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Striking out from a banking career to launch your own firm is something that’s only for the most confident among us. If you’ve got a real blue chip of a personal brand, you can get very rich this way, but if your franchise is good rather than great, then you’re likely to find out that fact pretty quickly. Three former Institutional Investor poll-winners are taking a shot at the title this week, reports Financial News, as On Field Investment Research launches as an equity research boutique, run by Mark Stockdale (former head of research at UBS), Arnaud Pinatel (most recently of Moore Capital, before that Exane) and Yassine Touahri (also of Exane). Good luck guys…

The problem that small advisory firms of all kinds tend to come up against is the most basic economics – it’s awfully difficult to get paid. For some reason, people who know that their professional advisors work for money, and who are happy to write a large cheque for an hour with a senior lawyer, tend to be reluctant to pay the same amount of money for an hour’s worth of financial advice that could generate them much more value. The way that the industry has worked over the years has been to try and treat the client as a personal friend, to emphasise relationships over transactions and to suggest options which are in line with existing priorities and beliefs. This makes it awkward for the buy side, as they experience something that feels like a chat with a pal after which you end up being led into an idea that was close to what you were thinking anyway, and then get presented with a bill.

This is less of a problem for the big banks, because they have more scope to bundle different services together, to measure profitability across the bank as a whole, and therefore to accept payment in one division for services rendered in another. Not only does this help to obfuscate the true pricing of any one service, it also handily puts a few layers of separation between the touchy-feely relationship handlers and the debt collectors. It’s even better, of course, if the payoff for five years of advice comes in the form of a big capital markets or M&A transaction, where a truly massive fee can be concealed by making it a smallish percentage of a huge number.

The one advantage that boutiques have comes from their very smallness. If an idea or a piece of analysis comes from On Field, and you’re paying a direct and identifiable fee for it, then you can have a reasonable expectation that the idea has only been given to a small number of clients. If the same idea came from a bulge bracket firm, then it would have lower value precisely because you would expect it to have already been broked all across the Street. The M&A boutiques have a similar value proposition; if you hire them, you can be more confident that there’s no conflict of interest with your competition.

And when the model works, it works well. As Stockdale says, “[in the past] the perception was that if you were a bank at the top of the rankings, the buy-side would pay for your research. In fact, they only wanted a selected number of teams, but took the rest”. If you can take even a percentage of the value of a bulge bracket relationship, and split it between three guys (after paying for an office, compliance etc), then you can do very well. No guts, no glory …

Separately, Brevan Howard is sending out slightly mixed messages. On the one hand, it’s cutting back its office space and not renewing its lease on the ground floor of its office building in London. That means goodbye to the gym, kitchen, meeting area and ground floor reception, with some of these functions presumably relocated to the first-floor space that they will continue to occupy. But on the other hand, it’s not cutting back on fund launches, with a new central bank rates fund to be managed by Fash Golchin, according to Reuters.

It’s the age-old dilemma of hedge fund marketing – what kind of a message do you want your head office to be sending? On the one hand, it needs to speak of success and money making, hence the premium locations and modern art that tends to be seen there. You also want to keep the staff happy so that you can keep attracting the best managers and traders, so the kitchens and gyms are important too. But on the other hand, particularly when performance has been so-so, you don’t necessarily want to draw too much attention to the sort of things that the management fee can pay for. Added to which, most hedge funds are partnerships, so the cost of these things comes straight out of the boss’s pocket.

Meanwhile

Why would a superstar private banker at the “write your cheque” stage of his career decide to leave the industry for a job at an Australian retail fund manager? Perhaps because, despite his success at Credit Suisse, Francesco de Ferrari was never really a company man and more of a manager than a personal fee generator. (FINews)

High stakes for the SEC as they decide whether or not to take action against Elon Musk for market manipulation in the aftermath of the notorious “take private” tweets. If they decide to do nothing, the SEC itself could come in for some harsh criticism.(Bloomberg)

After a political candidate endorsed medical marijuana, Wells Fargo closed her campaign’s bank account. Is this an overcautious KYC policy, or have things gone too far in delegating law enforcement to the banking system. (New York Times)

How do you talk a client out of a bad idea? An American wealth manager shares some of the frequently asked questions he has experienced when his clients start to enquire about Bitcoin and ICOs (Wealth Management)

Layoffs in JP Morgan Chase asset management – about a hundred jobs at risk. (WSJ)

Some good news for Tesla as Deutsche Bank agrees to extend its warehouse loan facility. (TheStreet)

The business of private equity always used to be, according to its publicity material, adding value to companies by shrewd operational management involvement. Now it’s all about deal selection, as private equity investors increasingly take minority stakes without control rights, in order to get into growth companies. (Financial News)

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Whether you’re climbing the promotion ladder or keeping an eye on the job market, the ugly truth about the investment banking industry – or any other industry – is that the org chart is also an age pyramid. When the overall banking sector is growing rapidly, it’s possible to forget this as new jobs are created, but in more static times, the number of senior vacancies is to a large extent driven by the number of senior people who retire or move on to other fields.

So it’s worth keeping an eye on the retirement prospects of the generation above you. It’s never the most edifying experience to be in the company of a crowd of mid-level directors surrounding an aging MD, particularly one with poor health, but this is where the opportunities arise. And if you’re looking to replace an MD, your options right now are not great.

Senior bankers tend to come in two varieties. The first kind are the driven type-A masters of the universe. These ones aren’t really worth watching because they do it for the love of the game and they almost never retire voluntarily. The second kind are the ones who are in the job because they’re good at it, not because they love it, and who dream of a comfortable life of leisure once they’ve made their pile.

The retirement schedule of the second type of MD has historically been determined by school fees. However good conditions are in the market, if you have to write a five figure termly cheque out of post-tax income, you’re not going to be building up the kind of retirement wealth you need. For this reason, the key to understanding when someone is going to retire is to know the age of his or her youngest child. Once the last school uniform has been taken to the charity shop, the mental countdown will have started, and it’s unlikely to last much longer than the three years of an undergraduate degree.

Unfortunately, though, this useful rule of thumb might not work going forward. Costs are rising in the form of university fees and the need to help offspring onto the housing ladder. And retirement plans are dependent on wealth, which for senior investment bankers in London is very closely tied to the property market. Downsizing or moving to the country is often a big part of the plan, and the sale proceeds or rental income from a prestige property tend to be the factor that makes the overall economics work. This is even more likely to be the case for the current generation of bankers in their mid to late fifties, who will be aware that if they were to hang on to statutory retirement age, they will benefit in full from their membership of the extremely generous defined benefit schemes that banks used to run in the 1980s and 90s but which are now for the most part closed.

This all means that things might start to get delayed. The London property market, particularly at the high end, is not in the best of shape; asking prices are falling and expensive houses are spending a lot longer on the market. Nor is the high end of the rental market looking particularly healthy. With Brexit on the way, foreign executives are less likely to relocate to the UK and significantly less likely to be interested in signing multi-year contracts when they do. It’s not going to be quite as easy to finance an early retirement and the prospect of serving out the last few years, or waiting for a generous offer in a round of voluntary redundancies is going to look much more attractive. The ambitious middle tier might have to keep an eye on the corner office for a while more.

Dan Davies is a retired former investment banker, currently interested in any offers on a five-bed in North London.

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Goldman Sachs has roped in yet another senior equity researcher as it continues to strengthen its research team under the new regulatory framework MiFID II. Graig Suvannavejh, a veteran equity research analyst who specializes in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, joined Goldman as an executive director earlier this month in its London office.

A Ph.D. in Neuroscience, Suvannavejh comes with 18 years of experience. He is covering the European biotechnology sector at Goldman. Before joining the U.S. bank, he spent 18 months as director of business development for specialty products at pharmaceuticals company AbbVie in Chicago.

MiFID II, which came into effect this January, requires banks to unbundle their research from other services by charging separately for it to avoid conflicts of interest. This can increase cost and erode profits for investment banks, as clients are less likely to pay for the separate research service. It is also expected to lower the prices for access to research, which may eventually lead to fewer equity research jobs in Europe.

To mitigate the risk, Goldman Sachs and other major investment banks are building teams of ‘big name’ researchers – senior sector specialists like Suvannavejh – who they hope will increase revenues for them under the new MiFID II framework.

One London-based recruiter previously described this as “de-juniorization”. “Goldman traditionally had a lot of junior researchers who were given big responsibilities early. These big hires suggest things might be changing there,” the recruiter told us, commenting on a spate of senior research moves at Goldman that began two years ago.

Suvannavejh’s appointment fits perfectly into this pattern of elite hiring because he boasts a sought-after combination of experience in both banks and biotech firms. Suvannavejh started his career with J.P. Morgan as an analyst in 2000 but moved to CIBC World Markets a year later, where he stayed for two and a half years. Over the next decade, his stints included working as a senior publishing equity researcher at UBS and Jefferies, focused on pharmaceuticals and biotech.

Between September 2014 and July 2018, however, Suvannavejh worked in the industry he previously covered as a researcher, taking on senior business development roles at U.S.-based biotech companies Biogen, Alzheon and AbbVie.

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When reporting quarterly earnings, banks will break down how each business line performed year-over-year and sequentially. Those percentage increases and decreases are often the headline – leveraged as the key data point when comparing the performance of one bank to another. The flaw of course is that one bank can be coming off a lousy quarter while another just set a company best. At the end of the day, the true measure of success is market share.

So, who are the top dogs in trading? Using data compiled by analysts from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, we broke down the banks with the greatest market share in fixed income and equities trading across the previous four quarters. Some interesting trends emerge.

One of the big stories in FICC during the latest reporting period was the return to greatness of Goldman Sachs, whose revenues rose 45% year-on-year in Q2. But as you can see below, Goldman didn’t actually increase its market share by much – just 0.3% on a trailing 12-month basis, according to the analysis. The bank’s FICC recovery was more of a reversion to the norm. You can also see how dominant and consistent J.P. Morgan has been, despite Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley receiving more accolades for their second quarter performance. JPM may not move the needle much, but it doesn’t have to.

It’s also interesting to see the diverging trends with Citi as it wrestles market share back and forth with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley each quarter over the last four. Expect the sharp drop of FICC trading revenue to continue at Deutsche Bank with its job cuts, although one star DB bond trader is doing his best to lift up the whole unit himself.

Within equities trading, the top three of Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs continue to dominate, though market share slipped -0.7% on a trailing 12-month basis at Goldman. While it may not look like much visually, BNP Paribas is quietly making quite a run in equities. Revenues were up 22% year-over-year in Q2, helping the French bank increase its market share from 4.8% to 6.2% over the last four quarters.

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The job market in Asian banking isn’t strong enough for candidates to successfully demand extra benefits when negotiating with new employers, say recruiters. But that isn’t stopping some people from trying.

Here are a few examples of banking professionals in Singapore and Hong Kong who’ve pushed their luck too far at job interviews, missing out on roles as a result.

Let me wear flip-flops to work

“I had a trading candidate who while preparing for an interview wasn’t concerned with the salary, benefits or even what the role entailed,” says Nick Wells, a director at search firm Webber Chase. “When I asked what he really wanted to know about, he said: ‘Do I need to be smartly dressed in their office? Can I wear jeans or shorts with flip-flops to work? If not, then cancel the interview.’”

Dress my staff in red

“I had a regional head go for a global-head role with an investment bank,” says Wells. “In a panel interview he was asked to recommend changes to the trading floor to improve its performance. His reply was to implement ‘red day’ – once a week everyone had to come in wearing red, even the client-facing sales team. This would apparently encourage them to address problems face to face if they were angry at a team member. Needless to say, after a very short discussion about this, he wasn’t offered the job.”

Pay my mortgage

“I had a candidate who was getting really good benefits from his existing firm and would only agree to move if the new employer agreed to pay his housing loan on top of the 30% salary increase that he was going to get anyway,” says Christina Ng, executive director at LMA Recruitment in Singapore. “He was a very senior guy, but you could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard this demand.”

Pay my tax

Singapore and Hong Kong already offer low income tax rates by global standards – but not low enough for one job seeker recently. “I had a candidate wanting a ridiculous nett take-home salary,” says Richard Aldridge, Asia Pacific MD at recruiters Black Swan Group in Singapore. “To move he wanted the company to pay his tax bill, or at least make up for it in a pay uplift.”

Wash my car

“One of the candidates we represented asked for his car-wash payments to be included in his package,” says Farida Charania, group CEO of search firm Nastrac Group. “It was silly – no company pays for that kind of thing and if you can afford a car, you can afford to get it washed!”

I’m a local, give me an expat package

So-called expat packages – additional benefits paid to staff hired from abroad – are almost extinct in Singapore. But in an effort to localise their ranks, banks in the city state are encouraging overseas-based Singaporeans to relocate – and some of these returnees are now asking (unsuccessfully) for ‘expat’ packages. “For Singaporeans looking to come back home, the question of a full expatriate deals – including kids’ education, housing and transport allowances – does get raised,” says Gary Lai, Singapore managing director at recruiters Charterhouse.

Let me holiday like I’m French

Annual leave allowances vary greatly between firms in Singapore and Hong Kong – from a paltry 15 days to a French-style 30. “I’ve had candidates on 30 days who absolutely won’t move an inch when they try to join a new employer,” says a Hong Kong recruiter. “It’s doubly difficult because companies often won’t negotiate on this either – they have to keep all employees on the same holiday allowance.”

Section me off

If you’re going for a management job, don’t demand to be treated differently from other managers. “A trader at a leading commodities firm asked if he would qualify for his own office should he join the new employer,” says Wells from Webber Chase. “But when told that all senior management sit on the open trading floor, he still insisted on being sectioned off from his staff, asking for a corner seat with a partition.”

Pay me for three years if you fire me

“Last year a candidate who was still in the consideration stage, not even shortlisted, asked for a three-year severance package if his services were terminated in the first five years of employment,” says Charania from Nastrac. “The employer found him totally unreasonable, but he believed in his demand and stuck to it. He never made any further.”

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I’m currently a technology contractor at a large European bank in Singapore. This is not something I am particularly pleased about.

I started searching for work a few months ago, having spent two years at home looking after my young child. I soon found out that career breaks are frowned upon by most banks here. Despite all the talk about gender diversity, the Singapore banking sector isn’t very welcoming to returning mothers who’ve taken time out – even if for just 24 months (not a long period in the scheme of things). I wasn’t even getting interviews for the type of jobs I would have walked into before I had my baby.

After a fruitless search for permanent work, I became desperate and started applying for contract roles. Desperation, I soon discovered, is also driving hiring managers in Singapore to look for contractors. Under pressure from headquarters overseas, banks are clamping down on permanent headcount approvals, but (in technology at least) teams are still very busy. A contract is often the only way of getting the extra pair of hands the hiring manager needs.

At this point you may be thinking: shouldn’t I be grateful for landing some contract work? Well, not really. You must understand that contracting in Singapore is not attractive, lucrative or something you would do out of choice – it just helps you in the short-term if you’re in a tricky career situation. It beats being unemployed.

Poor pay

Singapore is not like London, where contractors are often on high hourly rates and earn more than permanent staff. I’m paid monthly (on a six-month contract) and get about the same as perm employees doing a similar job, but without the benefits or job security. My bank can actually ask me to leave at just a week’s notice.

November and December are the worst months for contractors at my firm. Like at many banks in Singapore, that’s when managers here re-examine their contractor needs – the rug can suddenly be pulled out from under you even if you thought you had a few months left to go. Oh, and did I mention my completion bonus? That’s because there isn’t one.

My medical insurance is pathetic – it only covers the cost of standard GP visits, about $50. And my leave allowance is tight in the extreme: seven days, plus two days for childcare. I had to take a week off unpaid when I recently looked after my sick child. That might all be ok if the pay was set high to compensate for the poor benefits, but (as I’ve explained) it isn’t.

No overtime

But hold on: I get to clock off at 5pm, right? No – I actually work beyond my official hours, even as a contractor! A friend from Australia was visiting last month and was shocked that I was working at weekends for no extra money. I told him that when there’s work to finish, the bank expects contractors to just get it done – it doesn’t pay us for any additional hours (and we aren’t paid by the hour in the first place). When it comes to hours (but not benefits) we are treated like our permanent counterparts.

On the positive side, my bank has been very inclusive as far as inviting me to team events and training goes. And I’ve got a great relationship with my boss, who lets me work for home and pick up my kid from school when I need to. But that’s because he’s nice – it’s not a bank-wide contractor policy.

The actual work I’m doing as a technologist is a step down from my previous (permanent) role. As a contractor, I do whatever I am given to do, and don’t have a say in planning and strategy.

Interview issues

I’ve been to a few interviews recently in a bid to get back into the permanent workforce. Discouragingly, some of the interviewers have not liked the fact that I’m ‘only a contractor’. This is especially the case with older interviewers, who started their careers when contracting was very uncommon in Singapore. I’ve been asked whether my work is important (if it was so critical, why trust it to a contractor?) and I’ve been asked why my bank hasn’t converted me to a permanent role (implying that it’s because I’m no good).

So don’t believe the hype that Singapore has a great contracting job market providing wonderful career progression opportunities at banks. Contracting is only a stop-gap for the desperate. And it’s not even a good stop-gap either – it won’t necessarily be straightforward to turn your contract role into a proper job.

Candy Shang (not her real name) is a technologist in Singapore who works for a European bank as a contractor.

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It’s no secret that automation is eliminating the need for a number of banking functions once carried out by actual human beings. The first to be hit were traders and those working in retail. Now, banks are using robo-advisors and cutting jobs in research that have been made redundant by machine learning and artificial intelligence. But the general assumption was that sales jobs would always be safe. It turns out that may not even be true.

The World Bank has launched the first-ever public bond fund created and managed using only blockchain technology, according to Reuters. If proven successful, the $73 million prototype deal could lead to the automation of bond sales practices that currently require several human functions, including bond issuance, book-building as well as settlement and custodian services. Blockchain has previously been used in other bond offerings, but never from start to finish.

The bond deal is being carried out in Australia, a popular testing ground for market “experiments,” particularly those incorporating new technologies. The Australian Securities Exchange has already announced plans to utilize blockchain to clear and settle equities trades come 2020. The processes are designed to cut costs, which is a nice way of saying they will result in headcount reductions across a decades-old manual platform.

The news comes just two days after J.P. Morgan infuriated some discount brokerage firms by announcing the rollout of its own online trading service that will be embedded into the current Chase mobile app. The kicker: the bank is offering no-cost trading.

Elsewhere, U.K. officials said on Thursday that European firms will be allowed to operate as normal in London for three years post-Brexit if no trade deal is reached before the March split. The “no-deal” scenario is likely, in part, an effort by U.K. officials to encourage the EU to reciprocate in a similar fashion, but we’ll have to wait and see. The news was included in 25 papers published on Thursday outlining the potential impact of not reaching a trade deal, including higher credit card fees, limited access to organic food and a U.K.-wide sperm shortage. More than half of Britain’s donor sperm comes from Denmark – which is not a fact you thought you’d learn reading the Financial Times.

Meanwhile:

To no surprise, Goldman Sachs is launching its retail banking operations in the U.K. Savings accounts through Goldman’s Marcus brand are now being offered to current employees ahead of the online bank’s official debut in just a few weeks. (CNN)

Credit Suisse terminated two male executives in London after new evidence was unearthed related to a 2010 sexual assault investigation. (Financial News)

J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon was one of several business leaders to sign a letter expressing “serious concerns” about the Trump administration’s immigration policies. One of the issues expected to affect banks is the administration’s efforts to curtail work permits for spouses of highly skilled immigrants. Financial firms often sponsor H1B visa holders to work on highly complex technical projects. (Fortune)

It’s official. Elon Musk has indeed hired Morgan Stanley to pair with Goldman Sachs in his effort to take Tesla private. Morgan Stanley dropped its coverage of Tesla earlier in the week, sparking rumors that Musk was looking to hire the bank. (Bloomberg)

BNP Paribas is launching a U.K.-based broking team headed by two senior advisory bankers that it is poaching from Credit Suisse. Lewis Burnett and Andrew Forrester will start at BNP later in the year. (FT)

Goldman Sachs is shuttering two Asian-focused hedge funds run by partners Ryan Thall and Hideki Kinuhata. Thall is said to be starting his own fund while Kinuhata is retiring. (Bloomberg)

Another day, another depressing study on the lack of female management at financial firms. Just two of the 50 largest U.S. hedge funds count women as their top investment executive, despite half of their investor relations and marketing departments being run by women. (WSJ)

Procter & Gamble is up to some shenanigans. In an apparent effort to market its products to younger customers, the consumer goods company has applied for trademarks for acronyms WTF, FML, NBD and LOL. Seriously, WTF Procter & Gamble? (Bloomberg)

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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.

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The current job market for top tech talent is perhaps as good as it has even been. Investment banks, tech giants and startups are fighting over the same pool of candidates, leading to a highly competitive recruiting environment. While this is clearly good news for tech professionals, some working in banking have grown frustrated with a byproduct of the strong job market. Recruiting wars have resulted in a higher level of turnover, making projects more difficult to manage with a rotating cast of characters.

The core issue for banks is that they are no longer just competing against each other. “I think that years ago the Holy Grail for someone seeking a job in tech as they came out of college was to get into financial services because of perceived stability and good compensation,” said Gina Schiller, managing director at Wall Street headhunter Jay Gaines & Company. “That monopoly has been broken in the current economy and there’s no going back.”

Recruiting battles over tech talent are intensifying beyond the junior level as well. Highly skilled software engineers, data scientists and other tech pros in banking tell us they routinely receive unsolicited inquiries from companies across industries, with recruiters messaging them on social media and even cold-calling them at work. A quick search on LinkedIn shows that at least 630 people who currently work at Google have previously been employed by Goldman Sachs, for example. Meanwhile, more than 130 current Goldman employees once worked for Google. Schiller said that tech professionals today know their skills are more transferable and are far more open to exercising their options than in years past.

But all the movement comes at price, not only for banks but for the tech employees who remain in the industry. “In 18 months, my team has almost completely turned itself over,” said one junior software engineer at a tier-1 bank. “I’ve had three bosses in a year-and-a-half.”

A VP who works at a competing investment bank said the turnover issue is exacerbated by more work being done in the mobile and fintech space as firms are building their own proprietary software. “You’ll get people up to speed, they begin to take ownership, and then they’ll often move on, leaving you holding the bag,” he said. “It’s not as easy as just subbing someone else in.” He attributed many of his late nights and weekends to filling the gaps left by departing colleagues while HR tries to refill the seat.

However, he notes that he’s received more regular raises and bigger bonuses meant to encourage him to stick around. What he hopes to see next is an easier path for tech professionals to make managing director, where the real money is made. Historically, front office employees like investment bankers and traders are more likely to make MD than middle and back office workers.

“Banks have to realize they have to compete to get and retain talent – and that loyalty more than ever is a two-way street,” Schiller said.

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Recent waves of redundancies at global banks in Singapore have one common characteristic – they’ve been aimed largely at expensive senior staff. While job hunting at the top of the banking tree has always been more difficult than at the bottom, the difference is now even more extreme.

But in which particular parts of Singapore financial services is it toughest (and easiest) for experienced staff to get work? To find out, we analysed our database across 17 key finance job functions and compared the number of Singapore-based vacancies demanding at least 10 years’ experience with the number of local CVs at that level.

In the sectors toward the top of the table below, older candidates are currently enjoying more straightforward job searches.

In private banking – a talent-short function dependant on building long-term client relationships – there are ‘only’ 49 resumes on our database for every Singapore vacancy. Senior candidates also face less competition in asset management, hedge funds and private equity, largely because experienced buy-side professionals in Singapore remain thin on the ground.

Even in these comparatively buoyant functions, however, the trend is clear: senior jobs are hard to come by right now in Singapore. This is partly seasonal – employers are currently winding down recruitment for expensive senior staff and waiting to hire them early next year after bonuses have been paid. Equities and M&A, two functions that typically pay high bonuses, are both at the bottom of our table. The lack of jobs in equities (research, sales and trading) also reflects recent job cuts in the sector. Deutsche Bank made redundancies in its Asian equities team earlier this year, while Credit Suisse culled dozens from its regional equities operations in 2017.

Meanwhile, while recruiters say that junior compliance professionals are still in demand, the hiring boom at the senior level has ground to a halt. There are 145 compliance resumes on our database in Singapore for every job.

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Deutsche Bank is in the midst of laying off roughly 7,000 employees, and in theory, the vast majority of the 1,700 or so front-office cuts have already been made. So, what’s holding Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing back from hitting his target goal in short order? Powerful unions that are making it rather difficult to cut headcount, despite the fact that many who could be affected seem happy to go.

The German lender is looking to cut roughly 1,000 middle and back-office jobs within its retail division, according to Bloomberg. The only problem is that Deutsche Bank signed a pact with unions in which it promised to not fire retail employees for business reasons before mid-2021. That means the bank can’t just hand out a bunch of pink slips. If it wants to cut headcount, Deutsche Bank will need to offer employees early retirement or severance packages – expensive moves not typically required for retail redundancies.

The ironic part of the whole ordeal is that a large number of Deutsche Bank employees who could be affected by the cuts are raising their hands rather than ducking behind cubicles. A year ago, Deutsche Bank rolled out a voluntary redundancy program aimed at cutting its retail staff by 1,000. The program was “heavily oversubscribed,” meaning many were happy to take a lump-sum check and join the unemployment line. Deutsche Bank’s fourth quarter restructuring costs hit $474 million last year. Firing lower-salaried employees will cost Deutsche Bank a pretty penny – or it can just keep them around for another three years.

Elsewhere, one of the largest banks in the Nordic and Baltic regions is proving again what happens when mass layoffs are announced well ahead of time. Nordea Bank, which announced its goal in October of cutting around 6,000 jobs globally, is unsurprisingly suffering from a morale problem, according to Bloomberg. A former investment strategist at Nordea said that employees who have so far been unaffected by the cuts are stressed out as they continue to look over their shoulder. The end-result has been a flood of voluntarily departures by senior members of the bank. Deutsche Bank has suffered from the same fate, seeing several big names walk out the door of their own accord. Call it collateral damage.

Meanwhile:

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley bankers have already concluded what is likely one of their shorter assignments. Elon Musk announced that he is scrapping plans to take Tesla public after hiring both banks as advisers. Morgan Stanley had been on the job for less than three days. (NY Times)

Wells Fargo is cutting 638 jobs within its mortgage department. (Bloomberg)

Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio is planning a new book detailing the 2008 financial crisis and his thoughts on how it could have been avoided. “Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises” will drop on Sept. 10. Dalio’s first book, “Principles,” was a New York Times bestseller. (Westfair)

Goldman Sachs has become the biggest player in a new business of sorts known as the “guaranteed close,” where banks promise to honor the 4 p.m. closing price of a particular asset and then try to pair up buyers and sellers after the closing bell. The new strategy has found some skeptics who believe banks that are stuck with buy or sell orders can move market prices as they look to protect themselves. (WSJ)

Citigroup believes that its Asian equities business will post its best performance since the financial crisis. That would be comforting news for Citi execs as the unit has hired 30 people over the last year. (Bloomberg)

The former UBS trader who was jailed for illegally trading away more than $2 billion is set to be deported to his native Ghana. Foreign nationals who are sentenced to more than four years in the U.K. are required to be deported, though Kweku Adoboli has spent the last three years in Britain following his 2015 release. (Bloomberg)

Goldman Sachs has lost the head of an internal quant team to another industry. Former VP Giorgos Papachristoudis is joining AI and machine learning startup Qloo as its chief data scientist. (MarketWatch)

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““

Over the last few years, a number of investment banks and other large financial firms have dramatically improved employee benefits, particularly those aimed at retaining working moms and other primary caregivers. At the same time, banks have quietly increased the number of days that new fathers and non-primary caregivers can take after having a baby or adopting a child. However, using the full allotment of days provided through paternity leave – or anywhere close to them – is still heavily stigmatized in banking, no matter what the new HR policy says.

In 2015, Goldman Sachs doubled paid paternity leave from two weeks to four, for example. A year later, Citi upped second-parent leave from two weeks to eight. Bank of America went even further, extending paternity leave to 16 weeks, matching the policy for mothers and adoptive parents. Other banks have followed suit. But if you care about career progression, and there aren’t any extenuating circumstances, it’s best that fathers ignore both the new leave policies as well as the old ones, according to career coaches and industry veterans.

“It’s the kiss of death,” Roy Cohen, career coach and author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide, said of taking full paternity leave or anywhere near it. It’s not as much of a problem with human resources – you can’t get fired for taking advantage of employee benefits – but managers and colleagues at investment banks, hedge funds and other high-paying financial firms will look down on any father taking more than a few days away from the office, likely limiting future chances of being promoted.

“I know that sounds radical, but (taking full paternity leave) is always unwelcome,” Cohen said, speaking specifically of the financial services sector. “People are paid a premium to work hard and make personal sacrifices. You won’t be perceived as disloyal, but others may begin to question your commitment.” And it’s not just managers that will quietly be stewing. Work colleagues – many of whom are fathers themselves and felt the need to return to the office after just a day or two – will likely be upset that they have more work to do that may not be reflected in their year-end bonus, Cohen said.

Indeed, interviews with more than a half-dozen bankers, traders and asset managers suggest that recent improvements to paternity leave policies haven’t resulted in fathers taking more time away. In fact, several said that staying home for more than a few days following the birth of their child was never even a consideration – and not necessarily due to any implied sense of pressure from management. It was merely an assumed behavior that they didn’t put much thought into. A few even acknowledge they were itching to get back to the office.

One trader we spoke with said he took one day off after getting his wife home from the hospital. A VP in equity sales took two days. An investment banker at a tier-1 firm said he was on work calls for much of the day following the birth of his first child. Now managing a group of juniors, the banker said he’d be “pissed” if a new father took two weeks off totally unplugged. Only one person we spoke with – a father at a big asset management firm – took more than a few days off, and that was only because he had a new job lined up.

Exceptions to the “rule”

If a new father does decide to take a significant leave of absence, they should provide management with appropriate context, like not having any family in the local area or if there are medical issues, said Cohen. “The explanation is critical,” he said. “If you come in and say: ‘I really want to be part of the family experience,’ most managers will think incredulously: ‘well so do I!’” If you make a certain amount of money, there is an expectation that you can afford nursing or nanny care, he added.

A change in culture may be on the horizon, however. A recent Pew Research study found that 82% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 support paid parental leave compared to just 55% of people over the age of 65.

More pressure on women?

Despite the positive changes in maternity leave policies and other benefits for new moms, at least a few dark corners still exist in pockets of financial services. One female working in bond sales told us she was once asked in an interview whether she planned on having children in the near future. A senior hedge fund manager said she goes out of her way to not hire women of child-bearing age to avoid one or multiple gaps in employment.

While significant parental policy changes are being made at the corporate level, it seems the message has yet to fully impact how those benefits are being perceived by management.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

““

For many fresh graduates in Singapore, investment banking still holds the allure of huge financial gains and the glamour of helping CEOs and CFOs with their listings and mergers. When I started my investment banking career some 15 years ago, it was certainly exciting working in Singapore. The high point was from 2006 to 2008 when a lot of Chinese companies were listing here – it was an IPO gold rush.

Fast forward to 2018 and investment banking in Singapore isn’t an attractive area to work in. In many ways I think it’s past its prime in this region. Listing, especially, have suffered a lot in Singapore compared with when I joined the industry – we no longer have a steady stream of IPOs. Chinese firms generally prefer to list in Hong Kong. Looking ahead, it’s hard to see where there will be major areas of future growth in Singapore investment banking. On top of my country’s particular issues, big investment banks are under huge cost pressure across the world.

These local and global problems mean IBs like mine are axing jobs in Singapore this year. No roles appear safe and banks seem to be considering cuts almost on a rolling basis. Investment banks are getting costlier to run, especially because of the Basel III capital charge. And I also see a future cost threat from fintech companies, which don’t have the burden of operating under Basel.

At the moment banks have two main advantages over fintechs: capital and client trust. But fintechs are already gathering capital and it’s only a matter of time before more customers will start trusting them to provide more complex banking services. As I see it, the pressure to cut costs (and downsize teams) is only set to continue, both in Singapore and globally. If you work in investment banking this means you need to perform well to stay above the fray, so it’s not you who’s axed next. This may sound bleak – but it’s just how it is.

My advice to graduates

Here in Singapore corporate banking probably has a far brighter future than investment banking, although every function in a large firm carries its own risks. Relationship managers, for example, are constantly under personal revenue pressure.

If I were a young person now thinking about a long-term career in financial services, I would actually avoid big banks completely. I’d join or start a fintech firm instead. If you’re thinking seriously about your future career mobility, why would you want to start out by joining a dinosaur (i.e. a bank)? Of course a fintech career also comes with risks and you won’t get a big base salary to begin with. But the potential future rewards of getting an early foothold in an important emerging industry are huge.

As for me…

Unfortunately for me, a career change would be difficult. I’m going to try to stay in investment banking – not because I love the work but because I’m stuck in the sector. I’ve become reliant on a large, steady income and the spending power it gives me. That’s a hard thing to suddenly give up if your bank hasn’t given you the chop (yet).

There are still some good things in my job – like the moment of finally bringing a company to listing after nine months of due diligence. But to be honest, it’s 99% about the money. So I will try to keep chugging along. In five years’ time, however, I may not be in investment banking – not out of choice but because my job will no longer exist.

Harvey Wu (we have used a pseudonym to protect his identity) works for a large global investment bank in Singapore.

Image credit: monkeybusinessimages, Getty

Want to work at a bank in Hong Kong where your bonus is paid entirely in cash and none of it is deferred, leaving you free to move jobs without sacrificing future income? Try a Chinese firm. An investment banking recruiter in Hong Kong, who asked to remain anonymous, has surveyed 20 leading Chinese banks and securities firms and found that they all pay cash bonuses to the majority of their staff.

Sources within listed Chinese banks tell us that only very senior managers receive any stock. “My bonus is all cash, calculated as a percentage of base salary, with no deferrals of my money,” says a mid-level banker at CICC. Despite CICC having listed in Hong Kong in 2015, the banker says only MDs are receiving stock options as part of their bonus package. “There’s no stock at my level – cash is definitely better as it’s more secure and liquid,” she adds.

Another source at CICC in Hong Kong confirmed to us that he receives all his bonus in cash. A banker at BOCI, whose parent company Bank of China listed in Hong Kong 10 years ago, says the cash component of his bonus is also 100%. She adds that “cash bonuses are definitely better than stock” because you can change banks after receiving your bonus without the additional burden of giving up stock which has not yet vested.

While Chinese banks in Hong Kong typically offer lower base salaries than their Western rivals, their bonuses can actually be larger, says Maggie Li, a director at recruiters Executive Access.

“The bonus component of total earnings at global banks has been decreasing, so experienced candidates are increasingly open to opportunities in Chinese banks and securities firms due to potentially better bonuses,” adds a Hong Kong-based recruiter who asked not to be named.

While CICC has adopted the Western practice of paying a single bonus around March, smaller mainland firms in Hong Kong are spreading out their payments. “The boutique Chinese firms usually divide their bonuses into three instalments – typically before Chinese New Year and then in May and December,” says the recruiter.

These regular payments help “incentivise employees to stay,” adds Mirjam Gustafsson, says Mirjam Gustafsson, a director at Wellesley Partners in Hong Kong. “Chinese banks in Hong Kong mainly use this strategy for front-office positions in corporate finance and M&A.”

Still, employees at Chinese banks are not always enamoured with their bonuses. “My performance last year was good and the bank did ok, but my team’s performance was bad, so I end up getting a below-expectation bonus. Team performance is important to the calculation,” says the first CICC banker.

“Feedback from candidates on bonuses at Chinese firms is mixed,” says the Hong Kong-based recruiter. “We’ve seen cases where bonuses have been delayed or even not paid in certain years, while other employees have been pleasantly surprised with their bonus.”

The second CICC employee we spoke with says bonuses won’t dictate his future career plans. Ultimately he’d like to work at a Western bank because “the working culture is better”.

“Many junior candidates are willing to go to international banks even if the total compensation is lower just to have a well-recognised brand name on their resume,” adds the anonymous recruiter.

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Image credit: kupicoo, Getty

““

What do junior analysts want? Responsibility. The opportunity to make a difference. Real work, on real clients. Why are they not always given it? Because of cases like this. Transamerica Corp, the US asset manager, has agreed with the SEC that it will pay nearly a hundred million dollars to compensate investors for a suite of quantitative products it marketed.

The SEC judgement contains all the gory details. They start with a junior analyst at Aegon USA Investment Management (Aegon NV of the Netherlands is Transmerica’s parent company). He had recently gained an MBA but had no experience in portfolio management or financial modelling. He was given the job of inventing some quantitative models for tactical asset allocation. Nobody was overseeing him, nobody was checking his work and he was never given any training or mentoring in the field.

But this wasn’t just a hypothetical blue-sky project of the sort that you might give to a bright trainee to see how much initiative they have and whether they find out anything interesting. Transamerica was actually launching products based on these models, and doing so well in advance of any validation work to test whether their results could be relied on. Three days after the launch, a “peer review” process found that there were several serious errors, including such things as investment weightings which didn’t add up to 100%. These errors were corrected, but many more were not found until much later on. Those other mistakes extended to, “incorrect calculations, inconsistent formulas, and the use of whole numbers where percentages were intended (such as 1.77 instead of 1.77%)”.

In the meantime, the funds were marketed as being based on “Econometric Models” which “took emotion out of the process”. The junior analyst was featured in marketing podcasts explaining how all the decisions were delegated to the model. All the while, the senior managers at Aegon USA were completely unaware of what was going on. Confident in the analyst’s abilities, they would regularly forward prospectuses that had been sent to them for approval with emails titled “Help”. Even when the company finally realised that the models were unusable, they didn’t tell the investors about it.

The junior analyst here is, mercifully and justly, not named in the SEC judgement, although two senior managers who ought to have been supervising him are. It’s not the junior’s fault – he was given one of the trickiest jobs in finance, with no support. And the first drafts of everyone’s models are always chock full of silly mistakes like percentages not adding up, or missing decimal points. That’s why good organisations employ the “four-eyes” principle, particularly when dealing with work that has been produced by inexperienced staff and which is going to be used for real-money applications.

We can’t even blame the anonymous modeler in this case for taking on a job he was manifestly not ready for. It’s absolutely natural for everyone to want to stretch themselves, and to do real work. The SEC has done the right thing in putting the blame squarely on the CIO and the new products executive. The lesson for ambitious young analysts in a hurry is that sometimes the reason that the boss keeps holding you back is that if you make a mistake and lose a hundred million dollars, it will be the boss’s name, not yours, on the eventual lawsuit.

It’s not just in fund management that juniors want to get stuck in, though. It’s one of the most commonly cited reasons why investment banks tend to find their best associate-level staff get poached by private equity firms. And more and more of them are making this move. Analysis from the Options Group (a New York headhunter) suggests that banking-to-PE now accounts for one in three junior level job moves, up from one in five in 2015. And this is despite the fact that the average pay is quite materially lower. In the Options Group data set, the 2017 total comp was $180,000 for junior executives in private equity and $315,000 for senior ones, compared to $248,000 and $351,000 respectively in banking.

Part of the reason for the shift is still to do with the greater deal involvement and less pitch work on the buy side. But it’s also notable that changes in compensation practices in the banking industry mean that the dollar figures are not completely like for like. Private equity carried interest is subject to less tax than income, and it gets paid in cash once the deal is closed. It’s not held in restricted stock and not usually subject to clawbacks.

It’s also likely to be the case that people who move jobs don’t necessarily consider themselves to be average. The highest end of the private equity profession can see wealth creation for people with partnership stakes that is well in excess of anything you can get on a salary and bonus deal. Looks like the theme of today is ambition, and its dangers.

Meanwhile…

Employment lawyer John Singer appears to be building a franchise as the go-to attorney for prominent men accused of harassment. While he personally regards the #MeToo movement as “wonderful”, he also believes that “firms are shooting people without doing a fulsome investigation”. When companies have chosen to act quickly in the fact of bad publicity, he has advised his clients to take legal action. (WSJ)

In the UK, top bank analysts Jonathan Pierce and Tom Rayner are moving from Exane BNP Paribas to Numis, underlining the mid-cap specialist house’s determination to build a leading research product across sectors. Numis sees the MiFID 2 research rules as an opportunity to hire leading names in the UK. (Financial Times)

Lehman Brothers former staff are beginning to speak out in defence of their 10-year reunion (Irish Times)

A former Bank of America technology VP, who has his name on eight of BoA’s patents for innovations relating to blockchain technology, has said on Twitter that he believes the majority of those patents to be “worthless” (Cryptocurrency News)

The Deutsche Bank / Commerzbank deal rumours continue, with the FT’s Olaf Storbeck describing it as “when, not if”. Nobody quoted in the story seems to be exactly enthusiastic about the transaction, which would require “radical” branch closures and redundancies, but according to one source, there is no structural or technical reason why the deal could not be done in three to six months. (Financial Times)

As the IPOs of several bitcoin-mining equipment manufacturers draw near, observers suggest that their performance will be a sign of market confidence or otherwise in the long term viability of Bitcoin. (Bloomberg)

Research shows that African-Americans are significantly more seriously affected by job loss, in mental health terms (Brookings)

Hanspeter Brunner, the former head of Asia at Banca della Svizzera Italia who got caught up in the 1MDB scandal, is back, working with his son at a due diligence startup (Finews)

Fashion advice for bankers from the former proprietor of the GSElevator twitter account. The author does not approve of fleece vests, apparently. (Medium)

English Premier League footballers are paid in sterling, so they are in the market for hedges against the falling value of their wages post-Brexit (Financial Times)

“”

It wasn’t all that long ago that Barclays’ CEO Jes Staley said he saw no reason to shift jobs to Europe because of Brexit. – At one point, Barclays’ fondness for keeping jobs in London was even mooted as the reason why no one there was resigning. Now, after the April revelation that Barclays was planning to split its euro rates trading between Frankfurt and London and the July news that Barclays was planning to shift between 40 and 50 jobs from its London investment bank to Frankfurt, it seems that Barclays is stocking up with traders in Germany’s financial centre.

A quick look at Barclays’ careers site reveals that the British bank is advertising around 12 trading jobs in Frankfurt. They include senior roles such as a German-based director-level head of equity derivatives trading, plus jobs for FX traders, credit traders and rates traders.

A spokesman for Barclays said: “Managing the allocation of financial resources within Barclays International is key to ensuring that we are positioned to maximize benefits for our clients as well as for our shareholders.”

The Frankfurt trading jobs come as the bank has been doing some heavy hiring for its markets business globally. At the start of this month, Barclays said it had hired 30 managing directors across its markets division globally since the start of 2017. Big hires in fixed income currencies and commodities trading include Michael Lubinksy, the former RBS trader who joined last year via hedge fund Brevan Howard and Sharut Kalra, a credit trader who joined from Goldman Sachs last year.

Barclays has selected Dublin as its post-Brexit European hub, but appears to be focusing its European trading operation in Frankfurt. Both it and Deutsche Bank both shifted some of their euro interest rate swaps to Germany for clearing in June.

Barclays already has fixed income global markets professionals based in Frankfurt: Isabel Heske is an MD in rates distribution in the Frankfurt office, for example. The latest spate of job adverts suggest that Barclays is looking for new staff in German rather than shifting existing staff internally from London.

Photo: Getty

““

If you’re a strat who’s looking for a new job in banking you could probably do worse than joining Barclays’ Firmwide Resource Management (FiRM) group. Firstly, it’s hiring. Secondly, it’s absolutely crucial to the strategy of Barclays’ CEO Jes Staley and CEO of the investment bank Tim Throsby.

Barclays didn’t respond to a request to comment on FiRM. However, the group is understood to be at the heart of the bank’s attempts to raise its return on equity above the 2.6% it achieved in the first half of 2018. Among other things, FiRM is tasked with reallocating capital between Barclays’ businesses. In this way, the bank intends to bolster its RoE and to see off activist investor Ed Bramson’s attempts to coerce it into spinning out the sales and trading business. FiRM, which is run by Throsby’s lieutenant Art Mbanefo, is said to be the source of considerable interest internally as a result.

The latest FiRM recruit is Jeffrey Wasserman, the ex-head of Goldman Sachs’ private wealth management strats team in EMEA, who joined Barclays earlier this month as a director-level quant strategist in FiRM. Wasserman joined Barclays from Deutsche Bank, where he spent just 15 months after leaving GS. Wasserman isn’t the only ex-Goldman strat on the FiRM team: Jan Burgy also joined last year in New York, after nearly 13 years at Goldman.

Wasserman’s exit represents another departure from Deutsche’s strats team following the disappearance of its progenitor Sam Wisnia in March 2018, along with various other members of the team. Deutsche insiders say the bank’s strats team has “stabilized”, however, and that the bank’s new “Kannon” risk engine is now well-established and working to plan.

““

A quant trader and researcher who cut his teeth at Lehman Brothers has joined Millennium Management in an interesting new role that may have consequences on who the hedge fund ultimately hires. Derrick Li started at Millennium in New York in August.

Li’s new position at Millennium has some similarities to his previous career stops at Nomura and Barclays – he’ll still be building quantitative analytics tools and covering equity derivatives. But Li noted on LinkedIn that part of his duties as a risk manager include interviewing prospective portfolio managers and evaluating their trading strategies. It appears Millennium is working to mitigate potential trading risks before employee badges are ever handed out.

Beginning his career at Lehman Brothers as a software engineer, Li eventually transitioned to Barclays as an equity derivatives quant after Lehman fell into bankruptcy during the financial crisis. He moved on to Nomura in 2016 where he built systematic volatility strategies and trading infrastructure across equity, credit, rates and commodities while also beginning to work on risk-hedging strategies – a mix of experience that likely set him up for what seems like a hybrid risk management role at Millennium.

While it’s unclear if Millennium is one of the first hedge funds to bring risk managers into the hiring process, the practice isn’t known to be a common one. However, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) recently made a number of recommendations to financial firms to help eliminate potential sources of risk, including bringing employees who work in control functions like compliance and risk into the hiring process and giving them a partial say in who should receive an offer.

Tasked with monitoring the global financial system and making recommendations to regulators, the FSB has no actual authority to impose mandates, though it still wields plenty of power behind the scenes. Perhaps we’ll soon see more risk and compliance officers with a seat at the hiring table.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

“”

If you work for the average investment bank, it’s the nearing the end of summer and you’re rolling merrily towards the time of year when you might even start thinking about your bonus. If you work for Deutsche Bank, it’s a bit different. – CEO Christian Sewing has avowed his intention of racking up no more than €23bn in costs for 2018, but the bank spent €12.2bn in the first six months alone. In the second half of 2018, Deutsche therefore needs to get costs down to €10.8bn, a 15% reduction on last year. The squeeze is on.

As is invariably the case with squeezes, some people are tired of the pressure. Deutsche insiders complain of cost-cutting, “by an means necessary,” and claim people are leaving the bank while they have the chance.

The latest voluntary exits include Christos Tomaras, Deutsche’s former co-head of financial sponsors, who only joined from Goldman Sachs in March last year, and Claire Brooskby, a managing director in Deutsche’s financial institutions group (FIG). Tomaras is understood to be joining a fintech firm, while Brooksby is thought to be going to J.P. Morgan. Their departures follow those of Kris Triggle, another MD in FIG and Rainer Polster, Deutsche’s head of Austrian investment banking and head of German FIG. Earlier this month, Deutsche Bank also lost Paul Reynolds, its head of EMEA equity research, who quit for a competitor.

“DB is a mess,” says one managing director at the bank. “More people are leaving by their own choice.” He points to “dumb” policies like Deutsche’s decision to restrict non-essential travel, which he says, “makes no sense in a client-facing business.”

If front office bankers at Deutsche are in revolt, middle and back office bankers are gripped by fear. Sewing said in May that he would complete front office redundancies in the investment bank by the end of July. If there are cuts to come, they will therefore come in middle and back office functions like technology, risk, and compliance.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment for this article, but insiders point to appointment of Angus Vassie as global head of infrastructure and to the recent establishment of a new combined U.S. infrastructure group under Jyothi Rajagopal, an MD previously responsible for large systems architecture in New York. The new group is understood to be about efficiencies rather than redundancies, but Rajagopal is thought to have a mandate to cut costs (and stop the outflow of senior people from Deutsche’s U.S. regulatory infrastructure team.)

“Risk, finance and technology will be making cuts next,” says one U.S. MD. At the same time, he claims that Deutsche is on a, “big campaign to hire very junior staff whilst giving even more work to those who stay.”

Talent shortages in Hong Kong banking technology have reached extreme levels across many job functions, new figures reveal.

Hong Kong banks are desperate to recruit and retain more technologists but they face increasing competition for talent from the likes of Alibaba, Tencent and Google. This is good news for tech candidates as the job market turns dramatically in their favour. But in which specific functions within banking technology will they face the most straightforward search for work?

To find out, we analysed our database across 17 key banking-tech sectors and compared the number of Hong Kong-based vacancies in each category with the number of local CVs.

In the sectors toward the top of the table below, candidates are currently enjoying ‘easier’ job searches. Engineers (only 0.3 resumes per opening), architects (0.8) and developers (2.2) are all in short supply in Hong Kong banking.

Within these broad roles, Python skills are highly sought after, says Vince Natteri, director of Hong Kong search firm Pinpoint Asia. “Python is becoming more popular both as a primary development language and as a language used by quants and analytics teams,” he adds. “Many banks also want Java developers, especially people who know Java 1.8 as it also has a function-language feature in it. The good Java guys are hard to find in Hong Kong.”

Professionals who can act as a bridge between technology and the front office might also want to take advantage of the current job market. If you work in product management, digital transformation, change and transformation, or program management, you will face fewer than three rival candidates during your job search, according to our database.

In comparison to non-technology jobs in banking, however, even the roles lower down our list are in high demand. There are only three local resumes for every Hong Kong-based cyber security job, for example.

Cyber and information security are both hot areas for recruitment in Hong Kong, with demand being driven not just by the threat of online attacks, but also by the need to comply with increasingly vigorous regulations.

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

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Image credit: namussi, Getty

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Let me wear flip-flops to work

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Pay my tax

Wash my car

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Pay me for three years if you fire me

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No overtime

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Morning Coffee: Proof machines are coming for all banking jobs. Brexit’s strangest shortage

So you want to quit banking, but you still need the money?

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The Singapore banking jobs where you have no future

Morning Coffee: Deutsche Bank (literally) can’t fire enough people. What happens when your colleagues get laid off

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Investment banking in Singapore is in decline. I wish I was working for a start-up

My advice to graduates

As for me…

These banks in Hong Kong will pay you a CASH bonus. Here’s why

Morning Coffee: A dreadful cautionary tale for junior analysts who are out of their depth, and why investment bankers are taking pay cuts to move into private equity

Meanwhile…

Barclays is hiring a dozen traders in Frankfurt as Brexit approaches

Barclays poached a top Deutsche Bank strat for its hottest team

Veteran quant joins Millennium as a risk manager with one unique responsibility

More voluntary exits from Deutsche Bank as redundancy fears grow

Terrible tech talent shortages grip Hong Kong banking sector

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