China’s culture of corporate boozing has been thrown into the spotlight by news that a young employee from Xiamen International Bank was slapped in the face by an executive after refusing his boss’s request to drink alcohol during a company dinner at a Beijing hotel last month. The junior banker, known by his surname of Yang, was also taunted by intoxicated colleagues, who he’d seen vomiting on tables and harassing female staff. Yang wrote a viral WeChat post about his experiences, forcing the bank to apologise and dock bonuses from two executives.

Hong Kong and Singapore finance professionals who live in, visit, or cover China are unlikely to face an ordeal similar to Yang’s. They are certain to be older than Yang, who appears to be a fresh graduate or intern, and their age and skill levels provide some protection from being abused over a boozy meal, which is likely to be with clients rather than colleagues.

Nevertheless, bankers from the two...

It's a fairly stressful time at HSBC. In Noel Quinn, the bank has a still-new CEO who - having announced plans to cut 35,000 jobs in February 2020, has since declared that he may need to cut deeper still. Although jobs susceptible to automation are thought to be particularly vulnerable to Quinn's knife, front office staff may also be on the line. In August, for example, HSBC removed some members of its London M&A team who told us they had "no idea" they were on the cuts list. 

However, it's not just fears of redundancy that are wearing some HSBC bankers down. This year, the bank also abolished its "core leave" policy whereby almost all of its employees globally were required to take two consecutive weeks off during which time they were banned from logging onto HSBC's systems.

As we've observed already, data hiring at investment banks doesn't seem to have been impacted by the pandemic: both JPMorgan and Citi recruited people for senior data roles in July and August. Now, JPMorgan has also added a managing director (MD) to run its new AI data platform as a distinct area within the bank.

David Castillo joined JPMorgan as MD of the bank's Omni AI eco system in August. A former leader of the Center for Machine Learning at Capital One and adjunct professor teaching artificial intelligence and machine learning at the University of Maryland, Castillo is based out of JPM's New York office. 

There, he will be building out a new equity advisory practice. 

Today is Shinebourne's first day, so the new practice is just getting up and running, but it's understood that there's already another senior in the pipeline and that Shinebourne is working with some of Finsbury's existing institutional shareholder services staff and with its office in Frankfurt. 

Ultimately, it seems that Finbsury wants to build out a comprehensive equity advisory business to help clients on a retained basis, including those who are private and who are thinking of going public. Shinebourne, who has joined as a partner in London, will work on everything from IPOs to regular reporting and strategic projects, including perception studies, strategic reviews, positioning major M&A events, activism defence on governance, and defence against short attacks. 

It all sounds a little like corporate broking and the firm has big...

Nomura used to have a reputation for paying senior staff at its Angel Lane office in London pretty well. Not, necessarily any more. Results released last week for Nomura International reflect the extent to which pay has dropped at the Japanese bank in recent years.

In the year to March 31st 2020, the 1,834 staff at Nomura’s International business earned an average of $268k each. This was down from an average of $271k in 2019 and from $316k in 2018. 

If you're looking for some tips on how to write your resume for a new banking job this autumn, we suggest you take some inspiration from Mike Diiorio, the former head of EMEA equities at Credit Suisse.

After leaving CS in May, Diiorio has recently updated his LinkedIn profile using various techniques that suggest he could have a second career as a professional CV writer if he feels so inclined. 

If you're studying for the CFA® exams in June, you're probably feeling exhausted. Hang in there. You can do it. You don't have to lose all your friends and take up smoking in the process.

I passed CFA Level III two years ago. It took me a year to go through each exam (I started in 2013). During that period, I was working full time and I became a father twice over. It was exhausting and challenging, but it was worth it.

It now seems that this year's Citadel Securities' interns received similar treatment. At the same time, interns at Citadel itself (the hedge fund) appear to have been accommodated in comparable finery elsewhere. 

Business Insider reports that 35 interns from Citadel Securities went to the Four Seasons at Palm Beach this summer, and that another 100 interns went to the five star American Club Resort in Kohler, Wisconsin, where rooms can cost up to $400 a night and where spa and wellbeing packages are combined with wildlife trails. The interns reportedly spent a month in their five star bubbles, working during the day and participating in 'events' in the evenings. At Palm Beach the events included pool days and Spikeball tournaments; at Kohler they included canoeing, climbing and golf lessons. 

The deluxe internships appear to have been a success. One Citadel Securities intern at Palm Beach said his friends were all "super jealous" of his...

The way something is said is at least as important as the actual content, as anyone who has worked in banking for a while can tell you. Sometimes “I want you to do this right now” can be a suggestion, and sometimes “I wonder if you’d consider doing this?” can be an order, and the different cultural cues are a reliable source of entertaining miscommunications. So when a bank like Goldman Sachs gives “an invitation” to its MD ranks to return to the office, particularly after it’s already sent out offers of free pizza, childcare and subsidised cycling, it is likely to be seen by many as another move along the continuum to an actual order.

It’s particularly significant that the more senior bankers are being given the invitation. That is also likely to propagate down to the lower ranks. On the one hand, the culture carriers and officers have to set an example; it’s not really possible to ask your juniors to do something you’re not prepared to do...

While consulting firms are bracing for layoffs due to Covid 19 the good news for undergrads and MBAs is that pay is going up.

The 2020 salary report from industry coaching firm Management Consulted shows that salaries at the top three firms – McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) – known collectively as MBB, have risen as they increasingly look to compete with tech firms for talent.

Private banks in Hong Kong continue to add relationship managers to their headcounts in 2020, albeit not at the same rate as last year. Private banking remains a priority for many financial institutions in the city during the pandemic.

Among the latest people to leave banking for Amazon is Joshua Chong, who joined earlier this month as a senior consultant, according to his LinkedIn profile. Chong previously spent more than seven years at DBS, where he was a subject matter expert in self-service banking, a technical lead role for major projects, including digital payments and payments tokenisation.

Banking technologists like Chong regularly apply for Singapore-based roles at Amazon, because of the quality and quantity of jobs on offer, a technology recruiter told us.

Amazon currently has 207 jobs on its careers site, while four of Singapore’s other major tech employers can only muster 212 in total. Grab has 70 vacancies, Google has 54, while Facebook and Microsoft have 53 and 35 openings, respectively. Amazon’s hiring volumes are more on par with Singapore’s three local banks – DBS, OCBC and UOB – which often have more than 200 roles available.

About 70% of...

It appears that two of the investment banking industry’s biggest headaches are about to interact with each other to create a third, even worse pain. Everyone was already worried about the possibility of a “second wave” of coronavirus infections, as children go back to school, students go back to university and workers return from holiday destinations and start gradually returning to the office. Everyone was also a bit worried about the lack of progress on Brexit talks and the increasing likelihood that the transitional arrangements wouldn’t allow as many functions to be effectively managed out of London as the banks had hoped.

And now … because of worries that Brexit planning might once more get interrupted by a coronavirus lockdown, the European regulators are demanding that everything should be done a lot quicker. According to one person close to the ECB’s thinking, they are saying that “the summer period is a good time to move”, which might be a...

If you’re a job seeker in Hong Kong and you want to work for one of the world’s top-10 investment banks by market capitalisation, you could try Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, which respectively rank in first and second place.

To work as a trader today you need a wide range of skills. You still have to be numerate, cool under pressure, and have an excellent memory. But this is no longer enough. Increasingly, traders have to be able to program.

The whole industry has been pondering this strategic question for months, but according to an interview with Dan Pinto, JP Morgan has come to a decision – working from home, at least part of the time, is going to be a “more or less permanent” feature of their investment bank’s model.  The “rotational model” is going to have JPM bankers working “one week a month from home, or two days a week from home, or two weeks a month”, depending on the type of business. 

There is, of course, a pretty big difference between two days a week and two weeks a month, in terms of how you organise your life and commute.  It’s not clear at what level the decision is going to be taken; whether it will actually be based on an objective centrally planned assessment of the client and market needs, or whether this just means “what suits your MD the best”.  But it’s clear that JPM is committing seriously to the model – Mr Pinto says that the bank will be...

The average cost of employing a mid-level expatriate employee in Hong Kong cost a company US$284,466 (HK$2,231,611), including an average cash salary of US$88,126 (HK$691,344). Expat packages include three main elements: the cash salary, benefits (such as accommodation, international schools, or cars) and tax. Salaries for Hong Kong expats rose by 1.2% compared with 2018.

“Hong Kong stood out against the global trend of lower expatriate packages in 2019 and is one of the only locations in our rankings that saw all aspects of the average package increase,” said Lee Quane, regional director for Asia at ECA International, adding that the 1.2% rise in salaries was still significantly lower than in previous years.

While ECA’s data is not specific to the banking sector, two headhunters we spoke with in Hong Kong say anecdotally that expat pay at banks inched up last year, despite cost pressures on banks as the civil unrest took a toll on Hong Kong’s...

Access to a strong local talent pool is a key reason why hedge fund Citadel and market maker Citadel Securities have decided to launch a Singapore office, which will be shared by both firms, later this year.

The two businesses set up in markets where they have the opportunity to hire top talent, and Singapore is no exception, says a source close to Citadel.

Depending on who you view as the Dark Side in the eternal battle between IBD and sales and trading, the second half of 2020 might be seen as either “The Empire Strikes Back” or “Return of the Jedi”. After an almost completely dead first half, M&A deal activity is returning – perhaps not necessarily “roaring back” yet, as Financial News headline has it, but since 1 July there have been at least seven deals announced for more than $10bn.

What appears to have happened is that CEOs have reached a point where they have enough headspace to think about strategy, balance sheets have stabilised, and the smartest M&A bankers have adapted their pitches to concentrate on stock-funded mergers of equals, allowing both sides to share in the potential upside rather than relying on one party being willing to cash out at an uncertain valuation. There’s also a lot of cheap debt out there and considerable interest from financial sponsors (for example, BT Group...

The economic recession in Singapore and Hong Kong is making it more difficult for recruiters to convince technology professionals to change jobs in the banking sector. Their reluctance to move is helping to exacerbate talent shortages and is driving up pay demands.

After two decades in banking, the training and onboarding new graduates pretty much runs on autopilot for most managing directors. Over time, you delegate more and more of the responsibility to your team until you get to a point where the process is seamless and consistent across cycles. This year, however, a certain pandemic, however, blew that theory right out of the water.

Bringing graduate hires into banks in 2020 is requiring old dogs to learn entirely new tricks. Despite the fact that banks have an e-learning for literally everything, prior to this year, no one had ever completed the module on virtual training and onboarding, so this is new to everyone. Working from home has been productive for many firms. However, it's very different working from home for a firm you know inside out than joining one virtually, especially when it is your first job in life, and so we have had to be very cognizant of this when re-imagining...

As we have noted before on occasion, a useful basis for forecasting trends in the investment banking industry is to ask what would be maximally unpleasant for employees, and then assume that’s what will happen. You wouldn’t necessarily have been able to predict a global pandemic in this manner, but given the information that one had happened, the “what would suck most” principle would give you a pretty clear idea of how the lockdown might affect working practices for junior investment bankers.

On the positive side, reports Financial News, there’s no longer any problem with running out of clean laundry because you’ve been stuck in the office so long. That’s about it for the positive side. On the negative side, now that the working day is no longer punctuated by the commute to and from the office, there’s less to make senior bankers realise what kind of demands they’re making on their teams’ time. Giving a task that will take until 2am to complete...

If you thought the 108% year-on-year increase in U.S. investment banks' fixed income currency and commodity (FICC) trading revenues in the second quarter was something special, you're far too easily impressed. 108% is nothing. Just ask people in Virtu's electronic market making business: they just reported a 180% increase in daily average net trading income in the second quarter versus one year earlier. 

The second quarter increase was particularly impressive in Virtu's big equities market making business (revenues up 343% to $476m in Q2) but it wasn't bad in fixed income market making either (revenues up 176% to $78m). As the chart below from Virtu's investor presentation shows, daily average trading revenues slowed in July but they were still substantially above the historic average. The good times aren't over yet.

If you're wondering how to advance your career during the coronavirus pandemic, or are starting a new job from the comfort of your spare room rather than a bank of desks in the office, you might want to contemplate the advice offered by JPMorgan's new global head of diversity and inclusion, Brian Lamb.

Lamb himself arrived at JPM mid-pandemic, in April 2020. He previously spent over 13 years at Fifth Third Bank in Florida, where he was everything from regional CFO to head of retail banking to head of wealth and asset management.