As we've noted here before, big banks and big technology firms have been big users of H1B visas, which enabled them to hire-in global talent and that were temporarily banned by President Trump in June 2020. Despite protestations that the ban will lead to pay inflation for the "finite pool of super-smart folks" that have U.S. citizenship, the ban also has plenty of supporters. Key among them is Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University.

There's absolutely no reason why banks and tech firms should complain about the lack of H1B visa talent, Salzman tells us. "Annual hiring demand for top talent positions is probably, say, 5,000 new hires a year. Make it 10,000 if you like," says Salzman. He points out that the U.S. produces 1.9m bachelors graduates a year, plus hundreds of thousands of Masters graduates, plus PhDs: "It seems implausible they can't find that number among the...

Political instability in Hong Kong has not yet triggered an exodus of existing finance jobs from the city to Singapore and other Asian banking hubs, despite news that Japanese online brokerage SBI is considering downsizing its Hong Kong operations. But recruiters say they are receiving more enquiries from small financial services firms about creating new jobs in Singapore – roles that might have otherwise been added in Hong Kong.

Matthew Porritt, UOB’s head of transaction banking technology and operations, has left the bank after a stint of about two and a half years. Porritt told us that he cannot yet announce his next job. UOB did not comment on his move.

How much will you earn in your first year out of university in an investment banking job? If you work in M&A, equity capital markets or debt capital markets for a major investment bank in London, the answer appears to be around £80k ($103k/€88k). Despite the COVID-19 pandemic this is higher than last year after several banks hiked analyst bonuses, awarded in the summer. 

Research by recruitment firm Dartmouth Partners suggests bonuses for first year analysts (ie. in their first year of banking since leaving university), rose 15% this summer to an average of £35.8k. When £50k average salaries are added in, this gives average first year total compensation of £85.8k.

Anyone smart in the investment banking industry quickly realizes that you should always stay on good terms with colleagues and bosses, because it’s a very small world and people have this habit of coming around again.  In the far future, you may be looking for a new job and more money, and the best place to start is with places that are being run by “veterans” or “alumni” (depending on whether the experience was more like being in college or more like being in a war) of franchises that you’ve worked at in the past.  Senior bankers often like to deal with known quantities, who they can be sure will fit in with their own management style and risk appetite.  That’s why they’re also usually keen to “get the band back together” (another popular metaphor and indeed some investment banks are more like a touring hard rock show than either a university or a military platoon).

The most famous current example of this tendency is the team of...

In a new report on trade surveillance technology, analysts at Greenwich calculate that the trade surveillance tech market is likely to be worth $1.2bn in revenues annually by the end of this year. They predict that revenues will be 23% higher at $1.5bn in 2021, and will reach $1.8bn in 2022.

Trade surveillance spending was always going to grow this year, but Greenwich analysts say it's been given an extra boost by the pandemic and working from home. - Under COVID-19, Greenwich says banks and the buy-side encountered a "perfect storm" of trade surveillance issues that included problems obtaining monitored and secure market access, alert backlogs, and adjusting trade surveillance to remote working. In combination, this has encouraged them to ramp up spending, and is good news for the leading vendors in the space. 

Helpfully, Greenwich breaks out the top 50 trade surveillance specialists who should benefit from this boom. It also categorizes...

As we've noted here before, big banks and big technology firms have been big users of H1B visas, which enabled them to hire-in global talent and that were temporarily banned by President Trump in June 2020. Despite protestations that the ban will lead to pay inflation for the "finite pool of super-smart folks" that have U.S. citizenship, the ban also has plenty of supporters. Key among them is Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University.

There's absolutely no reason why banks and tech firms should complain about the lack of H1B visa talent, Salzman tells us. "Annual hiring demand for top talent positions is probably, say, 5,000 new hires a year. Make it 10,000 if you like," says Salzman. He points out that the U.S. produces 1.9m bachelors graduates a year, plus hundreds of thousands of Masters graduates, plus PhDs: "It seems implausible they can't find that number among the...

Robert Falzon has had a long and illustrious career in M&A. After starting out at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in 2001, he moved to UBS's European industrials M&A team in 2004 before joining Goldman Sachs in 2008. At Goldman, he ran the European industrials M&A team for eight years before quitting for Ardea Partners, the boutique founded by Chris Cole, Goldman's former co-chairman of investment banking.

Now, Falzon is moving on to something entirely new: he's setting up Inkwell Data, a company that designs, installs and operates Internet of Things (IoT) networks for the kinds of industrials companies that used to be his clients.

It's a moot point as to whether working from home is really preferable to commuting into an office and hanging out in a cloud of hand sanitizer alongside near-forgotten colleagues. However, if working from home really is your thing, there are a few finance jobs that are more likely to let you do it than others.

Somewhat predictably, you're likely to stay working from home for longer in the back and middle office that don't directly generate revenue and don't involve interactions with clients. While banks summon 'dealmakers' and traders back to their offices, at least for part of the time from this September, a higher proportion of middle office professionals responding to our recent survey said they expected to be home until at least 2021.

How are tech job postings trending in the financial services industry? We just launched The Financial Services Tech Job Report - analyzing job posting data to provide a fuller picture of how employers are navigating the current landscape.

The report analyzes technology job postings from financial services organizations across the first seven months of 2020 and includes the fastest-growing locations, employers, occupations and skills for three of the primary global financial markets: United States, United Kingdom and Singapore.

Students who work in investment banking will probably had a good understanding of what it’s like to work in mergers and acquisitions or sales and trading. However, the role of a structuring professional is harder to understand and frankly more complex.

Schur is a Daimler veteran and was most recently general manager for Asia Pacific IT infrastructure at the German automotive giant, which makes Mercedes-Benz cars. He joined the company in Germany in 2000 as a software engineer and transfered to Asia in 2002, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Banks in Singapore have begun to hire senior technologists from the corporate sector more regularly over the past two years, especially for data-focused roles and in other fields suffering from skill shortages.

As we reported on Monday, Standard Chartered has increased its Singapore vacancies by 144% since mid-April, and much of the recent surge is down to its technology hiring. About a third of the bank’s current Singapore jobs are in tech, and its global tech function is run out of the Republic.

There are several senior roles within Stan Chart’s current crop of Singapore tech vacancies. Alongside Schur’s hire, this suggests that the firm is...

“The bankers working on this deal should have good bonuses for this year, even if IB bonuses are not what they once were,” says Philippe Espinasse, a Hong Kong-based IPO expert and former head of Asia equity capital markets at Nomura. “Excluding guarantees, as an ECM investment banker, the highest bonuses I received were in the years in which I worked on large, visible and prestigious transactions that made a lot of money for my employers,” he adds.

CICC, Citi, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley are sponsoring the Hong Kong leg of the IPO, and bankers at these firms will enjoy the largest resulting bonuses. Credit Suisse is working as a joint global co-ordinator. “The bulk of the fees – perhaps 75% or more – will be earned by the sponsor banks and, to a lesser extent, the global coordinator,” says Espinasse.

Goldman Sachs’ Hong Kong bonus pool won’t receive the same kind of boost, even though the US bank was hired earlier this month as a joint lead...

Twelve worked for 'general management consulting firms', and 12 worked for 'high end strategy consulting' firms like the Bain, McKinsey and Co and BCG. Their hours were split by age, gender, and firm type as per the chart below.

Working hours management and strategy consulting firms

Source: German Journal of Human Resource Management 

The academics found that the longest hours worked were in the strategy consulting firms, where the weekly average was 60 hours. By comparison, Millennial management consultants worked a mere 50 hours per week.

One Millennial strategy consultant described his working week as follows: "Mostly, I work on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays until 11:00PM. And then Thursdays, sometimes I work until late, 10:00PM, 11:00PM, and other times I stop at 7:00PM. Friday evenings I have time off and then [I work a] a few hours during the weekend. "

One some occasions though, the academics discovered consultants...

We’ve all been there – as the Wall Street Journal says, “There have always been people who love to hear themselves talk and who dominate meetings. But Zoom meetings seem to have empowered these blowhards”.  It’s bad enough when they’re sucking all the oxygen out of your virtual pub quiz.  But when they’re the Economy Minister of Argentina, and they won’t give it a rest talking about academic theories when you’re trying to organise the creditors’ committee for a bond default, it’s not unnatural for tempers to get worn thin as the time ticks away.  Luckily, we now have both a collection of advice from professional psychologists about how to bring extrovert-dominated Zoom calls back on track, and a stellar example of how BlackRock MD Jennifer O’Neil actually managed it in practice.

As Bloomberg describes it, O’Neil took a subtle approach to Martin Guzman, the Argentinian Minister of Economy. While Guzman had reportedly irked...

In a new report on trade surveillance technology, analysts at Greenwich calculate that the trade surveillance tech market is likely to be worth $1.2bn in revenues annually by the end of this year. They predict that revenues will be 23% higher at $1.5bn in 2021, and will reach $1.8bn in 2022.

Trade surveillance spending was always going to grow this year, but Greenwich analysts say it's been given an extra boost by the pandemic and working from home. - Under COVID-19, Greenwich says banks and the buy-side encountered a "perfect storm" of trade surveillance issues that included problems obtaining monitored and secure market access, alert backlogs, and adjusting trade surveillance to remote working. In combination, this has encouraged them to ramp up spending, and is good news for the leading vendors in the space. 

Helpfully, Greenwich breaks out the top 50 trade surveillance specialists who should benefit from this boom. It also categorizes...

Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank have now both published their compensation reports for 2019, laying out the salaries and bonuses at the two German banks last year. Predictably, there is a large discrepancy between the two. 

Commerbank's investment bank is considerably smaller than Deutsche's. It's also considerably worse paying, at least in terms of bonuses. As the chart below shows, the average bonus in Commerzbank's investment bank was a mere €20k last year, versus €71k at Deutsche. Salaries at Commerzbank were, however, higher. 

Graduates in 2020 and 2021 will be entering a tough job market. In the UK, around 750,000 people have lost their jobs as a result of Covid-19. So it’s some comfort that the big four professional services firms are continuing their usual graduate intake, albeit by running the selection processes virtually.

HSBC’s ongoing hiring drive in Asian private banking is showing no signs of abating. Among its latest senior recruits is Cedric Chan, who’s joined the firm in Hong Kong as a managing director, focused on ultra-high net worth clients. Chan spent the previous three years as an executive director at Julius Baer, which followed a 10-year stint at Goldman Sachs as a private wealth advisor.

Asian private banking is a recruitment focus for HSBC even as it makes 35,000 retrenchments globally, mainly in Western markets. As we reported in March, HSBC plans to recruit 500 staff in the sector in Asia by 2022, including an undisclosed but significant number of Hong Kong and Singapore-based private bankers such as Chan.

Well, it was nice while it lasted. With Labor day done in the U.S. and public holidays exhausted until the festive season in the U.K., the new semester has well and truly started in banking. And as with all new starts, it's bringing new resolutions - namely, getting back into the office. 

The requests for bankers to return seem to be snowballing. Financial News reports that both JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank have summoned ('invited') some people back into the office now that it's September. The Financial Times reports that Blackstone and Carlyle are paying for taxis for people to return to work (although returning is 'optional'). Bloomberg is offering all its global employees $55 a day to return to the office. Goldman Sachs 'invited' its senior staff to return a week or so ago. Citi's Leonardo Arduini asked more sales and trading staff to come back in Europe at a townhall in Europe last week. The list goes on.

If you were supposed to have an internship at Santander's corporate and investment bank (CIB) this year, you will initially have been disappointed. 

Back in late March, as full lockdowns threatened, Santander wrote to the 52 students who were due to come for summer internships in its corporate and investment bank and commercial bank and informed them that it had been compelled to "reassess" its plans for a 10 week internship in 2020. Instead, Santander said disappointed interns would automatically be invited to an assessment day to determine whether they could join the 2021 graduate scheme.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become a training ground for some of the top jobs in banking technology. In 2019, Marco Argenti, the co-chief information officer at Goldman Sachs joined after six years at AWS. in July 2020, Rob Cochran joined Goldman as a managing director after time spent as a senior product manager at AWS. Now Barclays has made a major new technology hire from the same source. 

Barclays has recruited James Saull, formerly a senior solutions manager for global financial services at AWS in London. Saull, who spent eight years at AWS, has joined the bank as a managing director and head of cloud integration and DevOps.

Credit Suisse’s Asian private bankers who spent the Tidjane Thiam years building bridges with their colleagues in investment banking will be pleased to know that their efforts haven’t been in vain.

New CEO Thomas Gottstein has come out in support of Credit Suisse's “bank for entrepreneurs” drive, which was launched by his predecessor Thiam in 2016 and encourages cross-selling investment banking services to wealthy business owners. Gottstein said last week that while cross-selling is working well in Asia and Europe, it could be done even more effectively.

Elliott Dallen doesn't work for Barclays any more. But he did - after graduating from the U.K's university of Exeter in 2011, Dallen joined Barclays in 2017 as an assistant vice president in business performance and analytics division of the corporate bank. Then in 2018 he was diagnosed with cancer. Now, aged 31 he is just weeks from death. 

Dallen wrote an article in the Guardian about his condition at the start of lockdown, when he feared that he wouldn't survive the initial months of the pandemic. He did survive, and now he has written in the Guardian again - about what it feels like to slipping inexorably towards death at the very start of the fourth decade of life. 

HSBC didn't comment on Gupta's arrival, but it reflects the bank's ongoing emphasis on governance following some historic large fines. Gupta joins the bank from the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority, where he spent a decade working on the listings panel and in market oversight after a career in equity capital markets at Dresdner, Jefferies, and Rothschild. 

As we reported last week, HSBC's emphasis on corporate governance became a bit over-zealous when it asked all its employees to take two consecutive weeks off without logging into the bank's systems after the Mexico money laundering case in 2012. This was considered excessive and the bank recently restricted the two week policy to a few key employees instead, prompting complaints that some people didn't get long holidays this year.

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