Bank of America has cautioned its overweight employees that they may be at more risk of the virus. 

In a memo sent to staff globally last Friday, the bank highlighted recently updated medical guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which identifies people with a body mass index (BMI) over 30 as being at particular risk from the coronavirus. U.S. staff in this and other high risk categories should contact HR, said BofA. Elsewhere in the world, the bank said it would contact team members with high risk factors and that they could work remotely for the forseeable future. 

Those portraits of industrious investment bank employees showing one or two white men surrounded by a sea of female black and brown faces have always seemed a little suspect. After all, banks' own diversity reports show that beyond the most junior ranks there are almost no black or hispanic people in banking. Now it seems that at least one bank has been cheating.

In a series of interviews about the experience of being black in banking, Bloomberg spoke to Tessie Petion, the head of ESG Engagement at Amazon and former head of ESG Engagement at HSBC in the Americas. Petion also worked for Deutsche Bank and interned at Citi. Without naming names, Petion said that one of the banks she worked for assembled a diversity collage to depict its ethnically diverse employees, but that when she looked closely she saw that they'd simply added her over and over again to compensate for the fact that she was one of the only...

Barclays didn't immediately respond to a request to comment on Bogucki's case. When contacted for a statement Bogucki said by email that:  "After I was fully exonerated at trial for what a federal judge referred to as an improper and flawed prosecution, I separated from and settled with Barclays on amicable terms."

Bogucki was represented by David Wechsler of Wechsler & Cohen. In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that prosecutors in Bogucki's case improperly used a request for information from the U.K. in an attempt to buy some time.

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WeLab Bank, which is wholly owned by the eponymous Hong Kong fintech firm, is the third of eight new Hong Kong virtual banks – after ZA Bank and Airstar Bank – to fully launch its services. WeLab is trying to entice customers with high deposit rates, but it faces strong competition in a market that has 155 traditional lenders serving just 7.5m people.

Hong Kong’s newest bank is also in a crowded market for talent as its seven digital-banking rivals, including Standard Chartered-back Mox and Tencent-backed Fusion, are all hiring, despite Covid-19.

WeLab Bank itself has 14 Hong Kong-based roles on its career site, a high number compared with larger financial services firms, which have pared back their hiring. Bank of America, for example, has only nine Hong Kong vacancies, while Credit Suisse has 24.

Several of WeLab’s jobs are in technology, suggesting that although WeLab is up and running it still needs more technologists to help...

The French bank said today that it now plans to cut an additional €450m of costs from its global markets division by 2022/2023, a reduction of 9.4% on last year, and to accept a €200m to €250m ongoing annual reduction in global markets revenues in a normalized environment. SocGen is voluntarily shrinking its global markets business by around 5%.

SocGen wasn't clear today on where the cuts will come: senior executives at the bank said more clarity will be given in the first quarter of 2021, but that there are some areas of the "current product that we don't want to have any more." It doesn't take genius to see which areas these might be: SocGen CEO Frédéric Oudéa already suggested in April 2020 that the bank planned to pare its exposure to autocallabale products (multi-year savings products that can include complicated embedded options to boost investor returns) and to, "accelerate the transition to simpler products to...

When your CEO calls your department a “striking growth business” amid 35,000 job cuts, you know you’re probably working in the right part of the bank.

That’s how HSBC chief executive Noel Quinn described Asian wealth management earlier today, speaking after the publication of first-half results for the bank, which is currently making sweeping redundancies, mainly in the US and Europe.

HSBC's results are out today. Overall, the bank made a profit - but only just. A group profit of $6.2bn in the second quarter of 2019 became a group profit of just $1.1bn in the second half of 2020 as the bank booked another $3.8bn in credit impairment charges as a result of COVID-19. HSBC is now predicting full year impairment charges at anything from $8bn to $13bn. As an analyst pointed out on today's call, the bank could yet slip into a quarterly loss.

Something needs to be done. And indeed, something is. HSBC resumed its programme of 35,000 layoffs in June and has already cut 3,800 people including contractors since the start of the year. It's behind in its quest to cut $1bn from costs in 2020, but has already extracted $300m and expects to take out a further $500m before December, and to compensate for the $200m shortfall by cutting more aggressively in 2021. "We will be accelerating our transformation in the second half of the year and...

History is littered with examples of banking jobs that used to make people a lucrative living until fate or technology intervened. Take cash equity sales, which has been supplanted by electronic trading systems. Or take equity research, which was once the domain of superstars earning over $20m a year before Eliot Spitzer and then MiFID II came along. 

Could M&A bankers be next? Goldman Sachs is building an M&A app, which although it's not pitched as a Tinder for corporates and may not involve any right-swiping of hot target companies, sounds distinctly as if it could render some M&A professionals superfluous. 

With CFA exam takers already fretting about the possibility that the exams in December, which were postponed from June, will be cancelled because of the virus, there are increasing calls for the testing process to be moved online. All the more so because the CAIA, which runs a set of semi-rival exams on alternative asset management, will be offering online proctored exams from this September.

The CAIA announced its new arrangements last week. The online proctored exams won't be mandatory but will be optional for candidates hesitant about attending exam sites in person. In a document detailing how the online proctored exams will work, the CAIA says that among other things candidates will be expected to sit the exams in an area where online proctors can see both them and their testing space at all times. Candidates will need to provide photos of themselves, their government ID and their testing space (x4) and these will be validated before...

Andy Lipsky, who has been with the firm for 20 years, is understood to be joining JP Morgan in a senior role, according to two sources.

Lipsky was head of the swiss bank’s investment banking and capital markets business in the Americas until a reshuffle late last year saw him move to new role as vice chairman of the unit.

Lipsky’s shift in role coincided with the appointment of David Miller to replace Jim Amine as CEO of IBCM in November

Miller has revamped the division and now it is being combined with the sales and trading business following a restructuring announced this week by Thomas Gottstein.

Gottstein who was appointed group CEO in February is re-uniting corporate finance and global markets after they were separated by his predecessor Tidjane Thiam, who oversaw a radical restructuring of the global markets division.

Credit Suisse is planning to cut CHF400m of costs annually by 2022 with job cuts...

Goldman Sachs' London staff received a pay rise last year. 

The newly released results for Goldman Sachs International show the firm increasing average cash pay (salaries plus cash bonuses) per head in London from $421k (£320k) per head in 2018, to $509k last year, while newly allocated stock bonuses rose from an average of $100k to $108k over the same period. Compensation for the highest paid director also rose, from $3m to $4m. 

The bank had singled out its corporate finance business as an investment priority prior to the Covid 19 pandemic, and after hiring a dozen managing directors last year, it has maintained the pace of recruitment into 2020.

Nine managing directors have joined since the start of the year as the bank has beefed up its expertise across a number of sectors and products.

There has been a steady stream of arrivals throughout lockdown. Most recently the bank hired Steve Studnicky in July as head of strategic equity solutions for the Americas from Piper Jaffray.  

However, the recruitment began in earnest months ago. In January, UBS hired Chris Harris for its global industrials investment banking group from Lazard. In February, the bank appointed Michael Rosso from Royal Bank of Canada as global head of technology, media & telecom private placements for its San Francisco office.

An...

Societe Generale’s decision to cut Singapore-based front-office staff from its trade commodity finance (TCF) unit marks a “fall from grace” for a team that was once a poster child for the bank locally.

The news, which was reported by Bloomberg today, follows the collapse in May of Singaporean oil trader Hin Leong, which owed $3.8bn to banks, including $240m to SocGen.

If banks weren't supposed to be hiring during the pandemic, someone forgot to tell Credit Suisse. When the Swiss bank announced its second quarter results yesterday, it revealed the addition of 360 staff in its global markets division from April to June, an increase of nearly 3%.

Credit Suisse explained that the increase wasn't necessarily what it seemed. Those new people are mostly in India, said CEO Thomas P. Gottstein; they're also 'insourced' contractors who've been made full time employees. But, Credit Suisse only cut contractors by 200 in Q2, so at least some of the new hires must have come from elsewhere. 

Cheung had been with UBS for almost 10 years and was latterly a senior regional AML director, financial crime prevention, according to her LinkedIn profile. She spend the first eight years of her UBS tenure as head of trust and wealth planning.

At DBS, Cheung is based in the private bank and is primarily focused on helping wealthy people with their trust planning, according to a job description posted to advertise her ED-level role. Her tasks include new business acceptance, establishing frameworks for non-standard trust guidance, and supporting trust administration. The job also requires being a “knowledge centre” within private banking to monitor and analyse legal, regulatory and tax changes that impact trust structures.

Private banking as an industry and compliance/legal as a job sector have both enjoyed comparatively strong levels of hiring in Singapore, in the context of a job market that’s been blighted by Covid-19. Recruiters say there is...

BNP Paribas has become the latest bank to report its results this morning. In many ways they're great: year-on-year, profits in the corporate and investment bank (CIB) were up 50% in the second quarter; in fixed income currencies and commodities (FICC) trading revenues were up 150%. However, the results also reflect the headwinds faced by banks at this particular point in history. 

BNP said it spent €86m on 'staff safety measures' and donations related to the virus in the second quarter. As a result of Brexit, it has also created 400 new positions in continental Europe (presumably Paris), of which it said 160 are front office roles and 240 are support functions (predominantly IT). Sales jobs in London, and jobs supporting sales are being affected by the move. So far, though, BNP said that only 260 of its new European roles have been "taken up" - implying that staff either don't want to move to Paris, or that...

With 335,000 bankers worldwide working from "kitchens, studies and living rooms," getting everyone back into the office was always going to be a challenge - even if COVID-19 wasn't threatening a resurgence. Banks, however, have been making a case for returning key staff in areas like sales and trading, and in doing so they're having to go a bit Big-Tech.

Until now, banks have not been big on freebies. Free food and beer on tap have been the domain of the Googles and Facebooks and the WeWorks rather than the large financial players. The coronavirus could be changing this. 

What pandemic? When the world first went down the COVID-19 wormhole in March there were suggestions that private equity funds would struggle to exit investments as planned and that the industry could encounter a cash squeeze as portfolio companies needed help and investors ran scared. Four months later, the nightmare has vanished. Suddenly it's a great(ish) year. 

Carlyle Group is the posterchild for the transformation. The fund group reported its second quarter results today and they reveal that the compensation bill at Carlyle rose 24% in the first half versus 2019, to $685m.

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What pandemic? When the world first went down the COVID-19 wormhole in March there were suggestions that private equity funds would struggle to exit investments as planned and that the industry could encounter a cash squeeze as portfolio companies needed help and investors ran scared. Four months later, the nightmare has vanished. Suddenly it's a great(ish) year. 

Carlyle Group is the posterchild for the transformation. The fund group reported its second quarter results today and they reveal that the compensation bill at Carlyle rose 24% in the first half versus 2019, to $685m.

Diversity is a big deal to investment banks when it comes to graduate recruiting. As an industry that has a reputation for being largely male, predominantly white and the home of the economically privileged, a lot of energy is channelled into ensuring that the analyst pool is as diverse as possible.

If you fall into a 'diverse category' - if you're female, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), black, hispanic, or disabled - there are various schemes that will help you secure a junior role in banking when you leave university.

If you're a quant trader or financial services technologist nowadays, you will probably have heard of Jane Street. You may also want to work there. Many try. Few succeed: the company says only a "small percentage" of applicants are accepted for interview and that its notoriously difficult interview questions get harder with each round.

For those not in the know, Jane Street is about as hot as things get in the world of quant trading. In 2016, the New York Times described it as a "secretive E.T.F. trading firm that, after years of minting money in the shadows of Wall Street, is now pitching itself to some of the largest institutional investors in the world."

IT IS SUPPOSED to be the “Tesla killer”. Volkswagen’s new ID.3 is the firm’s first mass-produced all-electric car—and the first step in the German carmaker’s attempts to reinvent itself for an electrified world. That makes it perhaps the most important model since the original Golf, launched in 1976. The ID.3 is also late. Mechanically, the car is hunky-dory. But some software widgets that are a big selling point these days—rumoured to include smartphone connectivity and augmented-reality parking assistance—may be missing at first, only to be added later. Originally set for this summer, the launch has been pushed back until at least September.

VW is not the only big company struggling to make its computers work. Last year British banks were hauled over the coals by regulators for online outages and botched IT upgrades that left millions of customers unable to make or receive payments. Some problems are much more serious. Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft were grounded in 2019...

It’s hardly on the scale of HSBC, which is culling 35,000 jobs, but Standard Chartered has restarted the restructuring that it began more than four years ago in the early days of CEO Bill Winter’s tenure. In Singapore, home to around 10,000 staff and many of the firm's global heads, one source tells us he expects the cuts to be in the “low triple digits”, and that mainly managers will depart. A spokesperson for the bank did not comment on the Singapore figures, but said the layoffs are not Covid-related and that globally a “small number of roles are being made redundant”.

Still, if you work for the Asia-focused bank in its Singapore or Hong Kong hubs, you will likely feel more secure right now if your team performed well in the first half. “The crisis has put our existing focus on productivity into a whole new light. We are accelerating some elements of existing projects targeted at creating a leaner and more agile organisation,” Winters said in a...