has mysteriously resigned as European president at Bank of America to “pursue opportunities outside the bank.” BofA said it’s a natural time for him to leave, even though he was a high profile figure in the bank’s Brexit arrangements. (Telegraph)

Senior executives at Deutsche Bank forewent their bonuses, but some got a “functional allowance instead.” The chief risk officer’s allowance was earned because it improved relations with U.S. regulators. – Like a bonus for a job well done. (WSJ)

The acquisition of Bear Stearns has been a boon to J.P. Morgan’s trading business. By comparison, fixed income revenues at Barclays – which acquired Lehman – have declined 66% since 2010. (Bloomberg)

Asked to draw an effective leader, people produce a man. (New York Times)

Bankers in Luxembourg contemplate living in the red light district due to a shortage of accommodation (Bloomberg)

Follow @MadameButcher
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)

““

When Gerardo Salandra, CEO and founder of Rocketbots, looks back at the MBA he took at the Chinese University of Hong Kong one element stands out: entrepreneurship training. “By far the most useful course I ever had was applied entrepreneurship,” he says.

The module involved students being paired with struggling start-ups at Hong Kong’s largest incubators, Cyperport and Science Park. They had one month to learn about the business and suggest changes, before pitching the new business model to a room full of investors.

“It was a huge pressure. You really wanted to help, and you knew that, in a way, the future of this company was in your hands,” he says. “It was like the TV show Shark Tank or Dragons’ Den.”

Salandra’s pitch was successful, and he secured the entrepreneur he had been paired with the investment he needed. Fast-forward a year and Salandra found himself pitching to investors again, but this time for his own start-up, Rocketbots.

“The experience was really helpful. You have no idea how many situations I have been in, especially in the last four months, in which I have been going into a room and having to pitch to people who are interested in investing in our business,” says Salandra. “We have seven minutes, and you have to go out and be memorable. If it had not been for that experience at CUHK, I think it would have been harder for us to raise money.”

Not only did the CUHK MBA enable Salandra to hone his entrepreneurial skills, but taking the course was also instrumental in helping him get to where he is today.

Salandra, who was born in El Salvador, started out working as an intern at Google, before moving on to IBM and then fitness app start-up Runtastic. He came to Hong Kong in 2015 to do his MBA, where the CUHK alumni introduced him and other students to CEOs and entrepreneurs while they were still studying.

One member of the CUKH alumni contacted Salandra after seeing his CV. Salandra says: “I still remember his email. He said, ‘Gerry, I am keen to work with you in employment form, partnership form or sponsoring you.’ He was keen to work with me in any possible way.”

After initially working at his company to help him grow his business, the pair went on to co-found Rocketbots, which creates artificial intelligence chatbots for companies. Salandra explains that the company came about after Facebook announced it was opening up its Messenger app to other services.

“It meant you could connect Facebook Messenger to anything,” he says, enabling Messenger to be used as a channel through which people could interact with company chatbots. Within a couple of weeks of starting, Rocketbots had signed up Hong Kong’s largest bank as a customer.

“There is a huge gap in the market between the tools that are currently available and the tools that could be available. That is where Rocketbots was really born,” says Salandra.

The company went on to sign up several other big clients, including luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, home to brands such as Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, and tit completed its first round of funding in November last year. “We are incredibly excited,” adds Salandra.

While Salandra’s MBA concentrated on entrepreneurship and marketing, CUHK has recently adapted the programme to focus on entrepreneurship and technology. Salandra says he is jealous of the students who do the new programme and genuinely wishes he could have taken it himself. He points out that people often associated entrepreneurship with starting your own business, but in reality, it is much more than that.

“I used to work at Google and I tell you the first thing they looked at when they hired someone was does this person have an entrepreneurial spirit because being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean starting a business, it means starting things from scratch,” he says.

Salandra adds that large multinational company and banks also want to hire people who can come in and create new things, not just follow. “I think entrepreneurship is something that is incredibly relevant for today,” he says. “We talk to a lot of industry leaders and they tell us someone with entrepreneurial skills has an incredible edge when it comes to hiring.”

He says that having an MBA that focuses on entrepreneurship is going to have a stronger weight than just a general MBA, and as an employer himself, he always looks for people who are innovative and creative, who have an entrepreneurial spirit. “Over the last few months we have received nearly 400 applications and hired six people. We hire them because we saw this spirit in them,” he says.

Salandra is also enthusiastic about the technology element of CUHK’s programme. “In the next five years, all companies will be IT companies. That is why it is very important for anyone, no matter what they are going to do later on, to have a digital background.”

Another aspect of the CUHK MBA that Salandra says has been invaluable to him is the networking opportunities it offers, with many of his clients coming to him through the CUHK network. He adds that the degree has paid for itself just through the clients CUHK has brought him. “To be honest, I don’t think I would have my own company at this point if I hadn’t done the MBA,” he says.

Something seems to be going on at Deutsche Bank. In the past month, the German bank is understood to have recruited at least three senior macro solutions professionals from Goldman Sachs. As Goldman loses, it seems Deutsche Bank is gaining.

The latest Goldman defector is Felix Helbig, an executive director in the U.S. bank’s London pension and insurance group who dealt with structured rates sales for Germany. Helbig is understood to be joining Deutsche Bank as co-head of the real money group for Austria and Germany.

Neither Goldman nor Deutsche immediately responded to a request to comment.

Helbig is by no means the first person to leave Goldman’s rates team this year. As we’ve reported frequently in recent weeks, Goldman’s London rates business appears to have sprung a leak. Simon Kingsbury, head of European interest rate swaps trading, has left. So has Seb Fassam a top sterling market maker, Stanley Sheriff, a top junior macro trader, Sebastien Angles-Dauriac, a senior structurer in the macro division, and Emmanuel Biensan, a London-based rates salesman.

Helbig is going to Deutsche Bank. So too, is Biensan. So too, it now appears is Angles-Dauriac. The three are thought to be reporting to Panayiotis Stergiou, a Deutsche Bank lifer and head of European rates sales and structuring. However, Deutsche insiders suggest the build is also the work of Sam Wisnia, the former Goldman Sachs partner who heads fixed income and currencies structuring at DB, and who is said to be taking this opportunity to build out the German bank’s team.

The moves come after Deutsche Bank paid an average salary of $730k and an average bonus of $1.1m to its senior risk takers for 2017. Deutsche paid guaranteed bonuses to 18 people in its corporate and investment bank last year.

While Deutsche is poaching some of its best staff, Goldman Sachs is trying to add $1bn in FICC revenues under the plan outlined by its now-ex-co-COO Harvey Schwartz last September. Goldman is hiring at executive director level, although has to fill the vacancies in its macro group. This month it recruited Ram Krishnan for its distressed credit team (from Deutsche) and Jayant Harshvardhan for its credit trading team (from Barclays).

““

It’s easy to lose interest in your finance job isn’t it? Updating spreadsheets, doing presentations, chasing clients, scheduling meeting, writing reports can all be boring work. Humans weren’t designed to sit on the desk for 12 hours a day, staring at screens. When you look out the window, you might see a whole world of alternatives – none of them paying nearly as much as banking. How will you ever afford to leave? And what else could you apply your skills to anyway?

If this is you, I can sympathize. I’ve worked in finance for 18 years and every few months I feel a bit claustrophobic.

My message to you is this: it will pass. Don’t do anything rash. Sit it out. There are ways of keeping your life interesting.

If you’re bored, it may be that you’re too good at your job: there is no challenge, you’re not learning anymore, every day is more of the same, there’s no fresh stimuli. When this happens, your brain will start shutting down.

To avoid this situation, you need to break your routine. It can be small things: go somewhere new for lunch, talk to new people on your floor. It can be something big: ask to be involved in new projects; ask to move to a new team. Banks are huge organizations, there’s no need to stay in your niche: put your head above the parapet.

Secondly, you need to upgrade and add to your skills. If you’re bored, it may be that you haven’t learned a new skill in years. Your mind used to be sharp, now it’s as dull as Captain Ahab’s stump leg. There are a whole load of things you can learn and they don’t even have to be related to finance. Yes, you could take a coding course in your spare time, but you could also learn how to speak French, improve your knowledge of wines or add to your retinue of great jokes. Anything to stop the tedium.

Lastly, you need to be thankful. If you work in finance, you probably have a darn good life in the material sense of things. You’re warm, well fed, well clothed and you live in a country where stuff works. Whenever I start getting bored and craving excitement, I do what the ancient stoics like Seneca used to do: I practice negative visualization. I imagine losing all that I have. I imagine doing without everything my brain takes for granted.

So, next time you’re bored of banking, imagine digging ditches in India. Imagine working in a factory in China. Imagine coal mining in the Appalachians.

Life could be and can be a whole lot worse. Focus on the blessings you have. Enjoy what you’ve achieved.

What I Learnt on Wall Street is an education focused business founded a group of Wall Street veterans from the best firms determined to help the next generation.

Follow @MadameButcher

Photo credit: CSA-Archive/Getty

““

People leaving traditional financial services for cryptocurrency startups is becoming more common. These are the former bankers who are making a name for themselves in the cryptocurrencies and blockchain space.

BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes

No one has a career arc exactly like former Deutsche Bank and Citi trader Arthur Hayes.

During his first week as a full-time employee at Deutsche Bank making markets in exchange-traded funds, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, sending his and many others’ career off-track. Deutsche Bank slashed bonuses and reorganized its trading desks to rein in risk and comply with new capital restrictions. Hayes earned 30%-to-50% less than he’d expected when he signed on. Eventually, he jumped to Citi, but the situation there was no better and he ended up getting laid off.

Hayes pivoted to his Plan B – Bitcoin – at the perfect moment, initially trading it himself. Now 32 years old, he is the co-founder and CEO of BitMEX, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange that serves up cryptoderivatives – futures contracts that let investors make leveraged bets of up to 100-to-1 on the direction of 11 digital currencies.

Hayes’s firm brought in $83m in revenue last year and more than $21m last month alone, Bloomberg reported. It thrives on volatility and makes money whether Bitcoin goes up or down, and Hayes says there’s a lot more excitement compared to the current state of the banking industry.

Bitfinex CSO Phil Potter

Bitfinex chief strategy officer Phil Potter worked for Morgan Stanley in New York in the 1990s but lost his job after bragging at length in The New York Times about his $3,500 Rolex, his opulent lifestyle and his aggressive tactics for making money, according to the New York Times.

The company lost 1,500 Bitcoin, worth around $400k, to a hacker in 2015. But the most damaging incident happened in August 2016 when a thief got almost 120k Bitcoin, worth around $75m at the time.

However, the company made a comeback last year, according to Bloomberg.

Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam

Fred Ehrsam – the Bitcoin entrepreneur who co-founded the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which is back by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital, used to work in G10 FX trading at Goldman Sachs.

Ehrsam says he knew he had to get out of GS when he looked around and asked himself, “Did I want to be any of these people in the next ten years? – The answer was no.” One of the problems with banking, says Ehrsam, is that “the majority of the interesting stuff already happened – it was extracting rent rather than innovating.”

Erhsam recently signed a big deal for Coinbase to partner with Barclays.

Leverj and coinpit.io founder/CEO Bharath Rao

Bharath Rao is the founder/CEO of coinpit.io, a blockchain exchange, and Leverj, a decentralized leveraged exchange built on Ethereum. Previously he worked as a software engineer at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse.

TenX financial adviser Chris Meiss

Chris Miess spent around three years at Goldman, where he was latterly an M&A analyst in London. His route to GS was a study in moving up the banking brands: after leaving the London School of Economics, he spent four months at Deutsche Bank and then four months at Morgan Stanley before settling for 36 months at GS. Now Miess is the CFO of TenX, which offers the TenX Card, a debit and credit card with an accompanying mobile TenX Wallet that can be funded not only with Bitcoin, Ether, Dash and eventually other cryptocurrencies.

BlockEx Capital Markets MD James Godfrey

James Godfrey, managing director of capital markets at BlockEx, 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.

Now healthy, he’s working to grow BlockEx, a blockchain-based 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.
Follow @danbutchrwrites

Have a confidential story, tip or comment you’d like to share? Contact: dbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by actual human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t).

Photo credit: KeremYucel/GettyImages
““

If you have particular technical skills, then you’ll have a leg up when you throw your hat into the ring for a banking job – and not just for back-office roles. There are also plenty of open middle- and front-office jobs right now that require technology expertise, many of which banks are struggling to fill.

Data science is hot

Above all, data scientists are the most sought-after candidates on Wall Street, especially those with experience working in predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“We’re looking for talent more on the technical side than the banking side,” says Vuk Magdelinic, the co-founder/CEO of Overbond, a fintech firm that digitizes bond origination and issuance. “Data science is the most in-demand skill based on what’s going on in finance.”

S&P Global is acquiring Kensho Technologies, a developer of data analytics software, data visualization systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence, for $550m – the largest AI M&A deal in history.

“The Kensho acquisition exemplifies that demand – half a billion dollars for a startup with only three and a half years of existence,” Magdelinic says. “That’s astonishing and illustrates how disruptive AI applications are.

“That’s the number-one trend in financial services and capital markets right now,” he says.

Developers familiar with open source are hot

Dylan Gomez, a principal consultant at Selby Jennings, says that banks are looking to hire candidates with experience using modern open-source technologies for deep learning and neural networks. However, hedge funds can often outbid them for such talent, plus tech firms are competing for those same types of candidates, making those seats hard for banks to fill.

There are front-office positions requiring an algorithm developer skill set that are difficult for banks to fill. Middle- and back-office can be even more challenging to fill with young top talent, because banks are competing with offers that may be higher at hedge funds and that include massive amounts of stock from tech companies.

In response, compensation on Wall Street is trending upward for the right candidates.

“Banks are changing their compensation bands and structures to compete with hedge funds and big tech firms,” Gomez says. “Experience in the machine learning space and big data, that type of skill set is extremely sought-after, but there’s still a strong deference toward computer science.”

Front-office algo positions are highly paid even at a more junior range. In fact, banks are giving candidates right out of a Master’s program in a STEM or computer science program base salaries in the $110k-to-$130k range.

A Ph.D. coming into a bank as an associate, at the top end, could get a $140k base salary.

The compensation band for vice presidents with these in-demand skill sets range from $160k to $200k.

“Where they’re having flexibility is having sign-on and performance bonuses that can compete, as well as offering interesting roles,” Gomez says. “Some banks have a hard and fast stop for $200 on the base for a VP, but they have more flexibility on the bonus.

“That comp range is skewed toward the bonus at higher ranks,” he says. “If you’re over the $250k mark, then bonuses will be paid out in cash and stocks.”

Knowledge of C#, C++, Java and Python still comes in handy, but React, Angular/AngularJS, Java 8, kdb/q/kdb+, Apache Spark and Apache Kafka are a few more open source technologies that financial services firms are using more often
Follow @danbutchrwrites

Photo credit: miljko/GettyImages
““

As banks’ claims to diversity are blown apart by the figures emerging from the UK’s gender pay gap reporting requirements, how does it feel to be a woman in finance? Do you buy the Goldman story that men and women are paid equally for equal work and it’s just a question of getting more women into senior slots, or do you get angry and point to more insidious issues?

We spoke to women working across U.S. and European investment banks about their reaction to the figures. Some were resigned and described them as as a fact of life. Others agreed with Goldman – that the UK government isn’t comparing like with like because a high proportion of women in finance occupy non-front office jobs like personal assistants. Others, however, were angry. And the reasons for their anger weren’t always those discussed in sanitized accounts of women’s grievances.

One senior woman at a European bank argued that the push to promote more women is itself problematic. “The senior men have now got a cover for promoting the younger women who flirt with them,” she said. “They know they have to promote X number of women each year, so they look around and they promote the women who kiss up to them most instead of the women who are the most competent. It’s the same as the old boys’ network, with flirtation instead of familiarity.”

Partly because of this dynamic, she said there’s often a career premium for women who are young and beautiful. “You get a lot of beautiful young women in banking who find themselves replaced by a new generation as they get older. – I’ve seen older women being made to hand their accounts to 22 year-olds. They complain, but they were in that position once – they were the 22 year-old who took another woman’s clients. Women don’t help each other.”

It doesn’t help that the clients are mostly men, particularly in London. A senior woman at a U.S. investment bank on Wall Street said that during a recent trip to London she was struck by the absence of women on the buy-side. Things won’t change, “since the investor base is also dominated by men and aren’t making these demands”.

At the same time, women are losing out in the ongoing push towards juniorisation. As banks look for juniors to take on roles previously occupied by people at higher ranks, young women are stepping forwards. “You see a lot of women who are taking on roles that were previously done by VPs and even though they have the same responsibilities they’ll only be an associate on lower pay,” says another senior woman. “It’s all under the guise of cost cutting.”

Many women reserved their ire for the “F” word: family. Male bankers with families are feted as breadwinners, said one. “There’s still the assumption – often made by senior bankers with stay at home wives – that a woman’s income is the secondary income,” she said. In reality, this often isn’t the case: “Almost all the senior women I know in finance have househusbands, but they’re not going to broadcast that fact.”

While female bankers with husbands and children to support keep quiet for fear of seeming uncommitted to their roles, she said male bankers are more likely to make their familial responsibilities widely known: “I used to work with a man who would shout about how he had four kids at home every year when it came to making redundancies or allocating bonuses.”

One female VP in the investment banking division of a European bank, said that as male colleagues start families, they feel comfortable leveraging their new status to take additional time off, leaving her more overworked than before. “I’m being asked to cover for male bankers who are telling me they can’t take on projects because of their families. I would like a family too, but the stress and overwork from compensating for colleagues’ family time is killing my hormones.”

Things will only change if senior male bankers start promoting women on the basis of their competency, said senior female banker on Wall Street. “Women lose the will to fight against the tide and get tired of putting in the hours and sacrificing family time.” But women also need to ask for what they deserve: “I believe I am paid equal to men in the past few roles I have had, but that is because I have been proactive in finding out how much my peers make, and demanded that I be paid the same, if not more,” she concluded.

““

RBS has recruited Thomas Siegmund from UBS as APAC head and Singapore country executive, its second major Asian hire in just the past few weeks.

Siegmund joined NatWest Markets, the sales and trading brand that now represents RBS’s pared-down business in Asia, earlier this month, according to his public profile.

His move follows that of Jae Jun Lee, Standard Chartered’s former head of structured and illiquid credit sales for Hong Kong and Korea, who is now a Hong Kong-based managing director at RBS.

The two hires suggest that RBS still has the capacity to occasionally attract expensive senior front-office staff in Singapore and Hong Kong.

RBS, which remains owned by the British government, has been chipping away at its business in Asia since 2009 when it sold some of its retail, wealth and commercial units to ANZ. In 2015, it withdrew from Asian corporate banking, reducing its regional headcount from about 3,000 to 200 as it refocused on its core UK market.

Veteran Siegmund was a managing director at UBS in Singapore for almost eight years, firstly as head of FICC trading and sales for APAC (2010 to 2014) and then in a group internal audit, investigation and analysis role. His experience of both the front and middle offices likely appealed to RBS as it searched for someone to lead its Asian operations.

Siegmund started his career in 1992 at Merrill Lynch, where he worked for seven years in fixed-income trading in London, Frankfurt and Tokyo. He then moved to Lehman Brothers and spent nine years in the same field in London and Tokyo, latterly as an MD.

He transferred to Nomura and relocated to Hong Kong in 2009 – as co-head of fixed income sales, trading and structuring for Asia ex-Japan – following the Japanese bank’s acquisition of Lehman’s Asian franchise.

While RBS is now a niche player in Asia, Siegmund has at least made his move at a time when parts of its business are performing (comparatively) well globally. In 2017, revenues across RBS’s macro business (the combined rates and foreign exchange trading desks) rose 5% on 2016, outperforming UK rivals Barclays and HSBC.

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: georgeclerk, Getty

Deutsche Bank may not have even been on your list of potential employers in Asia 12 months ago. The firm was in the midst of redundancies in the region.

But if you’re searching for jobs during the post-bonus season in Singapore or Hong Kong this year, Deutsche is slowly coming back into contention – at least in some functions.

What do you need to know about Asian jobs and careers at Deutsche before you apply to the bank? We looked through its newly-released 2017 annual report and human resources report to find out.

**Deutsche has been expanding in Asia**

Asia Pacific was the only Deutsche region (its others are Germany, EMEA, North America and Latin America) where headcount expanded in 2017. Its workforce there increased 3.8% (762 people) compared with 2016 to reach 20,861. How did Asia grow in the face of Deutsche’s global restructuring? It was “primarily due to insourcing of business critical external roles”, especially technology and COO jobs, according to the firm’s annual report. IT insourcing, which also bolstered staff numbers at DBS in 2017, typically involves taking work away from third-party vendors and moving it in-house. Deutsche has also been adding Asia-based infrastructure jobs in its corporate and investment bank.

Wealth dominates front-office hiring

Not all Deutsche’s new Asian jobs are behind the scenes. Deutsche’s private and commercial bank has extended its “presence in key international markets, especially in Asia”. Its “strong organic growth strategy” in the region partly compensated for an overall fall in global commission and fee income. While Deutsche’s annual report doesn’t specifically comment on its private banking headcount, previous statements indicate that it went up in 2017. Asia Pacific head of wealth management Lok Yim announced plans in June to add 50 client-facing roles in Asia during the second half of 2017. Deutsche stepped up its recruitment in 2017, following senior staff defections the previous year, say headhunters. More hiring could be on the cards for 2018 – the annual report earmarks Asia as an important growth market, and new relationship managers have already come on board.

Transaction banking jobs seem safe

As at Standard Chartered, bread and butter banking at Deutsche is performing well in Asia. The business “acquired numerous major mandates, especially in Europe and Asia, in the automotive sector and from large conglomerates”. Deutsche identifies “strengthening intra-Asian trade” as a “key driver” of global economic growth.

Avoid work in FX in Asia

The region was singled out for the wrong reasons in FX. Asia Pacific foreign exchange and rates revenues decreased last year, “with a strong first quarter of 2017 offset by lower client activity during the remainder of the year”, according to the bank’s annual report. Deutsche’s 2017 earnings, released last month, also blamed low market volatility in Asia for the slump. As we reported at the time, bonuses in Asian FX are likely to be affected as a result.

Part-time work is hard to find in Asia

Banks in Singapore and Hong Kong are talking up their part-time opportunities as they try to recruit and retain more working parents. But Deutsche has a mere 43 part-time staff across Asia Pacific, according to its 2017 human resources report. That compares with more than 12,000 in Germany and more than 1,000 in the rest of Europe.

Millennials are more welcome in Asia

The average Deutsche employee in Asia Pacific is 34.5 years old. That’s up from 33 in 2013, but it’s still a lot younger than the decidedly middle-aged global average of 41.7. Last year’s influx of insourced developers (who tend to be younger than staff in many non-tech functions) and Deutsche’s large technology centres in India and the Philippines are likely helping to keep its regional workforce comparatively youthful.

Asian employees don’t hang around as long

Perhaps as a result of being younger (banking professionals tend to move jobs more often at the start of their careers), Deutsche’s Asian staff are staying with the bank for ‘only’ 5.2 years on average. That’s about half the tenure (10.3 years) of their colleagues in EMEA (ex-Germany).

Deutsche has just gone “gender neutral”

“At the beginning of 2017, a consistent approach to parental leave was implemented in the Asia-Pacific region”, says the HR report. “It no longer differentiates between a male and a female parent, but instead it is gender-neutral and takes into account the roles of primary and secondary caregiver”.

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: Goran Jakus Photography, Getty

There are bonuses, and there are bonuses. Any risk takers at Deutsche Bank who are feeling happy with their $1.1m bonuses for 2017 might feel a little less so when they consider that 10 years ago, a 36 year-old trader at the bank received a bonus of £90m ($140m) for a single year.

That trader was Christian Bittar, the French-born favourite of then Deutsche Bank CEO Anshu Jain. Bittar didn’t get his big bonus for nothing. He was one of Deutsche’s most profitable rates traders ever, and was rumoured to have made nearly €2bn in audited profits for Deutsche Bank over a five year period, partly by betting that the cost of borrowing in euros for three and six months would rise more quickly than one-month rates, something that paid-off amply when Lehman Brothers collapsed.

As with many good traders, Bittar was parsimonious, fussy about food, and relentlessly dissatisfied with his giant paychecks. Bloomberg reports that neither his car nor his clothes were flashy, that he alternated between eating only eggs and guzzling junk food and Diet Cokes, and that he kept lobbying DB for ever-higher bonuses by threatening to leave for a hedge fund.

Bittar has now crashed Icarus-like down to earth. After being fired by DB in 2011, losing $50m in unvested stock and being fined £10m by the FCA, he confessed earlier this month to rigging Euribor and is now in police custody awaiting sentencing when a related trial ends this summer. Sometimes it’s better to be slow and steady than fast and flashy and fueled by nothing but boiled eggs.

Separately, a dark rider has drawn up alongside Barclays. It is the trim figure of Edward Bramson, an activist investor who reportedly thinks he can double Barclays’ stock price by effecting a “turnaround” and “pushing for change.” What this will involve exactly is not clear, but Bramson has a history of being both aggressive and successful and Barclays’ under-performing investment bank is a big reason for its stock trading at only 68% of book value.

Meanwhile:

A reminder: Barclays’ investment bank consumes two thirds of its capital and has made sub-par returns for many years. (Evening Standard)

Poor Gary Cohn: Trump said he could be director of the CIA and then appointed Gina Haspel instead. (Business Insider)

Jörg Kukies, the former co-chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs for Germany and Austria at Goldman Sachs has taken a huge salary cut and joined the German finance ministry. This kind of thing almost never happens in Germany. (Handelsblatt)

Citi hired Michela Ferrulli from BAML as its head of equities sales and sales trading for the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Asia. (Business Insider)

James Gorman the arch-strategist: Ssnce he took over as chief executive in 2010, Morgan Stanley’s share price has outpaced Goldman’s by more than a third. (Financial News)

Jimmy Cayne is still playing bridge. (Wall Street Journal)

““

A former director at Deutsche Bank who left the firm in 2014 to join Goldman Sachs is back at the German bank, this time as a managing director.

Asif Karmally, an executive director at Goldman Sachs who worked in structured finance sales in the fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC) division for last four years, joined Deutsche in Dubai as an MD last month.

Apart from his four years at GS, Karmally has spent his entire career at Deutsche, which he joined in 2004 after taking an MBA at the NYU Stern School of Business. In previous 10 year sojourn with the bank, he worked with Middle East financial institutions on asset liability management solutions, including funding, investments, and overall capital markets strategy, rising to become a director.

In his new role as a DB MD, Karmally will work in the financial solutions group in the Middle East.

Karmally isn’t the first ex-Goldman employee to switch to Deutsche. As we reported yesterday, the German bank has been poaching key members of Goldman’s macro team. He does, however, stand out for having used his four year interlude at GS as a stepping stone to an MD promotion at DB. As we’ve noted before, Goldman is busy hiring-in multiple executive directors externally. Karmally’s strategy suggests some of those hires could stay at GS for a few years before quitting for promotions at the banks they came from.

““

Shary Mudassir has been in banking a while. He joined RBC Capital Markets in 2009 and worked his way up from an associate on the capital markets rotational programme to become a managing director in global equities trading. Like plenty of people in finance, he has an MBA, but he also has something more: an MSc in predictive analytics which he took while working at RBC. For Mudassir, this is the future.

When he joined RBC nine years ago, Mudassir says 90% of people joining the equity trading unit typically had either an MBA or CFA. Now, he says a similar proportion are math, science, engineering or technology (STEM) majors.

“It’s a complete reversal – I joined in 2009, and RBC at that time was just ramping up the electronic trading side of things, taking a very traditional model of trading stocks over the phone with clients and moving to an automated approach to using technology for trading stocks,” Mudassir says. “We were part of a global team that was able to use software engineering while being involved in trading.

“As time has gone on and the bank has evolved, more and more business has shifted to the electronic, algorithmic style of trading, and for the last three-and-a-half years, we’ve been incorporating AI and machine learning.”

Mudassir should know. Until recently he was a director in global algorithmic trading for RBC and was building out the bank’s algorithmic trading strategies for its equities platform. Now, he’s busy opening artificial labs for RBC in Toronto and Montreal. As such he’s at the forefront of the new move to introduce artificial intelligence and data science into everything from compliance to the trading floor.

While there are still plenty of CFAs and MBAs around, Mudassir says it’s STEM expertise that is now lacking. And the only way to bridge the gap is to hire students. “Not enough people are doing this work in Canada,” says Mudassir. “You have to create and build that resource pool internally by recruiting students with a STEM or engineering background.

“Our focus is broadening beyond one or two desks on the equities side – we’re building that out.”

The shift away from traditional MBAs and CFAs is symptomatic of a broader shift in the nature of trading, says Mudassir. “The business has evolved from requiring effective operators to builders and creators who can analyze large data sets using statistical tools and use that analysis to build trading platforms.

“We need people with a tech and STEM background who can continuously monitor the performance of these systems to further enhance them,” he says. “The entire lifecycle has a technical quantitative component to it.

“The push to become a digitally enabled bank of the future comes from up high – we’re focused across the bank on hiring technically inclined talent to supplement the finance talent we have.”

Follow @danbutchrwrites

Photo credit: PeopleImages/GettyImages
““

KPMG director Piers Hogarth-Scott is currently building a team in what he says is “the most exciting and dynamic area in management consultancy in Australia”.

It’s not hard to see why he thinks this way. In his role as National Practice Leader of the Internet of Things (IoT) practice at KPMG in Australia, Hogarth-Scott is working in a field that connects the physical and digital worlds, and is forecast to add up to $120bn annually to the Australian economy within the next eight years.

“Back in 2015, we realised that IoT will completely reshape the way our clients do business. It will have a massive impact across all sectors – on everything from cars to farming – so we made a case for it to be a big part of KPMG’s growth strategy,” says Sydney-based Hogarth-Scott.

The Australian IoT practice, the first of its kind in the country, opened a year later and remains the only dedicated IoT practice among the top tier consultancies. “Unlike some other firms, we haven’t made IoT part of the technology practice, because we see tech only as an enabler of IoT. We work horizontally across KPMG’s different consulting businesses.”

Hogarth-Scott’s team employs about 30 consultants in Sydney and Melbourne, covering three core sectors: smart cities, precincts and campuses; smart food and fibre; and smart energy and natural resources. He now wants to increase headcount by about 50% over the next year because of “strong demand for our services in the pipeline from clients”.

A few of these new hires will come from industry – someone from a mining company could work with energy IoT clients, for example – but most will have a consultancy background. “Broad experience at consulting firms can be a significant advantage, but for this next stage of our hiring we want you to have some IoT expertise as well,” says Hogarth-Scott.

Senior IoT consultants typically also need industry knowledge. “The more senior you are, the more likely you’ll focus on a sector. For example, in smart food and fibre IoT, we often hire people who have experience working for agricultural companies or government departments,” explains says Hogarth-Scott. “If you’re junior, you might not be aligned to a sector right away, but over time you’ll naturally fall into one.”

No matter your level, if you join the IoT team at KPMG in Australia this year you will help to play a role in shaping what has been called the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. “IoT gives us greater visibility over what’s happening in our physical environments. It can help us make better and faster decisions, automate processes, and even enable prediction of future events,” says Hogarth-Scott. “Its transformative potential also makes IoT an inspiring area to work in.”

Hogarth-Scott describes his team as having a “start-up culture within a large organisation”. “We’re always working in fascinating new areas for clients in different parts of the economy,” he adds. “For example, smart-cities projects are about trying to solve important societal problems such as reducing crime, improving transportation, reducing wastage, and making power more efficient.”

Much of the IoT work that KPMG carries out in Australia revolves around developing “smart strategies for clients”, says Hogarth-Scott. His team also works across a range of other disciplines, from cyber security and data analytics, to vendor sourcing and operating-model design. “Importantly, we also help clients build a business case and an economic model for IoT. We examine what they need to invest and what the return will be, to determine whether the project is actually viable.”

Given the variety of the work, IoT jobs at KPMG require you to work closely with colleagues across the firm. “Because we operate horizontally, we regularly pull in people from other KPMG services lines to help our clients, and we provide IoT advice to theirs. About 300 consultants in Australia have worked on IoT projects just in the past year alone,” says Hogarth-Scott. “We call it the ‘one KPMG’ approach – if you work here, you don’t work in a silo.”

All of the new jobs that Hogarth-Scott is recruiting for this year are client focused. “One of the great things about this team is that everyone from the top down is delivering work directly to clients.”

Hogarth-Scott is also collaborating with KPMG’s Global Technology Centre of Excellence to help leverage our competitive advantage in IoT across members firms around the globe. “In just two years, we’ve built a market leading capability in IoT, helping clients improve business processes, create better customer experiences, develop more innovative products, reduce risk, launch new products and decrease costs,” says Hogarth-Scott. “And now we want to grow the team even further. If you’re passionate about how IoT can change the world, we’d like to hear from you.”

Bobby Vedral, a Goldman Sachs partner who managed cross asset global market strats for Goldman’s securities division has left the firm. Insiders say his last day was March 9th.

Vedral’s LinkedIn profile says he’s “retired.” He graduated in 1997 and joined Deutsche Bank, putting him someone in his mid-40s now. Vedral declined to comment on his exit, but sources close to his departure said he plans to take a year out before forging a new career in a different industry.

Vedral made headlines last November for a speech he made at a private equity conference in Amsterdam where he said that the weakness of the UK government was “scary” and that a government led by Jeremy Corbyn would be a “disaster.” “If we have Corbyn, we have Cuba without the sun,” said Vedral, who is German. He added that the Labour Party would likely raise taxes on the wealthy and drive bankers and banking jobs to Europe.

Vedral’s exit comes at a time when Goldman is focused on building up its strats team under (among others) Thalia Chryssikou and Stefan Bollinger, who were promoted as the global co-heads of sales strats in March last year. Chryssikou said last year that 27% of the experienced hires in Goldman’s FICC division were strats in 2017 and CEO Lloyd Blankfein said last month that analytics will play a key role in Goldman’s attempt to increase revenues.

Vedral’s departure also comes in a “partner year” for Goldman Sachs. At the end of 2018, Goldman will elevate a new round of partners from among its current managing directors. It’s usual for existing partners to retire to make way for their newly promoted (ex-) colleagues.

Photo: Alicia_Garcia/Getty

““

If you’re leaving bank now, you might want to be an entrepreneur. You may also want to join an established financial technology firm. Maybe you can fund yourself using bonuses you earned in banking, but chances are that eventually you’ll need to get venture-capital firms on board to fund your growth initiatives and take the next step. At this stage, you may discover that all that your experience as a banker doesn’t cut it when you’re talking to VCs.

VC investors are a unique audience, and some are very tough nuts to crack. We asked ex-bankers who’ve been on VC pitches for their advice on the pitfalls.

Don’t assume that a copy-cat or easily replicable technology will get the job done

Former J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and HSBC banker Spencer Lake, having risen all the way to vice chairman and group general manager of global banking and markets of the latter, retired from banking in 2016. He is now an investor in, adviser to and board member of fintech startups. These include Fenergo, which provides client lifecycle management software to investment, corporate and private banks, and cloud banking software firm nCino, both of which got significant investments from Insight Venture Partners, as well as Callsign, a cybersecurity authentication provider that received a recent investment from Excel Venture Management.

A lot of new fintech companies launch without any intellectual property (IP) that could be copyrighted, patented or trademarked. That either means your idea isn’t unique or someone else will come along and steal it.

“You have to have the right IP that is specialized so that your solution will be unique,” Lake says. “A former banker who is not a technologist typically has not thought through that tech differential, unless he’s pitching someone else’s IP.

“If you don’t have those attributes that VCs look for, then you will struggle with your pitch,” he says.

Don’t mention competitors, even if your technology is better

Don’t lead with how the problem you are solving is being addressed by existing financial institutions or other fintech startups, especially if your argument is that current solutions are overly complicated. That is the fastest way to lose your audience, according to Katie Hunt, early-stage company adviser and co-founder of The Fund, a New York-based VC firm.

“Start with explaining the simplest form of the problem you are solving and then dive deeper into how you are solving it and why your solution is different,” Hunt says. “Your pitch should be focused on your company, not on why innovation is necessary in the market as a whole.

“All a potential investor really needs is to understand what you are solving, how you are solving it and where you are in that process,” she says.

Don’t use buzzwords as a crutch when pitching VCs

Just because you use the phrase “machine learning” during a VC pitch meeting, it doesn’t mean you’ll be taken for a machine learning expert.

“People get enamored with terminology that sounds good and I’m sure feels good [to say during a VC pitch] – AI is the latest buzzword, so everyone wants to do something around AI,” Lake says. “They have a business proposition, but they don’t have a use-case.

“It’s critical in tech to have a problem that needs to get solved rather than a solution without a problem,” he says. “Blockchain is another one – it’s an infrastructure design; it’s not something specific that has a use-case just because blockchain [is hot].”

Don’t overlook your fintech idea fits into a potential addressable market

The VC community is very attuned to the various forms of tech they focus on. They need to see that you understand the lay of the land and are thinking big.

“If you’re a former banker who’s not a technologist by training, focus on a big market with plenty of potential, a marketplace that is big enough so you can see value creation,” Lake says. “You have to have a real go-to-market strategy to commercialize what you’re trying to do and the people to take it to market in a systematic and meaningful way.”
Follow @danbutchrwrites

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: dbutcher@efinancialcareers.com
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by actual human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t).

Photo credit: iammotos/GettyImages
““

I’m a senior contractor with a long history of working in banking. I have ten years’ solid experience in my field and have worked across top tier banks. I am also a woman and a mother. I took a year of maternity leave and now I am back on the market. And I am finding it almost impossible to find a new role.

Before you say that this is just how it is for experienced contractors in banking now, I’d like to say that it’s not. It’s because I’m a woman and I have had a baby., I know this because the day I put my CV out there I received four calls from agents. The next day I received three more. They were all interested until I mentioned I’d been on maternity leave.

This is how a typical conversation went:

Agent: “Hi, I’ve seen your profile and I think you’d be a great fit for a role I’m working on.”

Me: “Great, tell me more”

Agent: Goes on to tell me more about the role and to gauge my interest. There’s a short discussion on my rate expectation and they ask for a full CV.

Me: “I’ll send that across to you shortly.”

Agent: “So, how soon can you leave your current contract?”

Me: “I’m available now – I’m just finishing up on maternity leave.”

Agent: “Oh, you’re on maternity leave…”

We’d finish on the phone and in most cases, the promised right to represent email would never come through. When it did, there would be complications like the rate suddenly being much lower than expected, or an obscure requirement cropping up. The first time it happened, I thought nothing of it, but the more it happened, the more I started wondering. Was it because I’d been on maternity leave?

Personally, I think it was. On one occasion, for example, I was called three consecutive times early in the morning for a role a recruiter insisted I was a “perfect match” for. When I mentioned that I’d been on maternity leave, he said “Oh right,” and then, “Unfortunately this is a full time position.”…I told him that was great as I wasn’t looking for a part time role. Nothing else came of it.

I’m not the only one. I know of other female contractors who’ve had similar experiences. One suggested it’s best to use personal contacts when you come back from mat leave because recruiters are so unhelpful. Another advised emailing recruiters and saying, “Are you considering candidate who have been or are on maternity leave”. Even if nothing comes of the role, maybe it will force the recruiter to question their prejudices and to see the candidate, not the maternity leave.

In truth, I don’t think the problem is just the maternity (although this is certainly a lot of it) – it’s also the leave. I’ve also been told that because I’ve been “off” for a year, I should consider myself lucky to have any job at all.

There are plenty of laws to protect women, but they only apply to full time employees. When you’re a contractor in banking, it’s still the Wild West.

So I want to set the record straight. Women who have children don’t all want to work part time hours, or have special treatment. We won’t come to work with baby sick in our hair. Most of us who have taken time out, through choice or necessity, develop a set of skills that are priceless in a traditional workplace. Time management, crisis management, staying calm under pressure. You take the wins when you get them and make the best of everything else.

And when the time is right, a real desire to get back to the world of work means that parents, especially in my experience women, who have been on maternity leave, want to return to work and prove that they are as good or even better at their jobs than ever before. Give us chance. If not, you’re losing out.

Susan Montag is the pseudonym of a contractor who is looking for a job with a bank in London.

“”

Photo: IPGGutenbergUKLtd/Getty

Dylan Halterlein, Citi’s Hong Kong-based head of Asia Pacific Delta One trading, has left the bank to make private investments.

One of the most senior traders in the Asian banking sector, Halterlein was at Citi for almost five years as a managing director, according to his public profile. He departed last month and now describes himself as a “private investor”.

Halterlein’s main focus at Citi was expanding its synthetics footprint in Asia across ETFs, swaps and stock loans, acting as a bridge between the firm’s equities and prime finance businesses.

Prior to Citi, Halterlein worked for Goldman Sachs in Japan and Hong Kong between 2003 and 2012, and helped the bank build out its Delta One platform in Asia. He was head of trading for Asia Pacific One Delta (2010 to 2012), head of trading for Japan and Korea One Delta (2008 to 2010), and head Japan program trading (2006 to 2008). He made MD at Goldman in 2006 and partner four years later.

Halterlein started his career in 1992 at Susquehanna International and spent five years as an equity options trader in San Francisco and Japan. He then joined Deutsche Bank Securities in Tokyo, focused on index and single-stock options trading, and program trading.

Despite the loss of Halterlein, Citi has been building its Delta One team globally. As we reported in late November, it hired three New York-based traders in the space of a month: Kai Chen from UBS; David Rustico from Barclays; and Christopher Shanks from Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Delta One specialists, who trade securities that track an underlying asset as closely as possible, are in short supply and (comparatively) high demand in Asia, especially at a senior level. In August, for example, Dereke Seeto left Credit Suisse to join Societie Generale in Hong Kong as head of securities finance and Delta One sales for Asia Pacific.

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: fanjianhua, Getty

Is Goldman Sach’s expanding strats team the hottest place to work in the finance sector? Perhaps. Only last month CEO Lloyd Blankfein said strats give the bank a “competitive advantage” and will be a “key differentiator” for the future.

But there’s now another contender in the mix, BlackRock’s systematic active equities (SAE) arm, and it’s offering hipper and potentially more interesting jobs than those at Goldman. The $100bn computer-powered quantitative investment unit, which employs 80 portfolio managers and researchers, flew under the radar for years, but has recently become more critical to BlackRock’s operations, reports the Financial Times.

Mark Wiseman, global head of active equities, says SAE is already “at the centre of what BlackRock does” and will soon grow in importance as a testbed for cutting-edge new products. Wiseman wants SAE to transform BlackRock’s entire business by incubating new techniques that will spread across its asset management complex. As a result, SAE appears an attractive place to work if you want a stable job within an influential and growing team.

But its appeal extends beyond this – SAE is also cool (at least in the context of the finance sector). It’s based in San Francisco, where neighbouring offices include a medical cannabis dispensary and ecological co-working space, rather than on Wall Street. Wiseman wants his team to operate like the famous research institute Bell Labs.

And while banks are trying to manufacture interesting jobs (think, fintech innovation groups), SAE roles at BlackRock appear to be genuinely so. They will give you a taste of academia (without the salary cut) and you’ll be working alongside more than 30 PhDs in computer science, physics and engineering. “SAE’s research process borrows from academia,” reports the FT. “An analyst proposes an investment idea, and is then assigned a ‘referee’ who spends a week trying to demolish the thesis.”

If you don’t make it into SAE itself, try BlackRock’s new ‘integration group’, dubbed ‘Middleware’, which is helping to spread SAE’s data-driven tools around the company. Its head, Doug Chow, has hired more than a dozen staff already and wants to have a 30-strong team by the end of next year.

Separately, Morgan Stanley president Colm Kelleher has some bad news for traditional bond trading jobs. “We can’t wait for fixed income to go electronic. Technology is our friend,” Kelleher told a Morgan Stanley conference in London yesterday. About 80% of US bond deals are still carried out via telephone or a chat service, but Kelleher wants fixed income to go the way of equities, which trade overwhelmingly electronically, reports Reuters.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs bankers in London caught off guard by announcement of new CEO. (Financial News)

Deutsche Bank bolsters prime brokerage division in London. (HFM Week)

Who will succeed Jörg Kukies as co-head of Goldman Sachs in Germany? (eFinancialCareers.de – German language link)

Robots could make the next financial crisis even worse, says Goldman Sachs. (Business Insider)

London’s top bankers under 40. (Financial News)

Uncertain banker submits pertinent career question. (Financial Times)

Clones at the top of Goldman Sachs. (Financial News)

Why bankers are constantly terrified of going to jail. (Screaming and Shouting)

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: yuoak, Getty

If you want to get an internship or a first full-time job in finance, your CV will need to be exemplary. You need to think about a CV as a photo taken by a professional photographer. It only shows the parts of you which are the most attractive to the viewer. This is what to include.

1. Personal information

Only include your last and first name (same font size as the titles of your CV), email and phone number using the international format (e.g. +33 6 12 34 56 68 for French cellphone).
Don’t include a photo. Don’t include your age. Don’t include your mailing address.

2. Education

Provide the name and location for each of your schools. If your school is not well known, provide its ranking from a reputable provider (eg. The FT, the QS ranking.) This line should be in bold. The line below giving the title of your diploma should be italics. Only include the year of beginning and end of study (not the months).
With regards to your current school, do not preface it with “current” but write down the year of end of study. Banks need this so that they can establish which intern programs you’re eligible to apply to.

Below the title of your degree, indicate your GPA and – more importantly your ranking if you have it. Put this in brackets after your GPA. Eg. (Top 5%). Also indicate if you belong to the “Dean’s list”.

Below the GPA, you can mention courses you’ve taken that are relevant to investment banking. However, only include 3-4 max.
At the end of this section, include any other qualifications like the CFA. Only mention GMAT if your score is stellar.

3. Work Experience

For each internship, start with the name of the company on the first line, in bold. If the company is not well known, add in the sector it works for and the size of the business (eg. Employees, revenues). Add the month your internship started and the number of months it ran for.

On a second line, add your job title in italics. Eg. M&A intern. This doesn’t have to be your exact title as an intern, but a title which will explain what you did succinctly to someone reading your CV.

Add the country location on the far right. You do not need to put country and city.

Below these two first lines, only include achievement-based bullet points. – You do not want a job description, a recruiter wants to know what you achieved personally, not a general description of your role.

• Use action verbs in the past tense only.
• Each bullet points should be a maximum of 1.5 lines (ideally only 1 line).
• Use the STAR method to fill in each bullet point. Each point should explain which skill you proved.
• job description (i.e. the recruiter wants to read what you have specifically done and not a general description of the role)
• You can include more bullet points for more relevant and/or recent experience

4. Extra-curricular experience

This section can also be called “additional Information,” or, “extra-curricular activities” and/or, “leadership experience.”

The structure of this section should be the same as for work experience. Instead, of company name, give the name of the association you’ve been involved with. Then specify the size (e.g. budget, number of students involved) and the area in which the association is involved.

Only include experiences where you had an active role (e.g. VP communication, President). Don’t say you were a “member of the finance club;” it does not show any real involvement.

5. Language & IT skills

Keep it simple. Provide one line listing languages in which you are either native, fluent, or intermediate (write the level of proficiency in brackets). Remember that you may be tested in interviews.

Add any programming languages relevant to the position you are applying for. Do not mention here the fact that you know how to use Datastream, Factset or any other database – it only takes a few hours to know how to use them.

6. Interests

Recruiters want to know whether you are a person with whom they would like to work. You need to show you can talk about things other than finance, and that you are a « fun » person to work with.

Recruiters want to see that you’re interesting. They also want to see that your competitive and resilient. For every sport, activity you mention, put in brackets the length of practice and the length of competition if relevant.

Ferdinand Petra is affiliate professor of Finance at HEC Paris and a former banker at Barclays and J.P. Morgan. Ferdinand-Petra.com.

Related articles:

Meanwhile:

Related articles:

Related articles:

BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes

Bitfinex CSO Phil Potter

Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam

Leverj and coinpit.io founder/CEO Bharath Rao

TenX financial adviser Chris Meiss

BlockEx Capital Markets MD James Godfrey

Related articles:

Data science is hot

Developers familiar with open source are hot

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Deutsche has been expanding in Asia

Wealth dominates front-office hiring

Transaction banking jobs seem safe

Avoid work in FX in Asia

Part-time work is hard to find in Asia

Millennials are more welcome in Asia

Asian employees don’t hang around as long

Deutsche has just gone “gender neutral”

Related articles:

Meanwhile:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Don’t assume that a copy-cat or easily replicable technology will get the job done

Don’t mention competitors, even if your technology is better

Don’t use buzzwords as a crutch when pitching VCs

Don’t overlook your fintech idea fits into a potential addressable market

Related articles:

Related articles:

Related articles:

Meanwhile:

Related articles:

1. Personal information

2. Education

3. Work Experience

4. Extra-curricular experience

5. Language & IT skills

6. Interests

Related articles:

**Deutsche has been expanding in Asia**