Getting a job at J.P. Morgan is supposed to be difficult, and in most cases it is. The investment bank rejects 98% of its people who apply to its analyst and associate programmes in the U.S., for example.
But joining J.P. Morgan would appear to be more straightforward in Warsaw, where the bank has a new and rather staggering headcount target. It plans to hire 5,000 new staff into its operations hub in the city, at a rate of about 150 people a month, reports Polish business newspaper Puls Biznesu.
This news means that JPM now wants to recruit twice the number of employees in Warsaw than it did just five months ago. After reaching an agreement with the Polish government in September to open a new back-office centre, the bank was originally aiming to establish a 2,500-strong workforce “over a period of a few years”.
Right now, though, JPM has ‘only’ 75 Warsaw-based vacancies on its careers website. Of these, 32 are in corporate-finance reporting functions, with ‘external reporting strategy and analytics analysts’ particularly in demand. There are also plenty of positions in KYC.
Unsurprisingly, these are global client-support roles, which means many of them demand fluency in English, while a few ask for other languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and German.
The upcoming recruitment by J.P. Morgan gives operations professionals in Poland – which is trying to win some of the financial business that is expected to leave London after Brexit – even more employment options. Citi and UBS have 5,000 and 3,000 staff in Poland respectively, while Credit Suisse employs 4,000. Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered are also hiring in large numbers, attracted by the country’s well-educated, but comparatively cheap, workforce.
Separately, when banks move into new office buildings, they usually talk up their green credentials (HSBC’s new UK head office being a prime example). But UBS is now taking eco-boasting to a new and slightly bizarre extreme. In a tweet sent on Tuesday, the bank points out that its new headquarters in London “harvests rain water for toilet flushes”. Then come the graphic details about the bathroom-usage rates of the average UBS staff member: “At its full capacity of 194,000 litres, there’d be enough rain water to cover five UBS employees for five years”. Too much information, perhaps.
Meanwhile:
Deutsche Bank has received the green light for its new London office. (Financial News)
Berenberg is starting a hiring spree in the U.S. (Bloomberg)
Meet the latest big-name cryptocurrency sceptic: John Flint, the incoming chief executive of HSBC. (Bloomberg)
BlackRock is hiring in AI in Palo Alto. (Financial Times)
Ex-J.P. Morgan FX salesman returns to court to claim dismissal. (Bloomberg)
UBS has included non-solicit language into U.S. bonus documents (Advisor Hub)
Why HSBC should put even more resources into Asia. (Bloomberg)
Germany is planning to make it easier for banks to fire bankers. (Financial Times)
Does deal-making actually make sense? (Bloomberg)
Citi has expanded its Asian wealth management business. (Finews Asia)
How a senior Deutsche Bank trader quit finance to write a post-apocalyptic novel. (Bloomberg)
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