Back in April, DBS, OCBC and UOB all pledged not to cut jobs during the pandemic. Although global banks made similar early commitments, some of them – notably HSBC and Deutsche Bank – resumed their restructuring plans by the summer. “We’ve had plenty of people ask us whether we’re still committed to not making layoffs – we are,” says a senior source at one of the three local banks.

But while current roles are being retained, the firms have been forced to tighten their belts in other ways after suffering large falls in first-half profits. UOB is a case in point. Following an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, the bank has confirmed that it has frozen salaries. It will revise its stance as the “external environment improves”, Dean Tong, head of group human resources, said in a statement sent to eFinancialCareers.

A UOB insider told us that the bank’s pay decision was “expected and reasonable in the circumstances”. “It hasn’t caused an issue here, at...

Chris Yoshida has done the rounds of top jobs in finance. A former managing director and head of EMEA interest rate distribution at Morgan Stanley, Yoshida joined Deutsche Bank as global head of interest rate distribution in 2017 before promptly leaving again around 18 months later. Since then, he's been a senior advisor for the Kairos Society (an 'innovative community of students and entrepreneurs') and a senior advisor at Carlyle Group. 

Now, Yoshida has moved into the other hottest sector in finance: the family office.

Milind Sanghavi, OCBC’s head of digital payments, has joined Facebook in Singapore as director of payment partnerships for APAC. Sanghavi, who had been with OCBC since January 2018, is leading the “payments partnership team across Facebook’s family of apps”, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Another senior equity derivatives professional from Société Générale has been rehoused elsewhere. 

Tim Scanlon, the former head of equity derivative flow sales at SocGen in New York has joined Jefferies as a managing director.

Coronavirus has broken out at JPMorgan in Manhattan. Given that there’s no vaccine, no herd immunity and continuing transmission in the population, this is unsurprising. It would be really unlikely that there would be exactly zero cases on Wall Street during the “back to the school” period.  It's unfortunate for JP though, given that they made such a public push on requiring senior bankers to come back in from September 21st.

Even before the bulk of JPM's managing directors and executive directors return on Monday, the outbreak means that the bank has had to send some of its people home again, after someone apparently tested positive in equities trading in the Madison Avenue building. It’s hardly the sort of kick-off to the return program that anyone would have wanted. 

Goldman Sachs has just released its annual survey of the past summer's interns. The firm's post-summer revelations into the mindsets of its most junior employees have become a marker of generational changes in attitudes to work. Last year's interns said they liked eight hours' sleep and spending time with friends and family. This year's interns say they're not much interested in money and have few aspirations to retire young.

In a dramatic shift away from historic attitudes to retirement in banking (when it was all about working hard, playing hard, and getting out as soon as you can), only 16% of Goldman's 2020 interns said they expected to retire before 55. 12% said they planned to work beyond 65, and the biggest proportion - 39% said they wanted, "to work for as long as possible." 

It's getting late in the season, but hedge funds are still plucking staff from investment banks. 

Millennium Management just hired George Sager, a former executive director at Goldman Sachs. Sager, who was a member of Goldman's investment grade syndicate team, joined Millennium as fixed income trader this month. Global Capital first reported Sager's exit in June. He spent over 10 years at Goldman after joining as a graduate from the University of Warwick in 2010.

It's not just investment banks that are biased towards elite upper middle class students, it turns out that the big technology companies are too. If you want to make it through to an internship at the likes of Google, Amazon or Facebook a new study suggests that you'll need to show (or fake) that you're the right sort of person.

Undertaken by academics at the University of California Irvine, the study* looked at class biases in large technology companies. Two computer science PhD students at UCI interviewed 36 'evaluators' of candidates for elite PhD internships at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.  The study focused on candidates for UX roles, but could equally apply to applicants for other product or developer positions.

Not everyone earning over $200k works in finance, even in New York City. The most recent report on the subject from the New York State Comptroller found that the securities industry employed 182,100 people in 2019, and paid them an average of $399k (in 2018). The same report found that 24% of the sector's employees in the city earned over $250k (compared to just 3% of the total in other industries), suggesting that only 4%+ of the 978,000 New York State workers earning $200k+ are employed in securities roles.

As banks start to think about cutting jobs again, this might be why New Yorkers earning more than $200k are feeling optimistic. At the last census in late August, just 14% said they expected to lose their jobs in the next four weeks. Job insecurity was more prevalent at lower income levels: 23% of people on $75k-$99k expected their jobs to disappear, as did over 50% of people earning $25k or less. 

As the chart...

Bill Gross is unlikely to be the easiest person to live with. The founder of Pacific Investment Management Co (Pimco) and former 'bond king' has Asperger's syndrome (now known as Autistic Spectrum Disorder) and is infamously short-tempered. During the acrimonious divorce with his wife he placed a dead fish in the air vents and sprayed aromas called Liquid Ass and BARFume around the family home before moving out. It transpires, though, that Gross's difficult relations are not just with his ex.

In an investor note released last week, Gross confessed that he is also estranged "for some reason' from his 31 year-old son, Nick. Nick has "plenty of tattoos", says his father, including a full sleeve and "significant life philosophies on the other arm, ankles, back, and parts unknown." Nick even has "Gross" tattooed on the inside of his lip, which Gross says, "drives my ex-wife Sue mad and was and is now the only tattoo that I truly...

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"We had a good laugh at the list," says one portfolio manager at Millennium in New York. "It was a bit like calling someone a top 100 runner and then citing that they run half a mile daily," he added. Based on Fortune's reckoning that top hedge fund traders generate "tens of millions of profits" a year, the PM says most of the traders under 40 at ExodusPoint, Millennium and Balyasny would qualify for Fortune's list.

"Most desk heads on the sell-side are also under 40," he points out. 

If you have suggestions for alternative top traders under 40 years-old, leave a comment at the bottom of this article or let us know at the email address below, along with your reasons for nominating them.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are...

In New York, Japanese bank Mizuho has also been adding senior talent. Mizho hired at least two managing directors (MDs) in the past two months. Sameer Kishore joined as a managing director this week after leaving JPMorgan (where he was an executive director) and taking three months' gardening leave. Mizuho also recruited David Whitcher, a former member of UBS's power banking team, as an MD in August. 

The moves come after announced M&A deals fell nearly 70% year-on-year in North America in the first half according to Dealogic. They suggest that some banks are either anticipating a revival, or are lining up staff for a potential recovery next year.

While Mizuho has been hiring M&A bankers in New York, it's also been adding convertibles talent in London. Andy Bourne has joined from Deutsche Bank to build out an EMEA convertible bonds trading business. Ross Webster joined from Morgan Stanley to focus on convertibles sales.

If you're not among the bankers and traders who have returned to the office and are still working from home in banking, you might notice yourself being slightly less productive than usual today. If so, don't worry: Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, says it's endemic during the pandemic.

Speaking to banking analysts at KBW last Friday, Dimon said JPMorgan has seen a dip in productivity levels while its staff are working from home, particularly on Mondays and Fridays. Together with the dampening of "creative combustion" and unspecified 'issues' for junior staff working from home, this helped persuade JPM to urge people back into the office, said Dimon.

Summer is supposed to be over in the Northern Hemisphere (although Londoners basking in 27 degrees of heat in might question whether this is really the case). Now that most people are back from vacation and banks are encouraging people back into the office, attention is returning to recruitment. Is it about to pick up in the third quarter?

If it does, it won't be before time. Figures from data provider Burning Glass suggest that newly released jobs at major Wall Street banks were down 52% year-on-year in the U.S. in August.  The newly released jobs were down by less than in the peak pandemic months of May and June, but by more than in July. It's too early to call an improving trend.

If there were a curious moment for U.S. banks to get gung-ho about getting staff back into their London offices, it would seem to be now. On one hand, the British government has just issued confusing new legislation restricting encounters between more than six people as cases rise. Some Londoners have even received official text messages cautioning them against a resurgence of the virus. On the other, some U.S. banks are making excited noises about getting people back in again.

Leading the charge seem to be Citi and JPMorgan. In a call last week, JPMorgan's heads of trading and sales reportedly told senior sales and trading staff that unless they have childcare issues or medical vulnerabilities they and their teams must return to the office by Sept. 21. At Citi, EMEA boss David Livingstone sent a memo last week saying that, "everyone who can," should "reacquaint themselves with the office" soon.

Hong Kong-based Danny Wong, a 31-year Standard Chartered veteran, joined Raffles Management earlier this month as a managing director.

Raffles Management is part of Raffles Family Office, a multi-family office that provides asset management, wealth management and wealth transfer services to ultra-wealthy individuals and families. It was founded in Hong Kong in 2016, opened a Singapore office in December last year, and has a headcount of more than 60.

It's not easy to be a high earning woman. Research has long suggested that women with higher incomes than their spouses are more prone to divorce. However, in the case of Jane Fraser, who was yesterday revealed as the future CEO of Citigroup, earning more than a spouse doesn't seem to be an issue: Fraser has been married to the same man since 1996. Her husband, a former banker himself, gave up work to help support her in her career.

"We sat down, it was probably Christmas time of '08, and we said one of us has to stop for the family," Fraser told an interviewer six years ago. "And he said, 'Ok I want to go, I'll be the one I'll go and do something different... There was no way we could carry on."

It's not easy to be a high earning woman. Research has long suggested that women with higher incomes than their spouses are more prone to divorce. However, in the case of Jane Fraser, who was yesterday revealed as the future CEO of Citigroup, earning more than a spouse doesn't seem to be an issue: Fraser has been married to the same man since 1996. Her husband, a former banker himself, gave up work to help support her in her career.

"We sat down, it was probably Christmas time of '08, and we said one of us has to stop for the family," Fraser told an interviewer six years ago. "And he said, 'Ok I want to go, I'll be the one I'll go and do something different... There was no way we could carry on."

If you're looking for the safest job in finance, you might want to work for the regulator. The British Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released its annual report for 2019/2020 yesterday. It reveals that both headcount and graduate jobs are inexorably rising, and that getting in at the bottom of the ladder in a regulatory role is easier than before.

The FCA hired 84 graduates and 37 summer interns in 2019, compared to 41 graduates and 20 summer interns a year earlier, a more than doubling of its overall student intake. The FCA says the increase reflected, "a strategic intervention to meet future capability gaps," and that this year it was particularly focused on recruiting, "Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates," to its "newly developed Data Science, Cyber Security and Technology specialist schemes."

If you're looking for the safest job in finance, you might want to work for the regulator. The British Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released its annual report for 2019/2020 yesterday. It reveals that both headcount and graduate jobs are inexorably rising, and that getting in at the bottom of the ladder in a regulatory role is easier than before.

The FCA hired 84 graduates and 37 summer interns in 2019, compared to 41 graduates and 20 summer interns a year earlier, a more than doubling of its overall student intake. The FCA says the increase reflected, "a strategic intervention to meet future capability gaps," and that this year it was particularly focused on recruiting, "Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates," to its "newly developed Data Science, Cyber Security and Technology specialist schemes."

Citi’s promotion of Singapore-based Stacey Lacy to head of operations and technology for Asia Pacific has been welcomed by technologists and tech recruiters, who say she will serve as a role model for women within banking technology, which remains a male dominated sector. Lacy’s appointment comes as Jane Fraser was named yesterday as Citi’s next chief executive and the first female CEO on Wall Street.

This is one of the conclusions of a new report from analysts at Barclays who think that HSBC's currently avowed cuts are inadequate. If HSBC wants to meet its target of a return on equity of 10-12% by 2022, the Barclays analysts say it will need to cut 97,610 jobs (precisely) within that time frame. This would be around 40% of the number of people employed by the bank at the end of 2019.

No one's saying that HSBC is preparing to jettison four in every ten people, but new CEO James Quinn is said to be consulting people like James Forese, the former head of Citi's investment bank who's now a non-executive director at HSBC, on ramping up cuts beyond 35,000. Forese is a known exponent of automating some back and middle office jobs out of existence. 

Defendants of HSBC might suggest that the Barclays' report simply serves to deflect attention from Barclays' own problems. HSBC isn't the only bank skewered by the Barclays analysts:...

It's happened. Citi announced today that Jane Fraser, currently the chief executive officer of its global consumer banking division will replace CEO Mike Corbat, who plans to retire in February 2021. Fraser will become the first CEO of a major U.S. bank.

Fraser said she's "honored" and "excited" with her new role. Her career could, however, have turned out very differently if she hadn't started out working in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs.

If you've attained a CFA® charter, you probably feel pretty chuffed with yourself. Until now, it means that you probably spent over 900 hours studying for three six hour exams, for which the average pass rates since 2010 were just 44% (Level I), 46% (Level II) and 57% (Level III). Not just that, but you needed four years of CFA Institute-approved work experience. 

The CFA Institute's 154,000 charterholders globally could justifiably, then, claim to be members of a rarefied elite. Now, they fear their elite group is being diluted.