Three years ago, Denzel Matsaudza was an intern at J.P. Morgan in London. As part of the team in investor operations services, he worked on client fund accounting. When the internship ended, Matsaudza was offered a full time job. His parents were overjoyed: they thought he’d be at J.P.M. forever and ever.
“My parents are African,” says Matsaudza. “They think that you have a job and you stay there for 20, 30 or 40 years. It was their encouragement that got me into J.P Morgan in the first place- my mum would call it J.P. Morgan Stanley – but when I got there, I realized it wasn’t for me.”
After 15 months as a full-time employee in J.P. Morgan’s back office, Matsaudza decided that operations jobs in banking didn’t match the hype. “It wasn’t what I’d expected,” he says. “It was like J.P. Morgan hired the best talent from across the country, but when you got there they didn’t have the jobs to match.”
Matsaudza is coy as to what he did exactly at J.P. Morgan, saying only that it’s confidential and that he was working on the bank’s implementation of Blackrock’s Aladdin risk management system. He claims there was a discontinuity between the internship and the graduate programme (“Things that were supposed to have been delivered weren’t delivered – the programme changed in structure”) and that the work he was doing in any case seemed fundamentally lacking in meaning.
“It didn’t feel to me that what I was doing would have a real life impact,” says Matsaudza. “- There was no sense that I would make a difference to anyone’s life – it just felt like I was collecting a cheque at the end of each month. My director said I was doing a great job, but that didn’t seem like enough.
“I guess the problem is that I’m not really strongly motivated by money alone,” he muses.
Matsaudza quit J.P. Morgan in October 2017, but only after hitting on a way of making money helping young people like himself when he first joined. While still at J.P. Morgan he set up the website likemindedliving, which matches young professionals with similarly-thinking people in affordable rooms in central London. His target market includes junior finance professionals who have just moved to London. He currently rents rooms to 60 people and has plans to rent out more.
“There were definitely some graduates with amazing roles at J.P. Morgan,” says Matsaudza, adding that one of his friends is working on the bank’s Brexit preparations. “But mine wasn’t one of them. Now that I’ve left banking, I’m doing something much more rewarding,” he adds.
Even his parents have come to terms with his new venture.
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