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Investment bankers and corporate bankers in Asia now “respect” each other a lot more than they did just six or seven years ago, says the Singaporean woman who used to run Citi’s APAC corporate bank.

“In the past, there wasn’t much mutual respect. People in IBD, for example, felt that corporate bankers didn’t really understand complex products,” says Agnes Liew, who left Citi in 2017 after 35 years at the firm. “There was some truth to this as corporate banking traditionally focused on balance-sheet transactions and there was little interface with M&A or even fixed income. Large banks were more segmented than they are today.”

Corporate bankers in Singapore and Hong Kong were unfairly labelled as “plain vanilla” by some investment bankers, says Liew. “That’s because they were seen as people who just kept the lights on at the bank and didn’t seek high returns. Corporate banking was seen as a stable long-term career choice, but not necessarily an exciting one, and that was a turn-off for some graduates.”

Investment bankers across Asia weren’t even accustomed to telling clients about corporate banking products, such as trade finance, that could potentially benefit their businesses. “And some corporate bankers in turn felt that investment bankers would just rip off their clients by charging high fees, so they weren’t motivated to share information with them,” says Liew, who has relocated from Hong Kong back to Singapore since leaving Citi and now runs an upscale gym.

The 2008 financial crisis was, predictably enough, a turning point for relationships between the two sets of bankers, and many firms now operate joined-up corporate and investment banking divisions. “It became harder to originate new IB deals in the wake of the crisis, and at the same time Basel III forced more banks to focus on the cost of capital,” says Liew. “As a result, banks began to encourage corporate and investment bankers to work more closely together, both here in Asia and globally, to optimise returns.”

Liew says it then took about three to four years for a more collaborative approach to actually bed-in within large banks. “The mindset slowly changed as more corporate bankers and investment bankers saw the mutual benefits of co-operating to make more deals happen. Now the complaints have reduced significantly and have become the exception not the norm.”

Corporate banking now demands a wider range of skills, and it has become more attractive as a job function, adds Liew. “For example, as a relationship manager in corporate banking you increasingly need to know how to sell more complex corporate-finance products and/or sell to financial institutions.”

Meanwhile, in Singapore, corporate banking job opportunities outnumber those in IBD. “While Singapore is the Southeast Asia hub for investment banking, its slice of the IBD pie isn’t big compared with North Asia,” says Liew. “SEA is a collection of small and mid-sized markets which are very different from each other, making the region difficult to cover for bankers. And you typically don’t see much M&A going on in SEA when compared with North Asia, for example.”

There’s still a pay gap between IBD and corporate banking in Asia, however, particularly at a junior level. “A junior corporate banking relationship manager in Singapore or Hong Kong is paid less than an investment banking analyst. But this gulf isn’t as big as it was in the past,” adds Liew.

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Singapore’s three local banks – DBS, OCBC and UOB – are all among the most aggressive recruiters in the city state. In the year to end-June they collectively added 4,541 staff, according to their financial results.

If you’re considering going local having so far spent your career within global firms, what do you need to know before you interview with a Singaporean bank? We spoke with several recruiters to find out.

Be open to contracting

“Junior candidates should be open to taking contract roles,” says Lucas Yeo, head of banking and finance at recruiters Tangspac. “The local banks’ strategies now typically involve hiring juniors on contracts first. They usually do this to test you out before converting you to a permanent employee if they deem you satisfactory.”

Show off your tech skills (no what matter the job)

“The local banks are going through digitisation and automation drives, and they expect all new hires to be part of this journey,” says Yeo. “I’ve seen the banks sending people on coding courses so that they can add value beyond their current job. If you already have some form of coding knowledge, it will be a plus.”

Don’t rush into changing things

“Senior candidates mandated to drive change should keep in mind that these banks are operating in their own home markets, so they’re more susceptible to public opinion (or the voices of disgruntled employees) as compared to foreign banks,” says Yeo. “Local banks have a different level of tolerance for change, and senior managers need to calibrate their approach and timelines in accordance to the culture of the banks.”

Don’t assume you know their strategy

Given the extensive – and largely positive – media coverage these banks receive in Singapore, some candidates come into interviews wrongly assuming they already know enough about their strengths and weaknesses. “Do more homework. The local banks are dominant and highly visible here, but how much do you know about their strategies and nuanced differences?” says a banker-turned bank HR professional in Singapore.

Get set for a wider job scope

“The smaller regional coverage of the Singaporean banks does not equate to less work to be done,” says Vicky Wee, an associate director at LMA Recruitment in Singapore. “Candidates moving from foreign banks should be mentally prepared to cover more ground in terms of work scope than they used to in a larger team. And there’s the possibility of having to work with more manual processes.

Be mobile

DBS, OCBC and UOB are rapidly expanding their reach across Asia. “They’re identifying people who will eventually be mobile within the region,” says Gary Lai, managing director at recruiters Charterhouse Partnership. “During interviews you should say that you’ll be mobile should the bank require you to be posted overseas. However, don’t come across as looking for an immediate foreign posting if the job you’re interviewing for is currently based in Singapore.”

Go direct if you’re junior

Singapore banks use agency recruiters at a junior level even less than global banks do, so if you’re an analyst or associate, you should apply directly to the bank or get referred. “These days each local bank has a sizeable team focused purely on hiring, particularly for AVP positions and below,” says Lim Chai Leng, director of banking at recruiters Randstad in Singapore.

Don’t be a job hopper

If you’ve done too many short stints at global banks of late, you may want to wait a while before you apply to a local firm. “One of the most important traits that Singapore banks are looking for is your perceived longevity as a potential employee – so they value a stable career record,” says Angela Kuek, director of search firm Meyer Consulting in Singapore.

Don’t be a superstar

During a job interview with a Singapore bank, mark yourself out as a team player. “By contrast to some global banks, they usually shy away from ‘superstars’ with big egos, preferring to hire steady, mature but above-average performers who won’t upset team dynamics,” says Kuek.

Expect fewer interview rounds at DBS, OCBC and UOB

Singapore banks typically conduct about two fewer interview rounds than international firms, so expect about three rounds in total, says Lim from Randstad. “The whole recruitment process is generally faster than at global banks because the decision makers are mostly all working in Singapore, so it’s easier to set up interviews.”

But prepare for panel interviews

If you’re not good at being quizzed by multiple managers, applying to a Singapore bank could be a harrowing experience. “Because there are fewer rounds, more panel interviews are conducted, so you end up meeting with more people at each interview,” says Farida Charania, Asia Pacific CEO of search firm Nastrac Group.

Ask cultural questions

Leaving an international bank for a Singapore one may not be as daunting as joining a mainland Chinese firm or moving to the buy-side, but don’t underestimate the differences in company culture. Be sure to ask contacts within the bank about what the managerial and working environment is really like. “For example, their culture is generally more consensus-driven,” says Kuek. “Singapore banks are generally more bureaucratic in hierarchy and rank.”

Don’t push your base pay

If you’re looking to join a local bank to land a large salary increment, you’re out of luck. “Singapore banks generally have their own salary benchmarks at various levels, so there’s often not much room to negotiate over your base pay,” explains Lim.

But do ask about average bonuses

“While you shouldn’t expect a big base salary, Singapore banks do offer more consistent bonuses,” says Matthieu Imbert-Bouchard, managing director of recruiters Robert Half in Singapore. “It’s not uncommon to find out what the average bonus pay-out is before you join, especially for non-sales roles, to have a better overview of the compensation element of the job offer.”

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If you’ve focused your career on maximizing your earnings in order to hasten the time when you’re able to remain in bed until 8.30am daily and devote yourself to pursuits of your choice, it seems you’ve been doing it wrong. The new-new thing is not chasing the world’s biggest bonuses in order to retire young: it is spending as little money as possible.

So says the New York Times, which details the spread of the ‘FIRE’ (financial independence, retire early) movement. The NYT details 43 year-olds and 38 year-olds who were earning $110k and $150k a year respectively. After cutting their spending to the bare minimum, saving up to 70% of their incomes, and leaving expensive cities to live in cheaper rural areas, they’ve stopped working and are taking it easy.

“I made the right decision, this is the life,” says one FIRE adherent who formerly worked days of, “12- or 14-hour shifts where I didn’t use the restroom, where I didn’t eat, because so much work was piled up on me.” Another says, “I was almost a slave to my job because of the way we were living.” Another decided to get out young after seeing a colleague who collapsed at his desk taken away in ambulance after working 14 hour days.

Of course, retiring at 40 means you’re going to take a lifestyle hit. One of the NYT’s FIRE exponents is supporting is family on $40k a year, shopping at Costco, and fixing his own car. Some take part-time barista jobs at Starbucks for the health insurance. However, the upside of saving 70% of what you earn while you’re earning it is that your lifestyle was probably never especially lavish anyway.

None of the NYT’s examples are ex-bankers, but plenty people who’ve worked in finance will sympathize with the impulse to dial-down on work. The finance industry has its own early retirement enthusiast in the form of Khe Hy, Blackrock’s former head of hedge fund research, who retired aged 35 and is now a blogger, coach, and healthy-living evangelist. “I feel very different. Being out of finance has given me a completely different perspective on the life I want to live,” Hy told us when we spoke to him two years ago.

FIRE is only possible if you can avoid spending money as you earn it. This isn’t always possible if you’re working at a relentless banking job in a major financial city. As one associate complained recently on Wall Street Oasis: “I spend it in a vicious cycle. I pay exorbitant rent in order to stay in a city that is a financial capital, so that I can work in finance, so that I can pay rent to live in a city that is a financial capital. Repeat, in a cycle, until insanity or hilarity ensues.” And ex-Goldman Sachs associate Mai Le wrote here in July, many junior bankers spend everything and have less than £500 ($646) in savings.

To a degree, FIRE may go against the motivation to work in banking and live life in the fast (spending) lane. Some of the NYT’s exemplars express regret for the loss of fripperies like nice cars. Most seem to think their decision was worth it. “A friend of mine said the sense of dread from my face was gone,” says one, who now spends his time solving Rubiks cubes, cooking, reading and volunteering instead of earning money.

Separately (and we’re late with this), the Wall Street Journal had a piece last week echoing what we’ve been saying for years: that the finance industry has a propensity for hiring beautiful women and putting them into sales roles.

The WSJ says hedge funds are especially guilty of recruiting ex-cheerleaders and winners of beauty pageants into marketing roles where they’ll be chatting-up investors. It’s a trend that irks qualified women who feel sidelined as a result. “The whole mind-set is: There’s this gorgeous babe at home, and I’m going to have this gorgeous babe in the office, because what does that say about me? I’m surrounded by gorgeous babes,” complains one.

Meanwhile:

Tadhg Flood, who is 46 years old and had been with Deutsche Bank for 16 years in London, latterly as co-head of the FIG team, is joining Centerview. (Wall Street Journal)

12 out of 45 managing directors in Wells Fargo’s wealth management division are women. They’re fed up with being told things like they should be at home looking after their children. (Wall Street Journal)

Nearly 5,000 people now work for asset management firms in Luxembourg. (Financial Times)

Credit Suisse made Bruno Hallak, whom it hired from Deutsche Bank in September 2017, head of investment banking and capital markets in France. The memo accompanying his appointment said that Hallak will take responsibility for “accelerating growth” and that Credit Suisse will, “continue to build up our presence in this highly strategic market by promoting internally, attracting top talent… and investing in the business.” (Financial News)

Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam said there’s been a drop-off in client activity since the start of the third quarter. (Reuters)

Activist investor Edward Bramson discerns a softening in Barclays’ board: “It is our sense that the board does recognise the company’s continuing low valuation and that the current approach to remedying it is not proving to be successful. ” (The Times)

James Milligan, Nomura’s EMEA head of flow credit, has left the bank. (Reuters)

How to speak corporate American:

Don’t say: “a chain of coffee shops”
Do say: “a scalable coffee platform with critical know-how and expertise in a fast-growing, on-trend category.”https://t.co/mU3tQIBOSl

— Peter Thal Larsen (@peter_tl) August 31, 2018

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Goldman Sachs has rehired one of its former executive directors (EDs) as a managing director (MD) in London.

Adam Iqbal, who left Goldman last November to join fixed investment management firm Pimco as executive vice president and portfolio manager, is back at the U.S. bank just 10 months. This time, however, he has a bigger job. In his earlier three and a half year stint at Goldman, Iqbal was an ED and EMEA head of G10 options trading. Now he’s an MD and head of FX exotics and correlation trading globally.

During his brief interlude at Pimco, Iqbal handled foreign exchange options and specialist volatility strategies. A Ph.D. in Financial Mathematics and Financial Economics from Imperial College London, Iqbal began his career at Barclays as a forex vanilla and exotic options trader in 2010. He became a vice president at Barclays in 2013 but shifted to Goldman a year later. He has also authored a book titled ‘Volatility – Practical Options Theory’, which will be released in October this year.

Iqbal’s reasons for leaving Pimco aren’t clear, but Goldman has certainly shown itself willing to hire-in MDs from outside. Over the last few months, it’s brought on-board at least five new MDs in its New York office. The new hires include Max Ritter, a former MD at Morgan Stanley, David Hammond, a former MD at Credit Suisse, Wendy Jones, the ex-head of re-engineering at Och-Ziff Capital Management, Rebecca Kruger, a former MD at Citi and Koby Rosenschein, another ex-Goldmanite, who had previously spent 15 years at the bank before moving to Two Sigma as senior vice president and head of engineering education in 2015.

Iqbal isn’t the first former executive director that Goldman’s hired and promoted. Nor is he the first ex-Goldman ED who’s been rehired as an MD. In May, GS hired Patrik Czornik from J.P. Morgan as a managing director in telecoms, media and technology investment banking for Europe. Czornik was a mere ED at JPM. In April, Goldman re-hired Nicola Garrood from RBC as a managing director on its equities compliance team in London. Garrood worked for Goldman before joining RBC in 2015 – but she too was just an executive director in her first sojourn at the firm.

Photo: Getty

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It’s not just financial institutions group (FIG) bankers, U.S. risk and regulation specialists, and senior equity researchers who are leaving Deutsche Bank. It transpires that it’s also the sort of senior technologists who are supposed to be preparing the bank for the future.

Deutsche insiders say that Florian Miciu, Deutsche Bank’s EMEA head of equities product development resigned around a month ago. Miciu’s exit follows that of Taras Bondar, the co-head of equities algo quants at Deutsche Bank in London, whose departure we were first to report in May. Bondar is understood to have joined Exane as of today, where he will be building out an algo execution development team in London.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment on Miciu and Bondar’s exits and neither man responded to an invitation to discuss their departures. Insiders say Deutsche’s equities product development team is demoralized. This is partly the result of a hiring freeze and partly because staff who thought they’d be busy building a business are instead occupied with putting together internal presentations and P&L sheets outlining their strategy to senior executives. “It’s just really boring work,” says one.

Deutsche Bank’s global equities business is led by Peter Selman, a former Goldman Sachs partner who took the role in December 2017. Equities revenues at Deutsche Bank were down 15% year-on-year in the first half of 2017 as the German bank sharply reduced its presence in U.S. equities as part of its strategy for cutting costs to €23bn and focusing on core areas. In the circumstances, Miciu and Bondar’s voluntary exits might be seen as fortuitous and a means of cost cutting – except that most banks are currently focused on adding electronic trading expertise rather than letting people go.

Miciu’s tenure at Deutsche Bank was surprisingly short. He joined the bank in London in January 2018 after nearly five years as a senior technologist at Tradeweb in New York City. Bondar was a Deutsche Bank veteran who joined the bank nearly 17 years ago.

While Deutsche’s equities algo team is looking shaky, insiders say its FX algo team has been stocking up on developers from Bloomberg. Similarly, Deutsche Bank’s strats team is said to have stabilized despite the departure of founder Sam Wisnia for a hedge fund in March 2018. The ‘Kannon’ risk and pricing engine built by DB’s strats is understood to be fully functional and working to plan.

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I’m a woman in banking. I’m a vice president and am nearly a decade into my career in the investment banking division (IBD) of a European bank in London. I am at an age when you might expect to have a child. – I would certainly like to have a child, but I believe that my banking career is making it difficult for me to conceive.

When you’re a woman in your mid-30s, fertility is not a given. If you’re working 80 hours a week and are exhausted, conceiving a child doesn’t necessarily happen as easily as you might think. I know, and I am not the only one to have this problem. For women in finance, the heavy workload, the high stress and the lack of sleep not only make it difficult to find a partner, but are a recipe for hormonal imbalance and infertility. The longer I work in banking, the more that I feel that I’m being made to make a choice: the ability to conceive, or the opportunity to become an MD.

My male colleagues don’t have this dilemma. Not only are they able to have children easily (often with women who work outside banking) but their ability to start families is making it even harder for female bankers like me to do the same.

In the past few years several of my male colleagues have started families. They all take paternity leave (usually for around a month, sometimes for longer) and when they come back they often expect to work a bit less. As a case in point, I was recently asked to take on extra project by a colleague who’s a new father – he said he needs to spend time with his baby and can’t work as much as I do.

I’m stuck in a vicious cycle. The more that my male colleagues have children, the more that I am expected to cover for them and the harder it becomes for me to conceive. You can see why I’m annoyed.

It’s time that this dynamic is openly discussed. Plenty of women my age in finance have the same problem. It’s not considered appropriate to push-back when all the new fathers (and there are quite a few of them) expect their still-childless female colleagues to work harder than they do. Nor do any of these men take time to really understand the women they work with or to appreciate the sacrifices they are making for their roles.

Men and women are not the same. Women can and will work as hard as men, but doing so often comes at a tangible physical cost. This is why a lot of the senior women in banking are childless. By comparison, most of the men in banking have children. Some women in banking choose not to have children, but for a lot of women it’s forced upon them. Men in banking need to be more sensitive to this – and to stop crowing about their children and expecting childless female colleagues to pick up the slack when they start dumping work on them and taking extra time off.

Laura McDonald is the pseudonym of a VP level banker in London

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J.P. Morgan is looking for a managing director to spearhead its Belt and Road strategy as global banks start to build new teams to coordinate business stemming from China’s $900bn global infrastructure initiative.

The US firm is advertising on its careers site for a “Belt and Road Initiative lead”, an “internal expert” to develop BRI-focused initiatives within its corporate and investment bank.

This new JPM vacancy follows Citi’s appointment last month of Beibei Li as head of its BRI-related banking and origination businesses. In April, HSBC – which has singled out BRI as a strategic priority and wants to be the leading international bank in the sector by 2020 – transfered its Malaysia chief executive Mukhtar Hussain into the newly created position of head of BRI for Asia Pacific.

Standard Chartered, which has offices in 45 BRI markets, is also among the Western banks that are building small BRI strategy teams to develop policies, network with key clients, and liaise between different departments.

J.P. Morgan’s new job description demands the ability to “leverage coverage and product teams to execute BRI transactions”. “BRI teams coordinate across areas like corporate banking, investment banking, project finance, and infrastructure to ensure there’s a coherent strategy to monetise the BRI business,” says John Mullally, director of Hong Kong financial services at recruiters Robert Walters. “And they link BRI clients to the right people internally to meet their needs, whether that’s trade finance or M&A.”

Leading a BRI team typically requires decades of experience. Hussain and Li have been with their respective banks for 36 and 19 years, and J.P. Morgan’s new MD-level role demands at least 15 years’ experience. While the JPM opening is in Beijing (presumably to be close to private sector clients and government decision makers), both Hussain and Li are now based in Hong Kong.

At the rank-and-file level, recruiters expect steady but small-scale hiring for BRI units in both cities over the next year. “There will be expansion, but banks will want to keep these teams fairly lean because strategy people are costs centres,” says Mullally.

As with all internal strategy roles, there is no set route into a BRI job. J.P. Morgan says its new MD can have experience in “banking, markets, investor services and/or strategy consulting”.

“A lot of BRI people are from corporate banking backgrounds because a lot of BRI business revolves around trade financing and cross boarder payments,” says Hubert Tam, managing partner of Hong Kong search firm Sirius Partners. Shanghai-based headhunter Jason Tan says the cross-border nature of BRI transactions means candidates should ideally have both China and global banking experience, and have worked with large corporations on international deals.

Connections to the Chinese government will also stand you in good stead, says Mullally. “If you’ve already worked on other vast government infrastructure projects, these relationships will be invaluable, so candidates might well come from infrastructure or project finance backgrounds,” he adds.

Influencing skills and the “ability to interact with colleagues at all levels, including the most senior executives of the bank” are among the main requirements of the new JPM job. “In BRI strategy, your networks and relationship-building skills are more important than your technical expertise,” says Mullally.

Moving from the front-office to a BRI strategy team is not for everyone, however. “It’s a career decision to take a step back from the front-line,” says Mullally.

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How much money can a really good dealmaker bring in? Using data from Thomson Reuters, Freeman Consulting has estimated the five most lucrative bank/corporate relationships of the last decade. A few things stand out when you look at the data. First, that the most profitable dealmakers of the post-crisis period weren’t investment bankers at all; they were compliance officers. The biggest single fee earning relationship of the period since the crisis was that between Lazard and AB Inbev, which has generated $234m of fees in the last ten years, including $126m in 2016. But looking at the LIBOR cartel judgement alone, we can see that Barclays avoided a fine of €690m and UBS avoided a full €2.5bn, by maintaining good relationships with the regulators and making a deal to secure whistleblower status. If only they could get proportionate bonuses …

The second thing which jumps out is that a significant proportion of the blue-whale advisory relationships still seem to be personal franchises of the old-fashioned investment banking kind. While the Lazard/ AB Inbev franchise is a real team effort, going back to the days of Interbrew and including the CEO Ken Jacobs as well as the co-head of consumer and retail sector, Alexander Hecker, many of the rest of the top five are one man shows. The relationship between Goldman Sachs and Novartis, for example, generated $200m in fees, but these are mainly attributable to Gordon Dyal – since his retirement from GS in 2015, Novartis has Dyal & Co for a lot of its M&A business. Similarly, while UBS / Vodafone makes the top three relationships with $127m of fees, since Simon Warshaw left UBS in 2013 the business has been going to Robey Warshaw.

And the final point that can’t be escaped is that looking at the top five relationships really does underline that the last ten years have been anything but a vintage era for hard-charging deal makers. The UBS / VW Porsche corporate relationship makes it into the top five, for a single deal in 2008, plus the fees from the corporate struggle between VW and Porsche. The majority of the work that put the Goldman Sachs / E.on relationship into fourth place was done in 2009. Although activity is turning up, it’s hard to be optimistic for the near future.

So, will it be possible in ten years’ time to identify single individuals who are capable of claiming credit for nine-figure sums of deal revenue? Maybe not, even if activity does return. The world of corporate finance continues to be institutionalised, and governance arrangements more structured – every year there are fewer and fewer CEOs who are genuinely capable of agreeing deals all by themselves, and so less opportunity for the person-to-person relationships which have driven the mega individual franchises. It’s noticeable, for example, that major players like Asu Okyay are moving away from corporate relationships and in the direction of wealth management, still originating and executing, but doing deals for wealthy families and individuals. Family offices might not do deals in the same billion-dollar size as multinational companies, but it’s more credible for an individual banker to claim to “own” the relationship with a family than with the amorphous set of committees and structures that make the decisions at modern corporations.

Last week we noticed that comic author Gary Shteyngart was coming out with the most surprising insights into the world of hedge funds in the promotional interviews for his book, Lake Success. He’s still on the interview trail and still coming out with some absolute gems. As well as a YouTube trailer for the book in the form of a promotional video for a fictitious hedge fund to be launched with Ben Stiller, he has this to say about the marital habits of the very successful:

“It almost became a cliché to meet hedge funders who were married to women of great intellect and promise. What happened to them? When did the ambition leave them? How could they allow their husband’s career to become the only one in the family? What would that mean for their daughters and their view of themselves? These questions continued to haunt me. In the old days, you married your secretary. Now you married an MD-MBA-JD VP at Goldman Sachs and took her “off the market.”

Not sure about the nostalgia for days when “you married your secretary”, but the phenomenon whereby Wall Street professionals marry each other is well established enough to have a name (“assortative mating”) and the rest of the interview is filled with the kind of comments which make you think the author could have fitted in a little bit to well at the top end of the buy side.

Meanwhile

Strange tales from ICO land, where EQUI (the investment vehicle promoted by Baroness Michelle Mone and by Doug Barrowman) appears to have changed its token issue, recruited Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as an investor and started to make legal threats to journalists. (FT Alphaville)

Fintech IPO of the year to date is Funding Circle, the UK-based peer to peer lender. But with the economic cycle beginning to look less benign, there is a danger that the P2P sector might find funding is exactly what becomes scarce if bad debts start to rise and lending volumes to slow. (Bloomberg)

Although jobs appear to be relocating to Frankfurt, German bankers still see Brexit as more of a threat than an opportunity. Joerg Asmussen, head of Europe at Lazard, sees New York as the main beneficiary. (Handelsblatt)

The clock is running down for former rogue trader Kweku Adoboli, who has now been detained ahead of deportation, and could be forced to return to Ghana by this time next week. (Financial News)

Moody’s have lost an important appeal in the case brought against them by the Hong Kong SFC over a research report that was critical of corporate governance and accounting policies. (WSJ)

SocGen, having already set aside €1.2bn for its sanctions-busting case in the USA, is close to finding out what the final bill will be. (Bloomberg)

Wary of the “key man risk” posed by the possibility of a money manager becoming “the Harvey Weinstein of finance”, investors are increasingly adding questions relating to sexual harassment policies to their due diligence. (PIOnline)

Bridgeton Research Group suggest that market volatility may be caused by clusters of stop orders and similar behaviour by algorithmic trading programs. (WSJ)

In a perhaps disproportionately detailed longread, the Wall Street Journal investigates the social meaning and office politics of what kind of candy people bring back as office presents from their summer vacations. (WSJ)

The retail group Lidl have banned work emails from being sent after 6pm, so that staff can enjoy stress-free time at home. At time of writing, no major investment bank has yet copied this policy. (Daily Mirror)

Smile on the line! A commuter has launched a grass roots campaign to persuade Londoners to be less grumpy on public transport. (Evening Standard)

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Macquarie is still building its equities trading business in London. – And it is still hiring equities traders from Credit Suisse in order to do so.

The latest addition at the Australian bank is understood to be Martin Turner, a veteran pan-European director-level sales trader at Credit Suisse. Insiders say Turner handed in his resignation yesterday.

Credit Suisse declined to comment on Turner’s move and neither Macquarie nor Turner himself responded to a query on his intentions.

If Turner is indeed off to Macquarie, he will not be the first. Jason Maniloff, the former head of small cap equity trading at Credit Suisse, joined the Australian bank in August. Other Credit Suisse equities recruits at Macquarie include Jan Asboth (who left after six months for Barclays) and Kenneth Kane, Credit Suisse’s former managing director of program trading.

Macquarie’s appeal for Credit Suisse equities professionals is almost certainly down to Daniel Kaye, the former Credit Suisse trader who’s been building the business since early 2017. Kaye is understood to be offering generous packages as an inducement to join. He has not restricted his attention to ex-colleagues: traders from Deutsche Bank and BTIG have joined Macquarie too.

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Machine learning (ML) is probably the hottest thing in quantitative finance right now. But it’s also badly misunderstood.

For starters it isn’t actually clear what machine learning actually is. The term conjures up images of artificially intelligent cyborgs poring over streams of financial data, coming up with novel trading strategies which they then test and modify – all without any human supervision. Some esoteric ML techniques look a little like this; genetic algorithms for example can modify themselves to improve their performance.

However, there’s more to machine learning than just this. Other methods described as machine learning look decidedly old-fashioned; many people even label classical statistical techniques like linear regression as ML. These older techniques require closely supervised learning – a human being has to specify the variables of interest and the general equation that relates them. The machine has to do no more than find a few parameter values.

You probably think that machine learning is a recent innovation. This is incorrect. Most ML techniques have been around for decades – the exciting ‘new’ technology of neural networks dates back to the 1950s. Where ML draws from traditional statistics there is even more history: linear regression was invented in the 19th century.

However two recent trends have brought machine learning into the limelight. Firstly there is more raw computer power available to data scientists than ever before. Partly this is thanks to Moore’s Law – the continuing exponential growth in the performance of individual chips. But it’s also because of cloud computing, which allows ML programmers to access machines far more powerful than their local desktop or server cluster. As a result computationally intense ML techniques are now feasible.

The other change has been the availability of “big data”: larger data sets for ML to crunch. In the traditional data world tick level price data is now relatively cheap and accessible, giving a much richer data set than minute-by-minute prices. There has also been significant growth in alternative data such as social media posts; which in theory could give clues to the mood of consumers and thus the fortunes of individual stocks.

But these trends don’t automatically translate into huge profits for anyone trying to use machine learning to predict stock prices. Even the fanciest ML technique won’t be able to find a relationship that isn’t there. Worse still is the danger that they will discover a pattern that isn’t really there, or won’t persist in the future. This problem of “overfitting” is an issue with all attempts to predict the future using data from the past, but it is especially problematic for complicated ML methods. Where ML does find a relationship it may just be discovering something that could have been found with more rudimentary tools.

Alternative data may also fail to live up to the hype. The chain of causality between many sources of alternative data and asset prices is probably quite tenuous, even if it exists. Most alternative data sets haven’t been around for very long, and ML techniques need long series of data points to find relatively weak effects.

Perhaps a more promising area is the ongoing battle between buy-side execution desks and the high frequency proprietary traders that try to pick them off. Here, both sides can use ML to see the faint footprints of their competition in large data-sets of tick level price data, and modify their strategies accordingly.

Ironically the real success stories for machine learning in finance are far away from the highly paid world of the front offices of banks and hedge funds. Instead they are to be found in the much less glamorous world of retail banking. ML is particularly good at identifying credit card borrowers and mortgagees who are more likely to default on their payments.

These areas have large and well established data sets for machine learning techniques to get their teeth into, but more importantly the behaviour of individual people seems to be more predictable than their interactions in financial markets. If you want a job in machine learning, it is probably here that you should focus your attention.

Robert Carver is a former head of fixed income at quantitative hedge fund AHL, and the author of ‘Systematic Trading’ and ‘Smart Portfolios’

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Here’s a true story.

It was 2005. I was working at Lehman Brothers and had just made VP.
I was doing well, but not great by any means.
I had been there since 1999 and thought I was going to be stuck there.

Given the latest promotion, I decided that I was going to try to monetize my new VP status and see what it could do for me.
A few head hunters had reached out, after all it was 2006.
I started interviewing.
Met 4 different banks, most didn’t want me and the ones that wanted me I didn’t want them.

I got a job offer from JPM for 40% more. I ended up going back to Lehman and having them guarantee me a higher package at the end of year.

Come comp time, Lehman tried to re-negotiate. After all I didn’t have anything in writing.
That’s one of the problems when you stay. You have to trust your home team.
So I found myself in a senior MD’s office in November, with comp time fast approaching being told, “So we are thinking of paying you ‘xyz’, what do you think?”.
But, that’s less than what we agreed to Jim. We ended up having some back and forth.
It was ok in the end. I got a 30% bump. By now it was 2006 and the market was really heating up.

It was time to roll the dice again.
I reached out to a head hunter I knew was known for big packages – that’s key by the way.
You have to do your due diligence – not all head hunters are the same.
Just like in banking, head hunters also have bulge brackets and the also rans.
You have to deal with the best if you want the biggest package.

So I found myself one of the best NY firms and convinced them to sell me.
That’s the other key part – you have to really sell them on yourself.
These guys are your bankers, your sales force out there trying to flog you.
Get it right and it’s worth thousands in the right market.
I remember going to their offices, sitting with them, putting the story together.
Building trust.

These guys start working, four, five months go by.
The phone rings one day, “Hey can you speak now”.
I walk away from the desk, “Sure, what’s going on?”.
The headhunter says, “I have something for you”.
Turns out, my dream firm, the one that had rejected me two, or maybe three times was ready to speak to me.
That started fifteen rounds of interviews. Those were rough.
I got grilled by guys much smarter than me.

One day the MD hiring me called and said, hey lets grab some sushi.
I ended up meeting him on the Upper West Side of New York, where I had recently moved to after getting divorced at age 29 (lets save that story for next time).
We meet up, and he’s got a brown envelope for me.
I was wondering, wow these guys do very elaborate rejection letters.
The MD ends up handing over the envelope.
I open it up.
Inside is an offer letter. The headhunter and I had come through.
What a combination.
I was being bid for 2x last year’s comp.
There wasn’t much to talk about.
When I told management at Lehman Brothers, I think I saw a flash of envy on my bosses face.

The author is one of a group of senior bankers who blog at the site What I Learnt on Wall Street.

Barclays executive John Miller had a one-of-a-kind experience on Thursday evening. He sat nervously in front of his television rooting for a prospective employee to earn a job offer with a different organization.

This seemingly odd scenario began more than a year ago when Miller, the global head of industry coverage banking at Barclays, received a call from a student at Wake Forest University, where he sits on the board of the business school. As a Wake Forest alum, Miller knew incoming senior John Wolford’s name and reputation but had never spoken with him before. Wolford was the starting quarterback at Wake Forest, a Division I school known more for its academics than its football program.

Wolford was seeking Miller’s advice because he hoped to begin a career on Wall Street after graduating. The problem was that Wolford couldn’t take the normal track of most students due to his commitments with the football program. He worked at an investment firm that manages Wake’s endowment during his junior summer, but his schedule didn’t allow him to take on a traditional internship at a big bank in New York – the feeder for analyst programs on Wall Street.

Miller saw it as an opportunity. “I had heard great things about John from many sources at the school – about his determination, his tenacity, his work ethic and his unwavering focus,” plus a high GPA, he said.

So, Miller flew him up under the guise of an informational interview – to give Wolford a better idea of what investment banking is all about. He also wanted to see if Wolford performed as well in the interview room as he did on the football field. After catching up with the half-dozen managers who met Wolford that day, Miller felt he saw enough and made him an offer on the spot. Suddenly, Wolford found himself walking into his senior year with a job in hand to work for Barclays’ debt capital markets group.

However, an “issue” popped up during Wolford’s last year at Wake that put his standing on somewhat shaky ground. He had a phenomenal senior campaign, passing for 3,192 yards and a school record 29 touchdowns, opening the eyes of pro scouts who likely didn’t have Wolford on their radar before the year. With the dream of potentially playing in the National Football League becoming a possibility, Wolford reached out to Miller for counsel throughout the year. And when the New York Jets offered Wolford a non-guaranteed spot on their preseason roster in August – right around the time he was scheduled to start with the bank – Miller and other Barclays executives huddled. They decided they wouldn’t pull his offer.

“We told him: ‘the door is open and we have the lights on for you’” Miller said. No matter how short or long Wolford’s NFL career would be, a seat at Barclays would be waiting.

But the reality of Wolford’s tenure in the NFL was put to the test almost immediately. Miller anxiously watched as the Jets played their last preseason game on Thursday, acknowledging that he was rooting hard for Wolford in his final audition before cuts were made, despite the connotations of him making the team. He was unspectacular and was ultimately cut, but showed enough promise that the Jets added him to their 10-man practice squad on Monday, meaning he is part of the team but won’t be active on gameday unless something changes. The practice squad is used to help groom young players in the hope of them eventually earning a full-time spot on the team.

When asked if Wolford indicated that he would immediately join Barclays if his stint with the Jets is cut short, Miller said that’s not the way Wolford is wired. “He’s an optimist. He’ll focus on plan B if and when appropriate,” he said. For now, Wolford’s NFL dreams are still alive, though he faces an uphill battle to make long career out of it. He’ll make a minimum of $7,600 per week while on the practice squad. Not a bad wage, particularly when you have a standing offer for a banking job waiting in tow.

UPDATE: At 10:23 a.m. on Tuesday, roughly 90 minutes after publication and 24 hours after signing him, the Jets cut Wolford from the practice squad to sign a different quarterback. A tough business…

Athletes in finance

While the particulars of Wolford’s story are unique, plenty of financial firms have targeted high-level athletes in the past. NFL veteran Justin Tuck started a job within Goldman Sachs’ wealth management division in July. Hedge fund D.E. Shaw has employed several Olympians, while the Ivy League football “mafia” has been a known pipeline for Wall Street talent. The idea is that college athletes who can still post high GPAs during the rigors of a season are more likely to have the competitive fire, focus and work ethic to put in the hours and be successful in banking.

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Of all the sought-after skills within HSBC’s sprawling Hong Kong operations, expertise in artificial intelligence – particularly machine learning – is right up there. In July, for example, the bank announced its first pilot machine learning projects using Google Cloud infrastructure.

HSBC has been developing new AI-powered platforms for the Hong Kong market (e.g. a local chatbot called Amy), but Hong Kong also serves as a global development centre for the firm, which generated 87% of its revenue from Asia during the first half of this year.

In contrast to most Western banks, many of HSBC’s senior AI and machine learning experts are in Hong Kong, not the US or Europe. Here’s a sample of these people, based on their online public profiles.

Ray Zeng, head of machine learning

The man you need to know if you want a machine learning job at HSBC in Hong Kong, Zeng is a 22-year veteran of the bank who has risen steadily up the ranks since joining as an analyst-level programmer within global cash management. After working in HSBC’s UK internet banking team between 2007 and 2010, Zeng returned to Hong Kong where he took on a series of senior posts, including global head of product engineering for global utilities, and chief architect for global operations. He took on his current role last December, according to his public profile.

KC Tsui, global head of applied innovation quality management and AI research director

Tsui’s team is responsible for “sourcing innovative solutions in the areas of AI, data science, RPA, blockchain, IoT, and similar emerging technologies”, according to his public profile. It also performs quality control before new tech solutions are deployed, and collaborates with research institutes and fintech firms. Tsui, who has a PhD in computer science from King’s College London, joined HSBC in 2003 as regional head of middleware technology services of IT operations Asia Pacific. He’s held several senior roles at the firm since then, including global head of DevOps tooling.

Martin Qiao, lead architect for machine learning automation

Qiao is in charge of “end-to-end solution architecture design” for machine learning and artificial intelligence related projects, according to his profile. He is HSBC’s main ML engineer on in-house solution development and leads research and development in natural language processing and computer vision. Qiao, who holds a PhD majoring in data mining and pattern recognition, joined HSBC in 2016 as a senior consultant for AI and cognitive computing, working on projects such as chatbots and automatic signature verification. The key machine learning tools he uses are Python, R, Matlab, SAS, AWS, and Google Cloud, according to his profile.

Soumyadip Mukhopadhyay, machine learning and AI lead, HSBC Asia Pacific RBWM analytics

Mukhopadhyay is responsible for machine learning and AI within HSBC’s retail and wealth management division in APAC and describes himself in his profile as “vastly experienced in AI applications like bots”. This is his second stint at the bank, having first worked there between 2007 and 2012 in various project management and business analyst roles. He then moved to Prudential Assurance, developing an analytics capability for the Indonesian market. Mukhopadhyay rejoined HSBC in India in 2014 and moved to Hong Kong in January this year.

Jasmeet Singh Gujral, global product lead for conversational banking and assisted digital products

Gujral’s team is using artificial intelligence to improve customer communication via the bank’s digital channels. It’s helping to “industrialise a pipeline of products that are built on cutting edge technologies like deep learning and natural language processing across all HSBC markets”. Gujral’s career has progressed rapidly since he graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a Master of Science in Management Information Systems in 2012. After a brief stint as a senior associate in quantitative equity research at Citi, he joined HSBC in 2014 as a digital product manager and “one of the youngest AVPs in HSBC USA”. Gujral moved to Hong Kong in August last year.

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Internship application deadlines at Goldman Sachs in Singapore are now looming for 2019. If you’re considering applying to spend next summer at Goldman, let me tell you a bit more about my experience there in 2017.

You might want to first read my original article about my internship, in which I described the great support that the bank gives to its interns. In comparison to the internship I did this year at a European bank in Hong Kong, Goldman gave me far better access to business tools like Bloomberg, for example.

Goldman took its internship programme a lot more seriously and this was reflected in the attitudes of the full-time staff – they were pretty much always willing to talk to me. I found the hierarchy of Goldman, at least here in Singapore, to be remarkably flat.

But there was a downside to my 2017 Goldman internship that I didn’t mention in my previous article: it was just a bit too structured and well organised for its own good.

Goldman’s HR people and bankers put a lot of effort into organising their internships so you learn the basics of the job (in whatever team you’re assigned to) within a ‘safe environment’. The work I did was mainly project-based – I didn’t get to work in real time on deals. In that way, I could make mistakes and they wouldn’t matter so much (at least to the firm), but I never really got to experience the thrill (and challenge) of the deal.

The European bank I worked for this summer, by contrast, has a smaller presence in Singapore than Goldman and doesn’t arrange its internship training so precisely. I was thrown into my summer role there from day one and my team needed me to help on live deals. This wasn’t formal training, arranged for my sake (and to see if I could cut it as a full-timer in the future) – the bank actually needed my help right there and then!

Goldman organised wonderful networking events and arranged for its most senior Singapore bankers to talk to us interns. But the European bank let me go to client visits, in which its bankers discussed real transactions. I even got to make a few client calls.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved almost every minute of my Goldman internship – but it’s good to keep in mind that you might not get the hands-on experience you were hoping for if you intern there. You will still need to work very hard to succeed next summer at Goldman, but it will be within a very controlled environment.

Josie Lei (not her real name) is a student at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who’s just done a summer internship at a European bank in Hong Kong. She spent the summer of 2017 at Goldman Sachs.

Image credit: AndreyPopov, Getty

If you’re looking for a bank where second and third year analysts are “unusually satisfied with their variable compensation,” try Citigroup. So says research from recruiters Dartmouth Partners. This year second year analysts there apparently received average total comp of £130k ($167k) and third years got £158k ($203k). This compared to industry averages of less than £100k and £123k respectively for 2018.

Exciting. But is there a catch?

Kind of. The reason why Citi juniors did so well this year is that they effectively got two bonuses. Citigroup decided to shift its junior bankers’ compensation year from a January to an August payout (calendar year to anniversary-of-joining), so there was a short compensation cycle. In future, Citi’s juniors will not be included in the bank’s January performance round, so things will be back to normal.

Cynics, however, will suspect that this move wasn’t made purely out of kindness: Citigroup gets significant strategic benefits from the move. Previously, Citi was unusual among U.S.-owned banks in having a January pay year for juniors. Moving to the same calendar as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will allow Citi to play banks’ game of jockeying to be slightly later paying than the competition to gain an idea of the market norm – the European-owned banks often set bonus dates stretching into February or even March, which allows them to calibrate the amounts based on the January round of Wall Street, at the price of a considerable loss of kudos for implicitly admitting that they’re always price takers.

Equally importantly, the August compensation date has an important role in the retention of third year analysts. This is a crucial stage in the life cycle of an investment banker: it\’s is the time when good analysts graduate from the program and are therefore capable of doing genuine value-added work. But given the lack of differentiation in the analyst bonus pool compared to associates and higher grades, the best third-years are often quite significantly underpaid for the work they’re capable of. And so they’re potentially vulnerable to being poached.

The problem, if you’re a third year analyst who’s unhappy with your August bonuses is that you’re stuck. Banks promote in January and if you move after your bonus is paid it’s almost impossible to arrive in your new place in time to be promoted. However, if you’re an analyst who gets paid in January you have more time to consider your options. – You can easily go through the recruitment process for a new banking job, take a month’s gardening leave, and still show up in plenty of time for at least a token payment in your new firm’s August remuneration cycle, without pausing in your progress up the ranks. An August bonus round is therefore a defence mechanism for banks that want to stop this happening. Citi isn’t paying two bonuses for nothing.

Deutsche Bank, meanwhile, receives another downgrade in terms of bragging rights, as Reuters has now seen documents which confirm what has long been suspected based on its market capitalisation – the bank’s shares are to leave Europe’s blue-chip STOXX50 index. A sad day in some ways, but it might be for the best. The relationship between Deutsche Bank and its shareholders has been unhealthy for some time, and outside the index, it is more likely to find an investor base which are holding the stock because they want it, and who are prepared to do research into a complicated company, rather than an investor base largely made up of non-specialist fund managers who hate the stock but feel like they can’t depart too far from the index. As Juergen Fitschen admitted in Handelsblatt this week, a lot of Deutsche’s problems today stem from its reluctance to raise equity in the past, and that wasn’t purely down to management stubbornness on the part of Fitschen, Josef Ackermann and Anshu Jain; the shareholder base have to take some of the responsibility too.

With a more involved and informed investor base (including, presumably Cerberus and any other activists), Deutsche’s Christian Sewing will be able to plan for the future and think about the appropriate size of its capital base in a calmer environment, a little more removed from the public eye. And it might even be good news for staff too. Deutsche’s balance sheet, league table rankings and even earnings are not so very different from how it was in 2013, when the market capitalisation was roughly twice what it is today. Now that most of the shareholder dilution is in the past, it might not be such a bad time to be pricing a brand new set of DBK stock options.

Meanwhile…

Surprise! David Solomon is still popping up to do surprise DJ sets at clubs in the Hamptons. Young and trendy Goldman Sachs employees boldly went on the record as saying that their CEO was fantastic and had opened their eyes to whole new music styles. In fairness, the set apparently also went down a storm with people who do not look to DJ D-Sol for their year’s compensation, and don’t have to justify to him why they were in a nightclub at the weekend rather than working on deals. (Bloomberg)

With the countdown for Kweku Adoboli’s deportation to Ghana now reaching the critical stages, there’s a petition to the Home Office to let him stay and act as a “living case study” (38 Degrees)

And on the same subject, a “where are they now” piece on the other 11 UBS bankers who were fired as a result of the Adoboli rogue trader scandal, including Carsten Kengeter (resigned from Deutsche Boerse), Ossie Gruebel (retired) and several more junior ranks. Most still work in finance, one could not be traced and one set up a gambling site called “Bets With Mates”. (Bloomberg)

Gary Cohn, formerly of Goldman Sachs, makes an appearance in the published extracts from Bob Woodward’s new book on the Trump White House. Apparently, among other exploits, he stopped the USA from leaving both NAFTA and a South Korean trade agreement, by stealing letters off the President’s desk and waiting until he had forgotten about them. (Washington Post)

The key job move news of the day concerns the reorganisation at Citi caused by the retirement of CFO John Gerspach. Mark Mason steps up from CFO of the investment bank to the group role, while Jim Cowles (head of EMEA) and Bill Mills (CEO of North America) are leaving the bank. No successors announced, but the company emphasised that the EMEA head’s job would still be located in London. (Financial Times)

Citi has hired Gordon Ball to be head of EMEA listed derivatives electronic execution and algo, and Joseph Michniowski to the corresponding job in Asia, both hires coming from GS. (Financial News)

John Gousias, who left HSBC for Millennium Capital in 2017, has gone to Nomura to be head of flow trading credit. (Bloomberg)

And Nikolas Skaff, an equity capital markets MD covering emerging EMEA has moved to JP Morgan, bringing Ismail Iraqi, a VP on the same team, with him. (Financial News)

A hedge fund which was among the creditors in the Toys-R-Us bankruptcy is now being asked by redundant workers to contribute to the hardship fund. The workers are approaching the New Jersey public investment fund to put investor pressure on the hedge fund. One of the costs of taking public sector money is that you enter the world of politics. (FT)

A team of private bankers who moved from JP Morgan to Merrill are being sued for “bad mouthing” their former employer. (Financial Planning)

Millennials are learning German in increasing numbers, seeing it as potentially a business language of the future. (Guardian)

And an excellent think piece on the difference between designing a profitable trading system, versus actually trading it properly. (Cuemacro)

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Arjun Sofat badly wanted to be a banker. An economics graduate (1st class) from the UK’s University of Nottingham, he completed three banking internships as an undergraduate and then got lucky. He joined the investment banking division (IBD) of a major European bank when he graduated. But for Sofat, the time he spent getting into the industry outlasted the time he spent working in it – within two years and eight months of becoming a banker, he had changed his mind about his career. And he is far from being alone.

“I can say with certainty that 80% of my analyst class have left,” says Sofat. “There is no one I recall joining with me who is still with the bank today.”

It’s a phenomenon most banks will recognize. While the banking industry has no problem attracting hundreds of thousands of students to apply for its jobs, keeping hold of them is an altogether different matter. For many highly ambitious and highly intelligent students, banking turns out to be no more than a career staging post – whether they intended it or not.

The exits are particularly pronounced in Sofat’s area – IBD. Like Sofat, one Goldman Sachs IBD associate estimates that over 80% of his analyst class left after a few years. By comparison, he suggests that the departure rate in securities is lower, at more like 60%.

The major reason for getting out of IBD is burnout. For all banks’ fine words and fancy strategies for cutting juniors’ working hours, the job remains a grind. “There were quite a few occasions where we would work for 24 hours non-stop,” says Sofat, who left banking in February 2017 – long after such practices were supposed to have been outlawed. “We’d get to the office at 9am and at 9am the next day we’d go home shower and then come back in again.I can remember feeling very excited when I got six hours’ sleep a night.”

Like most junior bankers, Sofat also has his share of stories about holidays being cancelled and friendships falling by the wayside. “The expectation wasn’t that you could take leave when it was convenient for you.” Facebook made things worse: “You definitely fet the FOMO looking at social networks and seeing what everyone else was up to.”

What makes it difficult for banks though, is that hours aren’t the only issue. If they were, keeping juniors would be a simpler matter. However, for Sofat, as for the others of his generation who spent years jumping through hoops to get into finance only to leave once they arrived, it was also a question of fulfillment. They wanted it; for whatever reason they decided it was not on offer in a bank.

“I wanted to get back in touch with the creative part of myself,” says Glenn Regis, a former European government bond trader at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who left 18 months after joining. When he looked around at his colleagues on the trading floor, Regis says he was struck by their wasted potential: “What we were capable of could be better used elsewhere.”

As with Sofat, Regis knew what he was getting into – or should have. He spent three months interning with BofA before joining full-time. He says he’s still interested in markets and “how things work”, but that after 18 months the mundanity of the menial work done by trading floor juniors was too much. “A lot of the people who go into banking are very intelligent but the work is just not very stimulating and doesn’t use their intelligence properly. I think I’m using my brain much harder and better after leaving.”

Regis left Bank of America in February 2018. He’s running creatyve, a crowdfunding website where artists can raise capital from investors by selling shares in their art. The site is due to launch this week and Regis expects some of his former colleagues to be among its supporters. “There are a lot of people on the trading floor who are looking at ways to invest their money – this can help them do that.”

Sofat too is targeting some of his former colleagues in an entrepreneurial capacity. Months after leaving banking, he set up Free Soul, a company offering nutritional supplements formulated for women. “My dad became sick and during that time my mum felt very low on energy. I started working with leading nutritionists to develop protein blends that are helpful to females” says Sofat. “A few of my friends are in finance and they are saying they really feel its benefits too.”

While Regis and Sofat are no longer in banking, neither begrudges the time they devoted to pursuing their lapsed finance dream. “I worked on the trading floor for almost two years and it was good,” says Regis. “M&A teaches you a great work ethic that you can take elsewhere,” says Sofat. “I have no regrets about working in IBD. What I do regret is all the coffee I drank while I was there.”

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If you work for Goldman Sachs, Slang is more than just the signifier of an informal word or phrase: it’s the bank’s very own programming language, devised by some of its most brilliant strats over two decades ago. However, depending upon who you speak to, Slang (short for Securities Language) is also a reason why working for the firm is a) incredibly interesting or b) a very quick way of ensuring you will never work anywhere but GS ever again.

Before you become a Slang programmer, it’s therefore worth knowing exactly what you’re getting yourself into.

“Slang is a single-threaded language that relates to SecDB, Goldman’s risk and pricing system, which is effectively Goldman’s object store,” says one former Slang programmer who left Goldman last year. “Slang is sort of similar to Python,” he adds. “- It’s certainly no more difficult to learn.” Because Slang was created specifically for use at Goldman, it comes with lots of features that have been designed for the firm’s needs – like a proprietary calculating processing system called “Graph.”

Some Goldman programmers say they love Slang. “I use Slang every day,” says one developer working on the systems the firm uses to process its trades. “I would say I’m a specialist Slang developer. I love using Slang – the principles are aligned to Python, so I would say it’s helped me as a technologist. I don’t think it’s been limiting at all.”

Not everyone agrees. “Slang is like Python, but worse,” claims a technology recruiter, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It’s not transferable. If you’ve been working in Slang and you leave Goldman Sachs, you have a lot less chance of getting a job somewhere else than someone who’s been working in Java or Python.”

Another ex-Goldman developer who now works for a rival U.S. bank also cautions against becoming a Slang specialist. “I coded in it for a few years, but in my opinion it’s very career limiting and no one should do it for long. – You can take your Slang knowledge and work on the Athena or Quartz systems at J.P. Morgan or Bank of America, but those opportunities are quite limited.”

One ex-Goldman Sachs trading technology developer who recently left the firm, says GS is alert to Slang’s limitations and has been moving to Java as a result. “I started out coding in Slang, but the company as a whole has been embracing Java because Slang drives away young people who would rather work on mainstream technologies,” he says. Goldman insiders confirm that the core booking and trading engine at the bank still runs on Slang but that new applications and interfaces are increasingly programmed in Java with hooks into Slang as necessary. “Java is integrated with Slang in what we call Java Slang integration – the integration is for using Java for what it’s good for (multi threading, integration with other languages),” he says.

This might be why Goldman is current advertising only 29 jobs with Slang in their descriptions, compared to nearly 80 jobs with Java and 70 with Scala. However, with anything from 15m to 40m lines of Slang code already in operation, Goldman can’t move away from its proprietary language completely. The 29 Slang-related jobs the firm is currently advertising cover everything from data engineering to credit trading and post-operations regulatory reporting.

Some of the best technology and quantitative finance jobs at Goldman (in the “strats” team) still rely upon Slang though. “If you work in the strats team there’s tons of Slang about,” says the trading developer. “They’re very used to it and they like it.” Ultimately, then you will need to make a choice: do you want to spend your career at Goldman Sachs, or do you not?

“Whether you become a specialist Slang coder depends on whether you see yourself building a career within GS or not,” says one technology analyst at the firm. “If you want to stay at Goldman, becoming a specialist in Slang is not career-limiting at all because they really value expertise in this area. It is a great asset to have if you want to advance your career here or even to move within different departments. – For example, I know a lot of people in tech that moved to front office strats because they had great knowledge of coding in Slang.”

If you think you might want to leave Goldman, he says it’s a different matter: “It’s not so easy to sell your Slang experience elsewhere.”

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As summer internships have wrapped up and new analyst classes are getting their feet wet, we thought we’d update our list of the most reviled office clichés in banking – the empty phrases your colleagues and bosses regularly use that make your skin crawl.

We talked to a group of bankers, traders and consultants to freshen up the list and explain them as best we can. We also included a few that you left in the comments from a previous posting as well as a handful recently added to a forum on Wall Street Oasis. Some are very industry-specific, others are more general clichés that tend to make people shudder. Let us know what we missed.

Action items: Essentially just a list of things that need to get done.

Provide some color: If you’ve ever listened to an earnings call in banking, you’ve heard analysts utter this phrase multiple times. It basically just means “please provide more details,” or a flashier way of asking someone to talk about something.

Circle back: To re-evaluate something or give it a second look. You can also circle back – or re-connect – with a person to solve an issue. “Let me circle back with Bob and I’ll let you know.”

Don’t boil the ocean: Don’t overcomplicate or overthink a project to make it unnecessarily difficult or time-consuming.

Don’t cut the lawn with scissors: Similar to the above – be efficient and get straight to the point.

Long/short/bull/bear: Some traders love using market lingo in situations where they’re not talking about a stock or anything to do with work for that matter. One buy-side trader said he was “bearish” on a player in my recent fantasy football draft. He’s said that every year for the last 10.

Facing some headwinds: A cute way of explaining why you haven’t hit your numbers, and why it’s not your fault. Bank CEOs love to talk about market headwinds when the firm misses its guidance.

Hard-stop: You have to stop a meeting at a specific time as you have another appointment that you can’t move or be late to – or you just want the meeting to be over. “I have a hard-stop at 11 a.m.”

You’re only as good as your last trade: Self-explanatory but uttered every day according to one sell-side trader.

Bandwidth: One you alerted us to last time. Having “bandwidth” means you have the knowledge to go into greater detail on something. You can also “provide” bandwidth.

Over the wall: You are in the know. You have information that others don’t.

Run this up a flagpole and see if anyone salutes: To run an idea past people casually to see if it has legs, to use another cliché. Apparently this one goes back to the 1950s.

Dead cat bounce: It is the recovery in the price of stock/commodity/etc. after a massive decline. It comes from the idea that something has fallen so far that even a dead cat would bounce.

Scrimmage it: Common in investment banking, it is similar to another cliché: to “hash something out.”

Dig out: To get through all your backlog of work. “Let me dig out and I’ll come see you in an hour.”

Deep dive: Giving a thorough analysis.

Best practices: A seemingly formal, informal way of telling you that didn’t do something correctly by not following “best practices.”

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered: Don’t be overly greedy, lest you get the chop.

Touch base: To make contact or catch up. “Let’s touch base later today.”

Give me a buzz: “Call me.” You can also “ping” somebody by messaging them.

Ready, fire, aim: The idea of being aggressive and moving quickly without over-thinking.

Get alignment: To get everyone on the same page.

30,000 foot view: The abridged version of an issue. You don’t want every detail, but just a general idea of what’s happening.

This is a perishable: Another one left by a commenter. It means that something is time-sensitive.

We just need to get them a little bit pregnant: One from Wall Street Oasis that we’ve never heard of but was too odd not to include. It’s reportedly used to (crudely) describe the need to warm up a green client during the sales process.

Follow @BeecherTuttle

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More fintech firms are opening up in Singapore and Hong Kong – and many of them are hiring, albeit in small numbers. Over $2bn was invested in Asian fintech companies during the first quarter of 2018, a 188% year on year rise, according to data from CB Insights.

If you’re thinking about leaving a bank and joining a fintech firm, you’ll need to rework your CV. But how? We asked fintech founders in Singapore and Hong Kong for their top resume tips.

Show evidence of multi-tasking…

“Start-ups are low on resources and will need you to do a lot of things at once. If your company needs marketing emails sent out, it won’t matter that you’re only supposed to do business development,” says Anna Vanessa Haotanto, a former UOB banker who now runs The New Savvy, a Singapore fintech firm targeting female investors. “So provide them evidence that you’ve multi-tasked before – start-ups value well-roundedness.”

…and cross-divisional collaboration

Fintech firms are small, so you must be able to collaborate with people throughout the business. “But in a large bank you often work in a silo and having a blinkered view about the large picture,” says Ovidiu Olea, a former HSBC associate director, now founder of Hong Kong FX start-up Valoot Technologies. “So show on your CV how you’ve at least tried to break through those silos – it shows a willingness to explore interesting projects and expand your network.”

Highlight your tech skills

Even if you’re not applying for a developer role, your CV must showcase your technology skills. “First and foremost, start-ups need all staff to have great tech expertise,” says Eddie Rong, CEO of Hong Kong money-conversion firm Heycoins. “So mention these, supported by job-related experiences.”

Don’t forget your failures

Working in a fintech firm which failed actually adds credibility to your resume. “l like to hire people who have start-up experience, no matter if they were successful or not,” says Rong.

Mention motivations in your cover letter

Fintech founders don’t like to recruit candidates looking for an easy exit from the banking the sector. You must want to move to a start-up on its own merits. Explain yourself in your cover letter – don’t wait for the interview. “The cover letter is an opportunity to make a sincere introduction of your motivations and aspirations,” says Freddy Lim co-founder of Singapore robo-advisor StashAway and former global head of derivatives strategy at Nomura

Demonstrate how you delivered under budget

Start-ups are constantly under financial pressure and are keen on candidates with track records of successfully delivering projects. “Writing that you ‘managed a team of 20 people’ doesn’t mean anything, but ‘delivered a large complex project on (or under) budget’ – with real numbers – tells a better story on your CV,” says Alex Medana, CEO of FinFabrik, a Hong Kong-based capital markets and wealth management fintech firm, and a former Deutsche Bank vice president.

Don’t over emphasise education

“I’ve seen so many CVs that list GPA and test scores. That’s really not necessary – how well you did in your degree is superfluous and sometimes just takes up space on the CV,” says Olea from Valoot.

Keep it (very) short

Keep your fintech CV to two pages preferable one. “Fintech is a popular, growing sector and I receive a high number of CVs. Time is the most precious commodity in a start-up, so I always appreciate it when people keep it succinct,” says Olea.

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

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: metamorworks, Getty

DBS urgently needs more big data expertise to help drive the expansion of its consumer bank. The firm currently has 70 Singapore-based tech vacancies requiring big data skills (most of which have big data in the job title), according to its careers website. That’s nearly 42% of its total tech openings and 14% of its roles across all functions in the Republic.

This is not a junior or contract hiring spree – almost all the new positions are permanent and are at AVP level or above. DBS is predominately looking for mid-career candidates – from data scientists to product managers – who have work-based experience (not just academic qualifications) in big data.

Its solution architect (big data) vacancy, for example, tasks you to develop “enterprise grade data products using Spark” and demands “strong hands-on experience in distributed data architectures” and a “strong understanding of ML concepts”.

DBS also has a few data-related jobs at a senior (ED/SVP) level, such as head of customer management and analytics within consumer banking and big data analytics technology. This role calls for experience with “data integration on traditional and Hadoop environments”, and involves managing more than 100 people and spearheading future recruitment. You’ll be “responsible for growing and leading the highly skilled multi-disciplined engineering and data science teams that deliver technology and analytics solution for the consumer banking business regionally”.

Most of the vacancies lie within DBS’s group consumer banking unit, which is now handling even larger amounts of customer data following the final integration of ANZ’s Asia retail and wealth units into DBS earlier this year.

The 70 data-related jobs are part of an ongoing wider technology recruitment drive at DBS. The bank took on about 200 technologists, mainly developers and architects, in the 12 months to May this year. DBS has also been moving some development jobs in house, having previously used third-party IT vendors. These “insourced” tech staff helped the firm’s headcount to surge year on year in the first half, according to its financial results.

DBS may not find it entirely straightforward to find the data talent it needs. Banks like Standard Chartered, Citi and OCBC are also hiring, and candidates – particularly in data science – are thin on the ground in Singapore.

“Data engineers and scientists are highly sought after as banks in Asia harness massive amounts of consumer and internal business data, helping to predict the behaviour of their consumers, partners and investors, and helping to develop new products,” says Paolo Hiceta, manager of technology at recruiters Hudson in Singapore. “We see demand for people with Java, Spark, Hadoop, and Python automation and data-unification skills rising in Asia in the next two years.”

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

Follow @simonmortlock

Image credit: iLexx, Getty

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