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BNP Paribas is losing senior traders as it swaps staff with Goldman Sachs.

Headhunters say the French bank is parting company with Asa Atwell, its global head of G10 FX trading. At the same time, BNP has supplemented its existing stock of ex-Goldman Sachs traders with Robert Boeheim and Eusta Qin, a former Goldman sterling corporate bond trader and investment grade financials trader respectively. Bloomberg reported the latter moves early this week.

Atwell was promoted as global head of FX options trading at BNP in 2012 when the previous head of the business departed. The reason for his exit is unclear, although he’s not thought to be joining another firm.

The flow of talent at BNP goes both ways, however. While BNP is hiring in traders from other banks, it’s also losing them to rivals – Goldman Sachs included. GS is understood to have hired Darren O’Meara from BNP’s rates desk. Paul Mehta, a senior loans and distressed debt trader at BNP is said to have gone to Aberdeen Asset Management. And Paul Crawford, a senior sterling credit trader at BNP is said to be the latest arrival at UBS.

After cutting 233 London jobs last year, BNP Paribas has plans to expand its investment bank in Europe. Under ‘Strategy 2020′, BNP plans to achieve compound annual revenue growth across the CIB of 4.5% over the next three years.

Traders at the French bank had an excellent 2016. This may be helping to attract talent from elsewhere and encouraging “upgrading.” Goldman Sachs in particular appears to be losing sales trading staff this year, with UBS, Nomura and now BNP all poaching its people. As a result, and following layoffs last year, headhunters say Goldman is hiring. It already recruited Miran Serdarevic, Deutsche’s head of real money sales in London and is thought to have more senior hires lined up.

BNP Paribas declined to comment.

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Photo credit: UK Headquarters of BNP Paribas, Harewood Avenue,. London UK by Roberto Herrett is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Leo Labeis spent his final year at Goldman Sachs leading the bank’s efforts to comply with the long and sprawling requirements of MiFID II for its global markets business.

As the deadline looms next year, Labeis says one thing is clear – investment banks’ compliance teams are stretched.

“Compliance programmes are under very tight deadlines, in a rapidly shifting regulatory environment – it’s incredibly hard to keep up,” he says. “Technologists are consumed by individual projects, then immediately go on to work on the next thing. There’s little room to think strategically about how you tackle regulation, and this is even the case at Goldman where the programmes are well-run.”

Labeis spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs, working in senior roles across its strats division, including heading up its EMEA emerging markets trading strats team. Latterly, before leaving last year, he was global head of macro CVA and FX trading quants. He oversaw a team of dozens of quants and developers, taking responsibility for regulatory capital requirements and ensuring MiFID II compliance in its sales and trading business.

Most investment banks have been throwing people at the problem and hiring in people. Technologists who would have previously focused on innovative front office programmes have been shifted across to regulatory projects.

The sweep of MiFID II alone on banks tech teams is huge. Banks have to reengineer everything from algo engines, order and execution management systems to reporting and record keeping – just to keep the lights on.

“Investment banks have massively increased the number of people working in technology and control functions, but this just keeps pace with regulatory momentum,” says Labeis. “There’s also the question of cost – the entire industry is beholden to shareholder cost-control. They don’t have a free rein – there’s only so many people you can hire.”

Labeis, together with Pierre Lamy, a former managing director in FICC technology at Goldman Sachs, has just launched a new regulatory technology start-up called REGnosys.

The idea, at least initially, is to solve the problems large investment banks are facing complying with MiFID II on the trading floor. It provides a “canonical representation” of business processes – namely converting them into a standard format – across all investment banking markets divisions. It then converts them into programmable code that’s easily auditable for regulators, and also makes them available on an open source domain, so that compliance is fully transparent.

This is one of the main issues that banks face when it comes to compliance. There are teams working across divisions and functions in “parallel streams”, says Labeis, which means that technology around regulatory compliance has become “too complex and opaque to be auditable”.

So far, it’s attracted a lot of industry interest. The two founders raised $900k in private funding – largely, according to Labeis, from senior investment bankers and private equity professionals. The firm is currently speaking to “most bulge bracket banks on the street”, says Labeis, initially with the aim of confirming the technology with a product around MiFID II compliance.

REGnosys currently has four employees and is likely to start recruiting for business development roles in the future. Labeis says that 70-80% of staff will be software engineers. So far, most have come from investment banks. Jim Wang, a former executive director in interest rates technology at Goldman Sachs, joined earlier this month, while Minesh Patel spent 15 years in banking technology – latterly at Mercuria – before joining REGnosys.

“We want experienced technologists who have seen it all and done it all in investment banks, are regulatory specialists who understand the problems banks are facing,” says Labeis.

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Once upon a time, C# developers in investment banks were it. Banks used windows-based systems for their user-interfaces and they used window-based systems for their servers. If you could code fluently in C# within the .NET framework, you could work in either the front end or the back end. Nowadays, C# is very slowly being displaced in both.

“Most banks primarily use C# only for front-end development,” says Peter Wagner, a former VP in credit derivatives technology at Morgan Stanley and managing director of search firm Affinity North. “- The majority of their server side software is Linux-based. At the same time, front end development is quickly migrating to Javascript and web-based technologies, so C# in this context is quickly falling out of favor. ”

Goldman Sachs is a case in point. Of 21 technology jobs currently being advertised by the bank in London, 50% require familiarity with Javascript and Angular technologies. Just three require knowledge of C# and .NET.

Mike Baxter, a consultant at London-based tech recruitment firm Caspian One specializes in recruiting C# developers for investment banks. “Three years ago, you had very high paying contracts for C# developers writing interactive user interfaces for banks’ risk systems. Now that UI layer is increasingly being written in web technologies,” he says.

The upshot is that the “sexy” user-facing roles in finance increasingly use Javascript and HTML five. The less sexy roles maintaining the servers still require C#. However, recruiters say this is changing, particularly at U.S. banks, which are switching to Java and Linux server environments.

The laggards are the European banks. Credit Suisse, Barclays, SocGen and BNP Paribas are understood to remain wedded to C#.NET for both their front and back end applications. “European banks can’t afford to move away from their .NET systems,” says technology director at a Swiss firm. “They might want to, but you have huge existing systems and moving is just too expensive.”

For this reason, Baxter says you’ll always be able to find a C#.NET job with a bank, and that this job will usually pay well. In London, £550 to £750 a day is common for contract C# programmers working on “business critical systems” or developing user interfaces. Global macro hedge funds are also a repository of C# jobs: tech systems are less important in global macro and most funds have been slow to switch their systems across to angular technologies.

For the most part, however, recruiters say Javascript and HTML 5 are the future for front office finance roles. Moreover, with tech start-ups also recruiting for this talent, banks are being forced to pay-up.

So what do you do if you’ve built a career as a coder in C#? Baxter says the best option is to chase one of a new class of “hybrid” role requiring people with both C# and Javascript as banks make the transition. “There’s a lot of competition of these roles,” he says. “People want to upskill and stay employed.”

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Large Chinese companies are increasingly hiring senior investment bankers to help them with their takeovers, listings and international expansions. It’s a trend that started about two years ago and it shows no signs of abating, particularly within China’s technology sector.

Who are the bankers who’ve quit the bulge bracket for top jobs at Chinese conglomerates? Here’s a selection.

Patrick Kwok: Barclays to HNA

HNA International, a subsidiary of Fortune 500 company HNA Group (whose businesses include tourism, industrials, logistics and ecological technologies) appointed Barclays veteran Kwok last month as its chief investment officer. Kwan was with Barclays in Hong Kong from 2001 to 2016, latterly as co-head of investment banking for Asia Pacific and country manager of Hong Kong. He began his career at Goldman Sachs and has held various senior positions in markets and investment banking with Peregrine Fixed Income, TD Securities and Deutsche Bank.

Winston Cheng: BAML to LeEco to JD.com

Cheng has taken the banker-goes-corporate trend a step further – he’s now moved to a second Chinese tech business. Cheng, the former head of technology for Asia at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, was hired by electronics company LeEco as head of corporate finance and development in 2015, but the firm’s international expansion plans have since floundered. He is now reportedly joining Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, to led new investments. While at BAML, Cheng worked on JD.com’s 2014 listing and also advised it when Tencent purchased a stake in the company.

Loh Long Hsiang: Stan Chart to Dianrong.com

Online lender Dianrong.com (formed in 2012 and often called the ‘Lending Club of China’) pulled off a recruitment coup in January last year when it poached three senior managers from the traditional finance sector. Loh, now the company’s COO, is the biggest hire of the lot. He was previously deputy head of origination and client coverage at Standard Chartered in China and had been with the bank for 18 years. His other leadership positions at Stan Chart include Shanghai general manager and head of the CEO office.

Michael Evans: Goldman Sachs to Alibaba

Evans is still the most well-known banker to join a Chinese corporate. He moved back in August 2015, helping to kick start the trend, and he took on arguably the most powerful Chinese corporate job ever occupied by a former bulge-bracket banker: president of Alibaba Group, the world’s largest retailer. Evans was vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia and was a partner in the firm for 20 years. He was also a member of the Canadian men’s eights rowing team that won gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

Douglas Feagin: Goldman Sachs to Ant Financial Services

Evans is far from the only Goldman banker to be poached by a Chinese conglomerate. Other high-profile hires include Douglas Feagin, who moved to Ant Financial Services, China’s most valuable financial technology company, last year. Like many ex-bankers, Feagin was hired to lead a global expansion – he’s head of the firm’s international business. Feagin had a 22-year career at Goldman Sachs, most recently as head of its financial institutions group for the Americas. He was also the head of FIG in Asia from 2004 to 2010.

Tony Yau: Deutsche Bank to Heung Kong

Hong Kong-based Deutsche Bank MD Yau left the firm in February, after a tenure of more than 10 years, to join Heung Kong Financial Group as CEO. Heung Kong Financial – part of a wider conglomerate which covers industries from furniture to real estate – specialises in loan financing, funds management and equity investment. Yau began his career as an auditor at Arthur Andersen in 1996, before switching to investment banking with BNP Paribas in Hong Kong in 2000. He started at Deutsche six years later and his experience includes M&A, capital markets, derivatives and private equity.

James Mitchell: Goldman Sachs to Tencent

James Mitchell, chief strategy officer at Tencent, China’s largest gaming and social-networking company, was formerly head of communications, media and entertainment research at Goldman Sachs in New York. He was with Goldman for 11 years and also worked at the firm in Hong Kong and Sydney. Tencent’s president, Martin Lau, also hails from Goldman, although he left the US bank more than 10 years ago.

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Nirgunan Tiruchelvam has been through some difficult days as a senior equity researcher in Singapore, but is adamant that the job function has a bright future.

He was a director of ASEAN consumer research at Standard Chartered when the bank shuttered its Asian equities unit in 2015.

And as global banks continue to trim their equities teams in Asia, Tiruchelvam is open about the challenges facing those who still work in the sector.

“At banks, equities is being disrupted by online research marketplaces and ETFs, so costs are under pressure. The number of equity analysts and salespeople in Asia is shrinking and the commissions received are getting smaller,” says Tiruchelvam, who is now a director at Religare Capital Markets in Singapore.

Still, Tiruchelvam doesn’t believe equity analysts will become obsolete.

“The profession provides value to clients that ETFs or online research providers can’t match. Equity analysts play a fundament role in assessing whether a company is overvalued or even whether there are non-compliant practices happening,” he explains.

Equity analysts must, however, adapt the way they work in order to remain relevant to clients.

“Driven in part by the MiFID directive, banks in Asia and globally are moving away from the carpet-bombing approach of covering hundreds of companies in every sector and flooding the likes of Fidelity and Wellington with advice,” says Tiruchelvam. “Analysts need to focus on fewer companies, with an emphasis on quality coverage.”

To succeed as an equity analyst you also have to “stay clear of the consensus”, he adds. “For example, in 2008 I made the radical suggestion that Singapore agri-business Olam International was overvalued. That then proved correct when the firm was accused of poor accounting practices by the short-seller Muddy Waters.”

“As an equity researcher, you need to stand your ground and tell people exactly why you hold a particular point of view,” says Tiruchelvam. “You need to withstand pressure and act independently within your bank, even if your research might affect a client of another department in the bank.”

If young analysts want a long-term career in equity research they must “focus as much on nurturing client relationships as they do on providing great market insights”, says Tiruchelvam.

“A client relationship is cemented with face-to-face meetings – this is something a lot of junior analysts overlook. The value of relationships has been diminished in a world where most connections are made online,” says Tiruchelvam.

Tiruchelvam is now developing new relationships himself. “One of the key things we’re doing at Religare is working more with the large family offices that are increasingly setting up in Asia. Many of them want new ways to access mid-cap companies, and we provide opportunities that they couldn’t find on their own.”

“The most interesting part of working in equity research is the opportunity to meet companies and investors, and play a pivotal role in making connections between them,” he adds.

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Is it a while since someone called you to offer you a new job? Since a recruiter gave you a special gift? Since your employer gifted you tickets to a sold-out show? You’re in the wrong area of finance. If you were in a highly quantitative role, you’d be getting all this and more.

So suggests the Wall Street Journal in the latest instalment of its series on the resurgence of quants.

Nina Kuklisova, a 27 year-old quant associate working on risk systems at the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi in New York, tells the WSJ that she’s fighting off the recruiters. Between three and five of them call her every week, touting offering jobs at “other finance firms” and tech companies.

A recruiter tells the WSJ that he “love-bombs” quantitative candidates with golf lessons and “private dinners” with tech firm founders.

And it also reports that hedge fund Citadel is gifting its quantitative employees with tickets for Hamilton in Chicago and New York.

For a breed of finance employee widely vilified for causing the financial crisis not so long ago, quants have become inordinately popular. And as Kuklisova’s case shows, it’s not just banks who want to hire them. It’s also hedge funds. And it’s tech firms like Google and Facebook. Along with every other company with a need to analyse data.

“Google is trying to hoover up every data scientist in the world,” the chief executive of Man Group confides to the WSJ, adding that even Man can’t compete with Google in terms of pay. If you’re looking for the most sought-after spot in finance and tech, the data scientist/quant is it.

Separately, and more pertinently, how do you become one of these people every bank wants to hire? The traditional route has been to do a PhD, but a growing number of Masters courses prepare students for data science jobs too. Kuklisova studied Maths at Chicago and Columbia, followed by the comparatively new Master in Information and Data Science degree at Berkeley.

If you’re based in Europe, however, you might want to consider Imperial College. The Financial Times reports that the London University College started an MSc in business analytics three years ago and has already achieved some exciting things – including a visualization depicting a tendency to accumulate senior staff at the Royal Bank of Canada.

Meanwhile:

Magnetar, a hedge fund once known for its discretionary investment strategy, has “gone quant” and is now 20% comprised of technologists. (WSJ)

At Google: “A male Googler drank excessively at an offsite event and touched a few different female Googlers in a manner that made them uncomfortable, made inappropriate comments, and followed two women back to their hotel room and told them ‘I’m following you.'” (Bloomberg)

If you want to be a tech entrepreneur you must do your MBA at Stanford. At the typical business school, some 3% of recent MBAs start a business upon graduation. At Stanford, it’s about 16%. (Bloomberg)

The worst thing about interviewing at tech firms: “Imagine being brought into a room with a complete stranger, being handed a mysterious algorithm, then being told to implement and analyze it within 45 minutes while said stranger evaluates your ability to do it.” (Business Insider)

Blackrock’s begun benchmarking its benefits against tech companies. (BenefitsNews)

Bank of America’s been shaking up its U.S. high-touch equities trading business. (Bloomberg)

Rothschild’s new U.S. boss, Jimmy Neissa, keeps hiring. He just added three new senior M&A bankers in NY and one in LA. (Financial News)

Crispin Odey still thinks UK stocks will slump 80% after Brexit. Too many Britons have borrowed money they can’t pay back. (Bloomberg)

Your brain will eat itself when you’re chronically sleep deprived. Literally. (New Scientist)

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If anyone needs a highly polished CV these days, it’s traders in investment banking. Juniors are taking over the trading floor, and even recent increases in revenues haven’t resulted in much more recruitment. The traditional jump into a hedge fund is becoming tougher as more look to train their own staff and increasing numbers fold altogether.

As an experienced trader, you’ll need to adapt your resume according to the products you’ve traded and the risk you’ve run. But as a junior in an investment bank, or trying to get into the industry, there are some simple rules to follow regardless of the desk you want to end up on.

1. The perfect trading CV must be no more than one-page in length

You’ll be up against thousands of applicants and if your CV makes it on to the desk of the trading team, they’ll want to be able to see the relevant points quickly.

“Traders have very limited time and even more limited attention spans,” says David Hesketh, COO of trading simulation platform TradingHub. “Keep it concise and relevant. Good punchy sentences are much better than long emotive paragraphs.”

2. The perfect trading CV will highlight brand-name universities and relevant coursework

If you’re up for a trading job, there’s a strong chance that you will have studied maths, economics or physics at university. You will have done this at either an Ivy League or Russell Group University and will demonstrate impeccable academics from school through to your eventual graduation. This is the reality of the competition.

“Many of the bank recruitment teams work off a list of the best (top 20) universities and business schools. This makes a big difference,” says Victoria McLean, managing director of CityCV. “But you also need to highlight any coursework that was capital markets, statistical, financial model related, in addition to anything that demonstrates your knowledge (and understanding) of the macro environment. You should also highlight any projects coursework or modules for which you scored a particularly high grade – especially if you led the project team.”

Hesketh says that you need to highlight education most relevant to the type of trading job you’re applying for – an FX spot trader should “emphasise anything relating to central bank policies and inflation” whereas, say, structured credit trading candidates need to make the most of their analytical skills. “Good candidates would have natural science or maths degrees and show a keen interest in programming languages,” he says.

“Try to portray that you are at least in the top 10% academically,” says Peter Harrison, an ex-Goldman Sachs trader who now runs Harrison Careers. This, unfortunately for the majority, means a first class (or at least 2:1) degree or a GPA of 3.7-4.0.

3. The perfect trading CV will demonstrate revenue-generating capabilities

Like any investment banking job, the quickest route into a trading job is to intern with the division you’ll eventually end up in. In fact, these days graduates securing markets jobs usually have at least two internships under their belt. But getting directly relevant experience isn’t the only thing to emphasise.

“Highlight any client experience and your ability to generate revenue – this could be in any sector,” says McLean. “If you have worked in any revenue-creating or client-expansion capacity then try to lead with the outcome and think carefully about targets you have surpassed, budgets you were set and volumes. Think achievements! What was the result and what role did you play in achieving this? What kind of volumes of calls or clients or products were you dealing with?”

The work experience section of your resume should not just be crammed with as much relevant experience as possible – you need to emphasise an interest and capacity for trading as well as evidence of leadership and teamworking experience. You could have taken part in a trading simulation game or competition that shows your prowess, or been part of an investment society where you can demonstrate your trading ideas.

4. The perfect trading CV will suggest some trading ideas

“Mention your three best trading ideas,” says Harrison. “For example ‘I would short Tesco – in two years its market value will half.’ or ‘I would go long oil with a $X target because demand will be rise to X million b/d by end 2017’. Or highlight a successful call – firms that you discovered were undervalued and recommended investing in based on long-term earnings growth, for example.”

5. The perfect trading CV will show an ability to handle pressure

You’re not shouting across a trading floor anymore, but the job is still loaded with pressure and requires quick-thinking and an ability to handle decisions that don’t go well. At a graduate level, the best way to demonstrate this is through extra-curricular activities.

“Mention hobbies that demonstrate the criteria the banks are seeking – for example the banks like sportsmen – they want to hire individuals that are competitive, aggressive, confident, disciplined and importantly believe in themselves,” says McLean.

6. The perfect trading CV will mention poker

Poker skills are a big plus, says Hesketh: “Games like poker also show traders that the candidate is good at estimating probabilities and multiple outcomes in a short space of time.”

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2017 is a year of change for Credit Suisse’s under-performing equities business. In Mike Stewart and Stuart McGuire (and now Michael Di lorio) the Swiss bank is bringing in three well-established, well-liked industry heavyweights to turn things around. But, as the cash equities business is given an injection of new leadership, Credit Suisse risks losing top traders in other areas to their former colleagues at BlackRock.

The most prominent among the latter is Tim O’Hara, the former head of Credit Suisse’s global markets business. O’Hara left Credit Suisse suddenly in September last year and Brian Chin was appointed in his place. Last month, O‘Hara joined BlackRock as head of global credit, with a mandate to boost the credit investing business at the world’s largest fund management firm. He has company. Also at BlackRock is Philip Vasan, the former head of Credit Suisse’s Americas private banking business and – more importantly – the architect of the Swiss bank’s prime brokerage business. Vasan joined Blackrock last July, as head of investments and solutions for the wealth advisory unit, with a mandate to look at ways of combining actively managed mutual funds and index tracking products.

Credit Suisse insiders say O’Hara and Vasan represent the latest link between the under-performing Swiss investment bank and the thriving global money manager. BlackRock bought Credit Suisse’s ETF business in 2013. Andy Stewart, a former head of liquid alternatives at Credit Suisse is co-head of BlackRock’s alternative investing business. But while Stewart was only at BlackRock for three years, Vasan and O’Hara were CS lifers: the two men spent a combined 50 years at the Swiss bank. If anyone knows where the best traders and salespeople are buried at CS, they do. And most Credit Suisse traders would be only too happy to shift to BlackRock at a moment’s notice.

“There’s a close association between Credit Suisse and BlackRock now,” says one senior CS equities banker, speaking off the record. “Anyone who can get a chance to move to BlackRock, will go,” says a headhunter, speaking on a similar basis.

Both O’Hara and Vasan are based in the U.S. So far, there’s little sign that they’re eyeing up people at their ex-employer. Robin Ferrett, a former equity derivatives structurer at Credit Suisse in London joined Blackrock’s quantitative finance business in San Francisco in October, but this looks like mere coincidence. Ultimately, if O’Hara hires from anywhere, it’s likely to be from Credit Suisse’s successful emerging markets or high yield businesses. If Vasan hires from anywhere, it’s likely to be from Credit Suisse’s equity derivatives business, although his focus on marketing to retail investors at BlackRock could preclude recruits with an institutional bias.

Credit Suisse’s cash equities traders won’t be joining Blackrock. Not only do they fall outside the scope of the two ex-CS lifers, but they’ve got a bad image in the market and are unlikely to be of interest. “Credit Suisse’s cash equities business in London is mostly awful,” says one equities headhunter. “It’s the electronic trading business, run by Chris Marsh, where the strength is,” he adds. Headhunters say Marsh’s business has been well-looked after, but Mike Stewart may still need to offer reassurances when he arrives next month: Ksenia Ozdoeva, a VP-level electronic equity sales trader at the bank is understood to have recently quit for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

For ‘good’ CS equities insiders, the arrival of Stewart, McGuire and Di lorio, each of whom is widely held to be exceptionally good and exceptionally personable, represents an opportunity to undo years of neglect. Stuart is the big, transformational hire: he’s joining in June as global head of equities, based in New York. McGuire is expected to join in the third quarter as head of EMEA equities client execution strategy, based in London. Di Lorio is joining at the end of August, as head of EMEA equities, also based in London. Insiders say the Swiss bank is now aiming to be in the top five globally in equities. In the U.S. it’s ranked around sixth, but in Europe it’s fallen to eighth or even ninth.

“The strength in Credit Suisse’s equities numbers always came from electronic side and the rest of equities at CS has been under-invested in for years,” says one CS equities professional. “The worst time was in 2010 when Brady Dougan [the former CS CEO] decided to build out in fixed income. The equities floor was this low-ceiling dingy sort of place and Dougan created a big, high-ceilinged, fantastically decorated new fixed income trading floor and hired in hundreds of people – most of whom weren’t even the best in the market. Bit by bit, the fixed income people then took over.”

The balance of power at Credit Suisse won’t change with three big equities hires – the whole global markets business will still be run by Brian Chin, whose background is in securitization. All the more so as Chin is orchestrating the current rebuild before Stewart arrives. Even so, Stewart, McGuire and Di lorio might help tilt things back to equities – especially if some of Credit Suisse’s senior fixed income traders leave to work with O’Hara. This, quietly, is the hope.

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Can you ever go back to Goldman Sachs after you’ve left the ‘firm’? Yes, actually.

The head of electronic trading for J.P. Morgan’s commodities business, who joined the bank after 20 years at Goldman Sachs, has just returned to his former employer.

Scott Weinstein has just re-joined Goldman as a managing director in operations engineering in its securities business after eight years in senior electronic trading and quant roles at J.P. Morgan.

Weinstein last role at J.P. Morgan was leading the team developing its commodities automated trading systems in commodities, but was previously head of quantitative research at the bank and technology for the commodities division. He also sat on J.P. Morgan’s Electronic Trading Management Committee, which was formed in 2013.

Weinstein’s latest role represents a return to the ‘firm’ he spent over 20 years at in various senior jobs, predominantly around commodities. He was co-head of U.S. power trading at Goldman between 2002 and 2005 before moving on to a role as a bank loan trading strategist until his departure in April 2009.

Weinstein is the second senior former Goldmanite to return this year. Johnny Vo, the former head of insurance research at Goldman Sachs who left in 2011 to reinvent himself as a financial institutions group investment banker, returned to the bank in February as a managing director in research.

Investment banks’ commodities divisions made just $800m in revenues during the first quarter of 2017 – a 29% drop on the same period in 2016. However, Goldman Sachs was ranked number one last year for commodities, according to figures from Coalition. J.P. Morgan, which dominated the league tables last year, was second.

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Chung (a pseudonym) is leaving Goldman Sachs’ strats team. After several years with the firm, he’s had enough. He’s going to try his luck with a hedge fund, or a fintech. Anything but a bank.

Chung was a sales strat (the Goldman Sachs term for quants) at Goldman: his role was to structure deals and analyze trades. If a client wanted to put a hedging strategy together using options, that was him. If a client wanted an analysis of the correlation between volume and relative value, that was him too. “I was basically a quantitative salesperson,” he said. “I used my quant skills to drive revenues, but it wasn’t easy. It only ever felt marginally useful to the franchise or clients and it didn’t feel like a sustainable career. The more senior you get, the harder it becomes to prove your value.”

Chung’s withdrawal from the Goldman strats team is quiet compared to the most voluble exit in recent history. That of Antonio Garcia-Martinez, a former pricing strat on the credit derivatives desk. Garcia-Marquez left Goldman in 2008 and wrote a vehemently anti-banking blog about the whole experience two years later. There, he argued that Goldman’s quants were a group of failed scientists working alongside “complete tools” in sales and “bat wielding gorillas” in trading. “We were basically the trader’s little bitches,” claimed Chung, adding that the embattled quants tried to maintain their sense of cerebral superiority by writing, “academic papers on the more theoretical aspects of their work,” – although their names were erased whenever they left to do something else.

The quants we spoke to said Garcia-Martinez’ experience applies to a lost past. Banks today are a lot less raucous: there are none of the food eating competitions he complains of. But there’s still a shortage of the rarefied academic pursuits that make quants feel special. Andrej Karpathy, a Stanford PhD and research scientist at OpenAI has just calculated the key institutions whose research papers have been accepted by ICML, a top machine learning conference coming up in Australia. The top twenty include Google, Microsoft and Facebook, as well as leading universities like Berkeley, Stanford and Princeton. There are no banks on Karpathy’s list. There’s not even a hedge fund. If the list is a proxy for institutions engaged in original research into artificial intelligence (which is what Karpathy suggests), finance looks pretty dire. This might by why David Ha, a former co-head of Japanese rates trading at Goldman, quit for a sought-after residency at Google Brain when he wanted to learn about machine learning.

Some quants aren’t even working at the algorithmic coal face. As a sales strat at GS, Chung says part of the problem was that he wasn’t actually writing code: “I might’ve stayed longer if I was.”

Garcia-Martinez didn’t respond to a request to comment for this article, but when he left Goldman he spent long hours coding. First, he created AdChemy, a bid management tool for online media exchanges. Next, he coded AdGrok, a search marketing tool. The latter was sold to Twitter and Garcia-Martinez went on to work for Facebook. Since 2015, he’s been writing a book about Silicon Valley; things have worked out very well.

For Chung, the future is less assured. He’s hopeful about hedge funds, although they’re more interested in data specialists that in quants who’ve worked in sales jobs. Maybe this is a bad time to leave Goldman anyway? Marty Chavez, the new Goldman CFO, is a former strat himself and the bank’s own jobs site is filled with strats roles as the firm pursues Chavez’ vision for a “data lake” overlaid by machine learning. If he were to stay at GS, which he won’t, Chung says he’d probably angle for a role coding the whole derivatives process. “That workflow is receiving a lot of attention – the entire, ‘client calls sales, asks for quote, sales calls trading desk, trading desk prices it, tells sales the offer, sales relays to client,’ thing is just begging to be automated.”

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Back in the day, you’d end up in wealth management because of the people you know. If you were lucky, and had rich connections that you could persuade to invest their assets with your employer, then you had a chance of longevity and a lucrative career in the industry.

Craig Pfeiffer, the president and CEO of the Money Management Institute (MMI), is on a mission to change the ‘sink or swim’ tradition in U.S. wealth management. The industry is facing a talent crisis – there’s way too much grey hair and not enough new blood going into the industry. Morgan Stanley was the latest large bank sign up to a deal cutting back on the use of sign-on bonuses to entice brokers, such is the tendency for financial advisory firms to poach the best people with the biggest books of business from their rivals.

Young people are turned off by the industry, says Pfeiffer. “Their reference points and inputs are parents, teachers and Hollywood, from Bernie Madoff to The Wolf of Wall Street and the TV show Billions, which are exaggerated examples,” Pfeiffer said.

Pfeiffer suggests that the wealth management industry should shift to a “learn by watching success” model, like doctors, lawyers, teachers and apprentice-oriented industries have, rather than the traditional “learn by making mistakes” model of giving new recruits a desk and a phone and wishing them luck, which inevitably leads to a high failure rate.

“It is a tough learning curve in wealth management; however, medical school and law school are both pretty tough, but they have done things to enable success, whereas we as an industry have traditionally thrown them into the deep end of the pool and waited to see who can figure out to swim,” Pfeiffer said.

Pfeiffer has been around the block and back again on Wall Street. He started out on the 1970s at small regional firms that went through a series of mergers and acquisitions to form Shearson Loeb Rhoades, later Citigroup and eventually Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. When he left in 2015, he was vice chairman and managing director with leadership responsibility for 18,000 financial advisers located across 800 offices globally. He joined MMI that year.

Wealth management used to be a second career, with most candidates applying for their first job in the industry in their late twenties or early thirties. Now a higher percentage of early-career-stage professionals are in their early to mid-twenties and are in need of more training and mentorship.

Pfeiffer insists that the industry is evolving. “There is a definitive hierarchy of roles within advisory teams and a structured roadmap with continuous learning and advancement, enhanced by role-modeling and mentoring,” he said. “In their new employee training programs, firms should emphasize soft skills and chemistry with clients, focusing on their goals, emotions and risk tolerances versus investment products, features and benefits.”

MMI is partnering with the Envestnet Institute On Campus program, which offers on-campus guest lecturing and online courses that provide an insight into the wealth management industry.

In addition, Pfeiffer feels that wealth management firms should take a cue from the top professional services and management consulting firms in taking a longer-term view of talent development, seeing it as an investment rather than an expense.

“We’ve had a short term view on ROI, whereas when Big Four partners are aging and those firms experience natural attrition, they hire recent college grads and make a long-term investment and nurture them over time,” he said. “There will be all new partners at Deloitte, PwC and McKinsey in 10-to-15 years, which is a longer horizon. That is cultural to those firms, but it is not culturally ingrained in the wealth management industry.”

Pfeiffer recommends giving entry-level hires broad exposure to various areas of the business so they can figure out what interests them most and what their skill set is the best fit for.

“Most wealth management firms don’t have rotations, but if people got to see different things and were exposed to more aspects of the business early on, then more people would gravitate toward their favorite areas, and I know that would lead to better retention rates,” he said.
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Wells Fargo Securities in Hong Kong has recruited former Goldman Sachs partner Peter Welch as head of its global institutional capital group for Asia Pacific.

Welch is responsible for institutional client coverage in APAC. His is focused “on connecting sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, life companies, asset managers with investment opportunities (equity and debt) and services across the Wells Fargo organization”, according to his online profile.

He has returned to Hong Kong from his native Australia, where he most recently worked for Infrastructure Capital Group, an independent fund manager. Welch was head of capital during his four years at ICG and was in charge of client engagement and capital raisings across funds, separate accounts and co-investments.

Prior to ICG, Welch cofounded Sydney-based investment manager Shearwater Capital. Between 2003 and 2006, he was a managing director at real-estate capital arranger Pacific Capital Group in the city.

But Welch hasn’t only worked for Australian boutiques.

He was a partner and MD at Goldman Sachs JBWere from 2006 to 2008, and a member of the firm’s principal investment and real estate investment committees.

From 1998, he spent five years at Merrill Lynch, latterly as an MD and co-head of global principal investments. During that time he co-founded the global principal investments and real-estate principal investment teams in Asia Pacific.

Headhunters say Wells Fargo wants to expand its global institutional capital group in Asia and it was attracted by Welch’s track record of setting up and growing teams.

“This is a very capable individual who has built very successful businesses multiple times in the past,” says Matthew Hoyle, director of Matthew Hoyle Financial Markets in Hong Kong.

Welch isn’t the only senior regional appointment at Wells Fargo this year. The firm relocated Jafar Amin from London to Hong Kong in January as regional president for APAC and head of APAC global financial institutions.

Wells Fargo currently has about 1,600 wholesale banking employees in Asia Pacific, serving corporate, commercial and financial institution customers, according to its website.

The bank would not comment on its Asian hiring.

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Credit Suisse and UBS are battling to secure the assets of Asia’s millionaires and billionaires – and to hire the region’s best private bankers.

The two firms boast the largest headcounts in Asian private banking – UBS has more than 1,000 relationship managers in the region, while its Swiss rival employs 620.

But which is the best firm to work for if you’re a private banker in Asia considering your next move? Careers experts in the sector give us their opinions across 12 key areas.

Best for schmoozing with investment bankers: Credit Suisse

UBS and Credit Suisse are both trying to provide M&A and capital markets services to Asian entrepreneurs. “While UBS may have a larger investment banking division, Credit Suisse has had more success in creating synergy between IB and PB. Its ‘one bank’ concept has been instrumental in cementing this,” says Liu San Li, a former Coutts private banker, now client director in private wealth management at search firm EMA Partners in Singapore.

Best if you want a job now: tie

Credit Suisse was the clear winner here in the recent past – it took on 100 relationship managers in the year to end-June 2016, while UBS trimmed senior management last year and its RM headcount fell by 72. The tables have turned somewhat, however, because UBS announced earlier this month that it plans to hire 100 private bankers in Hong Kong over the next two years. They will target high-net-worth clients (those with $2m to $50m to invest). Credit Suisse, meanwhile, employed 20 fewer Asian RMs in Q1 than it did the previous quarter. But more hiring seems likely because the firm still needs 180 more private bankers by the end of 2018 to meet CEO Tidjane Thiam’s target of having an 800-strong RM workforce in Asia.

Best for technology: UBS

“Information technology, trade-input processes, structured-notes processes, client-portfolio recommendations and report-generating processes: these are generally slightly more automated at UBS, at least for now,” says a Singapore-based headhunter who asked not to be named because of client confidentiality. Expect technological competition between the banks to heat up in Asia in the near future. Credit Suisse chose Singapore to develop and launch its new digital wealth platform, while UBS has opened an IT innovation lab in the Republic.

Best for bonuses: UBS

At Credit Suisse, expect a bonus (calculated as a percentage of annual revenue minus base pay) of about 8% – UBS is a notch higher at 12%. But as our bonus survey shows, both firms have lower percentages than all their major rivals – boutique European wealth managers pay up to 20%, while you can get 30% at US private banks. The Swiss giants generally rely on their superior product platforms and client coverage to lure talent in Asia.

Best for flat management: Credit Suisse

“UBS is bigger and has more layers to its management, but it has taken strides in clearing up its structure. It let go of quite a few senior managerial roles in Asia in 2016,” says former Merrill Lynch private banker Rahul Sen, now head of wealth management at search firm The Omerta Group. “CS has some unnecessary layers too – there are a few managers there who are more administrative heads than market heads.”

Best for training: tie

Sen says both banks are “very good” on this front compared with their rivals in Asia. The UBS Business University in Singapore has been running training in wealth management and other subjects since 2007. But in 2014 Credit Suisse opened a Wealth Institute in Singapore, providing courses focused on client-advisory services and leadership development. “I’d now tie the training setup between the two banks because the CS institute has become very comprehensive in its scope,” says Pathik Gupta, regional head of wealth management at consultancy McLagan in Singapore.

Best for working with the ultra rich: UBS

“UBS has more experience in handling the UHNW clients and has more of them on its books,” says Liu. “In my opinion, it also has the best and broadest infrastructure and product suite for private banking in the region, so it has customised more products and services for UHNW.”

Best for getting in as a graduate: Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse launched a ‘Grow Your Own’ training programme in 2012 aimed at turning fresh graduates into junior private bankers. Last year 43 private banking analysts are joining the scheme in Singapore and Hong Kong, double the 2015 intake.

Best brand for attracting new clients: tie

Despite UBS’s size advantage (it manages US$286.4bn in Asian assets compared with US$163.8bn at Credit Suisse), our experts called this one a dead heat. “UBS is a larger, more formal – but sometimes more intimidating – brand to clients in Asia, while Credit Suisse’s brand is generally perceived to be more friendly,” says another Singapore-based headhunter. However, given that both banks are big players in Asia, the main stumbling block to joining either of them is that too many of your clients may already have some of their money managed there – it’s common for wealthy Asians to use several private banks.

Best for product support: UBS

Both banks outpace their rivals in Asia when it comes to the products they offer. “UBS has the best product platform and support in the region. That’s not to imply CS is inferior – it’s not very far behind,” says Liu. “Bankers I speak with at UBS point out how comprehensive and detailed its product training is – it’s a real emphasis,” says the second anonymous headhunter.

Best for regional autonomy: Credit Suisse

“Credit Suisse’s new structure means local management in Asia has more autonomy over decisions, while UBS still has global decision making,” says Gupta from McLagan. “CS can be more agile and its bankers and clients generally have faster turnarounds on their needs.”

Best services for external asset managers and family offices: UBS

“Both CS and UBS have top-notch products and services for EAMs and family offices,” says Liu. “However, UBS has bigger divisions, more RMs, and bigger infrastructure to service them.”

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It’s hard to get promoted in banking. As a recent study by financial consulting firm Quinlan Associates made clear, most bankers get stuck at around vice president (VP) level. Plenty of them leave. Who and what is stopping them from getting ahead? The Wall Street Journal might accidentally have identified the culprits.

In its latest article on quants on Wall Street, the Journal looks at the people who aren’t the quants – the older, less numerate generation who got in before a PhD (or at least a Master’s) in mathematics was a help. It discovers that not only are they not quants, they’re jocks – the antithesis of quants. And the new generation of mathematical geniuses is their nemesis.

The jocks are former athletes. As little as a decade ago, the people doing the hiring on Wall Street thought these athletic types were the ideal. The jocks had strong enough stomachs for risk-taking and a good temperament for winning clients’ trust and business. Former football, lacrosse, hockey, wrestling, tennis, soccer and crew stars jostled for position on trading floors. Some worked their way up the ladder. For example, former investment bank CEOs John Mack, Henry Paulson and Alan Schwartz were all ex-athletes. It turns out that there are so many former wrestlers on Wall Street there’s even an ex-wrestlers’ ‘meet-up.’

Now the quants are resurgent and the jocks are out of favor. The jocks are not happy. “Athletes are better equipped at knowing you’re not always going to win,” a former co-captain of the Columbia University wrestling team who’s spent over a decade in equity sales, tells the Journal. “In sales, you’re going to get a lot of doors slammed in your face. It’s how you bounce back from those losses that define us.”

The Journal doesn’t explicitly blame the jocks for obstructing the quants, but the generational gap is all too clear. The cerebral athletes are being pitted against the physical athletes and – for the moment – the physical athletes are still in the top positions. As sales jobs are automated along with compliance and risk systems, quants are likely to win-out. Disgruntled jocks can only complain about their vanquishers in their sports meet-ups. But banks may not want to do away with the jocks altogether. The ex-athletes possess discipline and quick thinking. They also have years of experience of the markets, while the AI systems built by quants are still unproven.

Separately, executing fake trades and sharing confidential information with traders at other banks are quick ways to self-sabotage your trading career. A regulator accused FX traders at BNP Paribas of doing just that and adjusting prices based on the inside knowledge.

The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) found that a trader located in the New York branch masterminded several schemes to manipulate prices and spreads in several currencies, according to The Trade.

A group chat with a “cartel” of other traders allegedly made plans to manipulate the price of the South African rand during New York trading hours to reap higher profits.

DFS accused BNP Paribas of paying little to no attention to the supervision of its FX trading business, allowing its traders to violate New York State laws for several years. It fined the bank $350m for failing to manage its FX trading teams who were manipulating FX rates, executing fake trades and sharing confidential information.

Meanwhile:

John Gallo, the head of U.S. fixed income sales at Deutsche Bank, is preparing to leave the bank after just 20 months in the role. (Business Insider)

Citi retained its place at the top of the global foreign exchange markets ranking, controlling 10.74% of the overall market, a fall from nearly 13% in the previous year, while J.P. Morgan placed second with 10.34% of the market. (Business Insider)

BlackRock has boosted its assets under management to a record $5.4 trillion thanks in part to quant programs. (WSJ)

Wall Street professionals commuting from the suburbs to Manhattan need to prepare for a “summer of hell.” (Bloomberg)

This new fund of private equity funds is hiring in New York. (FINalternatives)

The US Department of Justice has charged partners and analysts at the hedge fund Deerfield Capital Management with insider trading. (New York Times)

Many a hedge fund manager has been burned by trying to predict the impact of politics on the markets. (New York Times)

Financial technology startups are calling themselves “regtech,” not fintech, to convince banks their products are must-have. (Financial News)

Wealth management firms say they’ll need approximately four years on average to comply with the new MiFID II requirements. (The Market Mogul)

If the clearing of euro-denominated derivatives moves from the City to the continent post-Brexit, Aberdeen and others would follow suit. (Financial News)

MBA students doing investment banking internships, beware the overconfidence that can often cause you to squander opportunities. (FT)

Air rage is related to status anxiety. (The Guardian)

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Sean George would like you to know, in a casual sort of way, that he knows a lot of people in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). The softly spoken American, and 21-year Wall Street veteran, could – if it came to it – probably knock you down.

“We battle intellectually on Wall Street – there are plenty of keyboard bullies. I don’t talk tough, but I quietly carry a heavy stick,” he says. “I’m a happy go lucky guy, I’m always laughing. The fact that I like to kick people in the head during my spare time surprises my colleagues.”

George has held various senior roles on Wall Street. He was global co-head of credit default swaps (CDS) at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York, and led the North American CDS business of both Deutsche Bank and Jefferies. This month, after spending two years heading up Jefferies’ fixed income team for the Nordic region in London, George has called it quits on investment banking and decided moved to Sweden to become chief investment officer at fund manager Granit Fonder.

It has around $300m in assets under management, and the plan is for George to launch his hedge fund Granit Global Credit Opportunity with around $100m. Granit Fonder is still small – with around eight employees – but has just hired Ulf G. Erlandsson, previously a senior portfolio manager at the SEK334bn ($38.3bn) Swedish National Pension Fund AP4, as head of fixed income. His fund should launch with “hundreds of millions”, says George.

Since 1993, George also been a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, hanging out on the UFC scene. Over the past 24 years he’s competed in 11 Brazilian jiu-jitsu, boxing and Thai boxing fights. The high point of his fighting career was when he debuted in a Muay Thai bout – a brutal combat sport that allows the kicking, kneeing and elbowing of your opponent – during the summer of 2012 in New York.

“The guy headbutted me in the first two seconds and split my eyebrow open. I had to lie to the doctors and say I could see out of the eye, but I was half blind,” he says. “It was a mental battle as well as a tough fight, which went right to the end. I lost by split decision.”

Losing on your debut might seem like an odd highlight, but George says that battling through his injury “won the hearts and minds of the crowd, and allowed me to learn a lot about myself”. While he was in hospital getting his eye stitched up, the U.S Muay Thai champion turned up and handed over his championship belt he won that night because, says George, “He said I deserved it after being robbed by the judges”.

In 2013, George fought his last fight sanctioned fight in Bangkok, Thailand and knocked out a more experienced opponent in a minute and a half, he says.

George owned his own MMA gym during his time in New York, but spent his time in London sparring in the Mixed Martial Arts Clinic in Shoreditch, rubbing shoulders with UFC stars likes Joseph Duffy, Darren the Dentist, and UK Muay Thai Champion Shane O’Neill. In Sweden, he trains at the Five Stars Muay Thai and Allstars MMA gym where Alexander “the Mauler” Gustafsson is their star fighter.

These days, at 44-years-old, George says that he just uses MMA as a way to keep fit. “Some people like hitting the treadmill, I like to fight,” he says.

George also spent the bulk of his fighting career competing in the 70kg category, and says as he’s approaching his mid-40s, making weight is a “constant battle”. Instead, he contents himself taking on fighters 20 years his junior.

“I’m a tough guy to move around, so a lot of the 25-year-olds like to spar with me,” he says. “It’s good for them, but I walk like I’m 90-years-old for days after. The recovery time is too long – that’s why I hung up my gloves.”

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If you’re a 40-something salesperson or trader fearful of losing your job, don’t be. You might spend a 15 months tending the garden or playing golf or running a pub, but they’ll want you back one day.

Rates trading is a case in point. Research firm Coalition calculates that banks’ revenues from trading G10 rates products fell 51% between the first quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2014. By early 2015 senior rates salespeople were as popular as a meat sausage at a vegan picnic. Banks like Credit Suisse set about culling their rates desks; directors and managing directors flooded onto the market.

Two years later, times have changed. Coalition says G10 rates revenues rose 26% last year. Most banks reported higher revenues from their rates desks again in the first quarter of this year, and those that didn’t (like Barclays) are trying to do something about it. The unwanted experienced rates professionals are all the rage again.

Credit Suisse’s cast-offs are a case in point. Almost all have found new positions in banks. Mark Tieranan, the former head of rates sales moved quickly to Deutsche. Adam Bryant, Ben Harvey and others went to HSBC. Mark Mueller and others went to UBS. Only a handful have remained aloof from the banking market.- Ernest van Vredenburch, the former head of EMEA macro sales at Credit Suisse, joined Quant Insight, a hedge fund, in February, as did Huw Roberts, a former director in rates sales; Sergio Puglisi, the former head of South European sales at CS joined brokerage firm MINT and is now doing an MBA.

With Credit Suisse’s rates sales team a microcosm of the market as a whole, headhunters say senior rates talent is now hard to find. “There’s just no free capacity any more,” says one London headhunter, speaking off the record. “If you want to hire a good person, you can’t pick them up from out of the market – this is why most of the recent hiring has been bank to bank.”

Accordingly, as UBS looks at adding to the rates business it decimated in 2012, it’s hiring out of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs, in turn is said to have hired Cosimo Codacci-Pisanelli from Barclays as it looks to fill holes in London. Buybacks are becoming common: with Barclays and others hiring, no one wants to lose the staff they’ve already got. “The teams are so much smaller that there’s no ability to absorb a change in business any more,” says a NY headhunter, also speaking off the record.

Rates professionals’ reprieve should give hope to traders and salespeople in other asset classes. – Particularly as it’s taken place against at a background of ‘electronification.’ Between 2012 and 2015, the proportion of standard interest rate swaps traded electronically went from around 20% of the market to around 70% according to the Bank for International Settlements. This hasn’t dissuaded banks from stocking up on experienced salespeople as rates revenues rise again. – You might fall out of fashion in finance for a while, but you won’t necessarily fall out of fashion forever.

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;

Investor relations is an increasingly common escape route for both equity researchers seeking a new path, and M&A bankers looking for a change. But switching out of investment banking doesn’t mean that you’re cast into a career hinterland, never to return.

Case in point is Maren Winnick. She left her job as a vice president in M&A shareholder advisory at Goldman Sachs in March last year to head up corporate finance and investor relations at biotech firm Moderna Therapeutics in March last year.

She has just joined Evercore as a managing director within its investment bank in New York.

The boutique investment bank has been hiring over the past six months and, of all the small players gaining ground on the bulge brackets, has made the most ground. Evercore was 10^th in the Q1 global M&A league tables with $42.5bn worth of deals, according to Dealogic, up from 25^th at the same point last year. This is primarily due to gains in the U.S – in Q117 Evercore was 9^th by deal volume in North America, up from 25^th in Q1 2016.

Winnick spent eight years at Goldman Sachs in both M&A and equity capital markets roles, having joined in 2008 after an MBA from Columbia Business School.

She’s not the only Golmanite to leave the bank for a senior role at smaller firm in recent months. Matthew Borsch, its lead analyst for the healthcare services sector, has just joined BMO Capital Markets as a managing director and senior research analyst for healthcare.

Borsch joined Goldman in February 2001 after four years working as a director of business development at healthcare firm Telesis Medical Management.

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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Taimur Baig, a Deutsche Bank managing director and its chief economist for Asia, has moved to the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

He joined MAS, Singapore’s central bank and financial regulator, earlier this month as principal economist within the economic policy group. Baig’s areas of expertise include international finance, monetary policy, FX forecasting, macro surveillance, and macro-financial linkages, according to his online profile.

He had been at Deutsche since 2007, starting with a five-year stint as chief economist for India, Indonesia and the Philippines, focused on “macroeconomic forecasting and analysis” of those markets.

After a brief tenure covering India and ASEAN, Baig became Deutsche’s head economist for the whole of Asia in September 2013.

The MAS role is not the only time he’s worked outside of a commercial bank.

Baig interned at the World Bank in 1997 and then worked for the International Monetary Fund for more than eight years, latterly as a senior economist.

At MAS, Baig’s economic policy group is responsible for the surveillance and forecasting of domestic and foreign economies, monetary policy formulation, and economic research, according to the organisation’s website.

The group is made up of two departments: economic analysis, and economic surveillance and forecasting. The former analyses trends in the international economy and maintains a suite of macroeconomic models for Singapore, while the latter supports monetary policy decisions by providing forecasts of the domestic economy, prices and wages.

MAS declined to comment on Baig’s appointment.

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Following savage Asian job cuts at Barclays in 2016, headhunters now say the firm’s front-office in Singapore and Hong is looking more stable and hiring is on the cards, albeit on a small scale.

Last year Barclays shuttered cash equities in Asia, sold its Asian private banking unit to OCBC, and closed offices in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea. About 1,000 jobs were lost in the process.

In recent weeks, however, there have been some positive murmurings from the bank, which has pared back its Asian operations to just four markets – Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and India – and is now focused on connecting these countries to its core UK and US businesses.

“Where we will grow [in Asia], we will grow in the businesses that we already have. We have a strong global markets business. We have a corporate finance advisory business, and the capital markets business. These businesses will grow,” Barclays Asia Pacific co-head Jaideep Khanna told the Nikkei Asian Review earlier this month.

Although Khanna did not set out hiring numbers, his comments chime with those of two Hong Kong headhunters we spoke with.

One of the recruiters (who both asked to remain anonymous) says Barclays is likely to have “a handful” of advisory and capital markets roles in the second half of the year when its Asian strategy beds down.

Bankers who join Barclays under its new Asian regime are unlikely to be working on intra-regional deals or those involving non-British or American companies.

“The ideal candidates for Barclays in Hong Kong or Singapore would be those who understand US/UK markets and can bring US/UK opportunities to Asian clients,” says Eric Sim, a former head of structured solutions at Citi and ANZ, now a Adjunct Associate Professor of Finance at HKUST.

“Most global banks in Asia can no longer serve every type of client, so it’s natural to focus on specific groups, whose needs are in areas where banks have competitive advantages,” says Sim.

Any Barclays hiring this year is likely to be “lean” rather than “a full blown expansion”, says Yvette Kwan, a former APAC investment banking COO at UBS, now a partner at Hong Kong finance consultancy Quinlan & Associates “But its follow-the-client approach does have a higher chance of succeeding.”

“For UK-to-Asia business, it will be important to hire investment bankers who understand corporate banking, know British clients, and can break down divisional silos,” she adds. “For Asia to the UK and US, Barclays can expect a lot of competition from other banks.”

However, one of the headhunters we spoke with says Barclays may struggle to attract leading bankers to its ranks because it’s now too much of a niche player in Asia.

“Without an equities franchise in Asia, Barclays is now a third-tier firm in traditional IB here. It has a small M&A business and a second-tier DCM one, which doesn’t pay much in fees,” he says.

The bank ranks outside the top-10 for ex-Japan Asia investment banking fees in the first quarter of 2017 and comes in ninth position when China onshore deals are excluded, according to Dealogic.

Barclays, which is currently hiring investment bankers in the UK and US, declined to comment on its Asian recruitment plans.

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Investment banks like to tout internal mobility, but the prospect of moving from a support function in the back office to a revenue generating role in the front office is a rare event these days.

So, what happens when you do manage to make the move and it implodes on your first day? Wall Street Oasis, has a tale of an anonymous back office worker who “networked like hell” and managed to land an job in the investment baking division, but then blew it within hours. This is currently supposedly the big story running around NYC.

His problem, was that he left a trail of bad blood behind him. By striving towards a front office role, he annoyed his manager in the back office and it came back to bite. After getting settled in, he changed his email signature to show his new-found front office status: “Then he goes on to send an email to the boss who had fired him and who they were on bad terms with. The email was completely blank in the body of the email and had no subject. Just a blank message to his old boss,” says the poster on WSO.

If this seems like a way of sticking it to the man, bear in mind it didn’t work out. By Friday, the call from HR came. “He tries every excuse on the book and even says it was an accident that he emailed the old boss. An MD not from his group is in the office and sees right through him and says ‘we know exactly what you were trying to do. Your service is no longer needed at this firm. Security will escort you out of the building.'” Never burn your bridges.

Separately, a strange thing is happening in the City of London – bankers are going all out buying lottery tickets. Ticket sales for the huge Euromillions lottery, which has now swelled to £121m ($155m), have grown twice as fast in the City of London and Canary Wharf than in the rest of the UK, according to the Financial Times. Suffice to say, the chance of winning are slim – around one in 100m to be precise – but the FT has made an unpleasant comparison point. You are 14m times more like to get fired than win the lottery.

Meanwhile:

The cost of buying a home in London is so high, many young bankers would prefer to work elsewhere (Financial News)

How asset managers are preparing for Brexit: “You won’t see mass migration, but you will see slippage [of jobs moving away from the UK], as well as unseen losses — jobs that would have gone to London and now go somewhere else.” (Financial Times)

20 banks and fund managers including BlackRock, Citi, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley are being wooed to choose France over another EU financial centre after Brexit. Macron is a “game-changer” (Financial Times)

François Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the French central bank: “We are having discrete but numerous and serious contacts” with banks in the UK about relocations. (Independent)

Nomura’s international business is jokingly referred to as the “bastard child” (Financial News)

Machine learning is the real game-changing in finance (Economist)

Hedge funds are getting around really being quants by just saying they’re quants and attracting investors (WSJ)

Google avoids revealing gender pay gap by saying data is too hard to get (Guardian)

The best firms for women (Sunday Times)

Dangers of being a grammar bore: World Bank’s chief economist stripped of management duties for focusing too much on the language used in research (Bloomberg)

Jeremy Corbyn has his own video game (Politico)

Blazer and jeans as your smart casual choice? You’ve given up on life (Financial Times)

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Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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1. The perfect trading CV must be no more than one-page in length

2. The perfect trading CV will highlight brand-name universities and relevant coursework

3. The perfect trading CV will demonstrate revenue-generating capabilities

4. The perfect trading CV will suggest some trading ideas

5. The perfect trading CV will show an ability to handle pressure

6. The perfect trading CV will mention poker

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