It’s possible that people have got banking careers all wrong. That instead of being about getting trained at a prestigious and highly-remunerative name whilst earning CV points, they’re actually about meeting people. – Meeting people and getting the sort of pedigree that will later allow you to borrow huge sums of money from them and the institution.
This has been the experience of the two ex-Goldman and one ex-Credit Suisse employees who set up Neyber, a fintech consumer lending company in which Goldman Sachs just invested £100m and Gaël de Boissard, the former co-head of Credit Suisse’s investment bank, and Henry Ritchotte, the former chief operating officer at Deutsche Bank plus others, just invested £15m.
It’s not clear whether Neyber’s founders – Monica Kalia (an ex-Goldman executive director in banks research), Martin Ijaha (an ex-member of Goldman’s European bank loan investing desk) and Ezechi Britton (a former structured products consultants at Credit Suisse), know de Boissard and their other investors personally. However, it’s telling that their fundraising rounds received publicity precisely because they were ex-bankers. Would they have done as well if they’d tried raising money straight out of university? Unlikely.
All three were more than just ‘pass-through bankers’ of the kind who spend 18 months on an analyst program before skipping off to something else. Kalia was at Goldman nearly six years. Ijaha was at Goldman nearly six and a half years (despite having fintech dreams throughout) and then spent 18 months in private equity at HG Capital. Britton was at Credit Suisse five years and then Lehman five years before that. These aren’t fickle analysts who’ve seized upon fintech as the next best thing.
If you want your banking career to provide a platform for doing something entrepreneurial in the future, therefore, don’t quit too soon. Don’t quit before you’ve build a reputation for yourself as a reliable pair of hands. And ideally don’t quit before you’ve built relationships with senior bankers who might one day invest in your ideas, or with the division of the bank that might have money to invest. If you leave without doing any of this, you’ve missed a trick.
Separately, Morgan Stanley is honing its appeal to Generation Z. Business Insider reports that the company has developed some special Snapchat filters which are only available to students at UPenn, Harvard, Villanova, Howard and 14 other ‘elite’ colleges. Keen students can use them to put Morgan Stanley artwork, logos and other designs over the messages they send. Fun.
Meanwhile:
By 2020, Goldman Sachs plans to have the same revenues as in 2006. (WSJ)
Mitsubishi UFJ will be moving “dozens” of people from London to Amsterdam because of Brexit. (Bloomberg)
“It is my priority as chancellor to ensure that the UK remains the financial services centre of the world.” (The Guardian)
Andrea Orcel says UBS plans to build its pricing around a basic research package probably costing “thousands or tens of thousands” of dollars and then charge extra for value-added services such as access to the bank’s analysts. (Bloomberg)
Ex-Citi CEO Vikram Pandit says 30% of banking jobs will disappear because of artificial intelligence – but he would say that as he’s now a fintech investor. (Bloomberg)
Agency broker Olivetree keeps hiring in North America. (TheTradeNews)
Houlihan Lokey hired a very senior banker who left Barclays. (Reuters)
J.P. Morgan accidentally advertised on ZeroHedge. (Quartz)
New accusations of sexism in Silicon Valley: “People would leave with a manager, go to the parking lot, have sex in the car, come back in and get promoted.” (Vanity Fair)
Say goodbye tax efficient carried interest. (Marketwatch)
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Photo credit: Looking Out by Jens Schott Knudsen is licensed under CC BY 2.0.