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It’s on. Now that banks have opened their application processes for summer and full time hires for 2018, they’ve also started sending out invitations for their Hirevue digital interviews. There are U.S. students out there who’ve applied for summer analyst positions in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley and who say they’ve participated in first round interviews already. If you haven’t heard back, maybe you’re not wanted? – Maybe your invite’s in the post. Either way, you’re gong to want to know what you’re missing.

For anyone unfamiliar with banks’ new hot method of screening candidates, Hirevue interviews don’t involve you speaking to an actual human being. They’re a fully automated process in which you interact with your webcam and the system records your answers to preset questions. In most cases, a recruiter will review your application later – but this doesn’t need to happen. Hirevue has developed a complicated algorithm built around machine learning, which assesses your interview across 15,000 different dimensions (including body language, speech patterns, blinking) and works out if you’re similar to high performers already working for the bank you’re interviewing with.

From this point of view, gaming your Hirevue interview is a bit of a nightmare. – How are you supposed to know how quickly top Goldman IBD analysts speak, whether they gesticulate a lot, and how frequently they blink?

If you can’t prime yourself for the more esoteric aspects of a Hirevue interview, you can at least anticipate the questions you’ll have to answer. Banks started using the system last year, so there’s a bit of precedent for what they like to ask. Fundamentally, Hirevue interviews are about one thing: behavioural (behavioral in the U.S.) questions – but in a first round Hirevue interview you also need to be ready for at least one more technical question pertaining to the division you’re applying for.

At Goldman Sachs, you can expect five questions in each Hirevue interview (although some divisions may hit you with six). 80% of them will be behavioural. 20% will be division-specific, which can be confusing if you’ve applied to multiple GS divisions as it’s not always clear which one has issued the interview. You’ll get 30 seconds to prepare each answer and two minutes to speak to the camera. There are no second chances. – If you doing get to the point, you’ll run out of time. The whole thing will be over in 15 minutes and if you’re successful, you should hear back within two weeks.

At J.P. Morgan, you can expect five to seven questions per Hirevue interview. People who went through the JPM process last year say they got three attempts per question, although it’s not clear whether JPM has switched to the GS format of only one try this year (if you’ve been through the J.P. Morgan process and can elaborate, let us know in the comments box at the bottom of this page.)

At most banks, the questions are pretty tedious, but at least they’re fairly standard.

Goldman Sachs video interview questions:

Talk me through what happened in your banking internship.

Walk me through your resume.

What do you want to work in investment banking?

Why do you want to work for Goldman Sachs?

Why do you want to work for division X?

What is it about your past experience that has made you want to work for division X?

What’s the most important experience you’ve had in your career so far? Why?

What does division X do?

Talk me through how division X fits into the firm? (Eg. How does compliance strengthen the firm? How does the finance division protect the assets of the firm?)

Tell me about an asset class you’re interested [this is asked in securities interviews].

Why do you want to work in location Z?

Talk me through a time you were working in a team and someone wasn’t pulling their weight.

Talk me through a time you were working in a team and you were faced with a confrontation.

Talk me through a time you were working in a team and you took the initiative to make a change.

Talk me through a time you had to resolve a conflict with someone senior to you.

What would make you a good fit with Goldman Sachs?

What’s your core expertise? How have you applied that to a project?

What’s your greatest strength?

Why did you choose your major?

What’s the hardest problem you ever encountered? How did you overcome it?

J.P. Morgan video interview questions:

Why J.P. Morgan?

Which skills did you gain during your internship that will make you a good fit for this role?

Can you tell us about a time you’ve acted as a leader?

Why do you think you will succeed in this role? What makes you a good fit?

What has been your greatest challenge? How did you overcome it?

What are your best qualities?

Can you tell us about a time you worked in a team to solve a problem?

Can you tell us about a time you had to resolve a conflict at work? How did you achieve that? What happened?

What interests you about current affairs now? Why?

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Photo credit: Quad Core by Peretz Partensky is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Adi Prakash has spent most of his career working within senior technology roles at large financial institutions. Most recently, he was the chief technology officer of legal and eDiscovery at J.P. Morgan, and for all the talk of banks morphing into technology companies, he says they have a long way to go before they’re real competitors.

“Big banks are bureaucratic and risk-averse, and their sheer size, inertia and machinery prevent them from driving innovation,” he says. “At banks, there is a desire to be innovative, but I think what gets in the way is twofold.

“Over the years there has not been enough investment in technology and the skillsets of the folks working in tech.”

Banks say, “Let’s do what Facebook and Google are doing,” but that takes time and culture change.

Prakash, who also worked at UBS and Och-Ziff Capital Management, is now the chief innovation officer and head of client services at Yerra Solutions. It’s a regulatory technology company that provides consulting, managed services and technology services to global healthcare, pharmaceutical, automotive and financial services clients for legal, eDiscovery and compliance.

“There were disagreements about where I felt we should go and J.P. Morgan felt we needed to be,” Prakash says. “Over the last six months, by virtue of being in my role, I’ve been interacting with various firms, including Yerra, and I feel there is a void to be filled in terms of true innovation.”

A computer scientist who got his start as a software engineering, Prakash moved to New York for grad school, and his first internship was at a hedge fund. After graduation, he worked at General Motors, but felt the pull back to the financial services industry.

“I stuck within financial services in technology ever since, on the sell side and the buy side,” he says.

Prakash worked at UBS almost eight years, first in compliance technology, eventually working his way up to become the global head of trade monitoring, electronic surveillance and control room technology, and then he transitioned to serve as the global head of the eDiscovery development function.

“There were a number of management changes, and I felt I wasn’t challenged enough,” Prakash says. “I wanted to go back to the hedge fund space.”

He joined Och-Ziff Capital Management, working in legal, compliance and reference data as the head of portfolio finance and liquidity. His responsibilities ranged from Treasury, legal entity management, regulatory reporting, pre-trade, intra-day and post-trade compliance, anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions, tax and electronic surveillance functions.

“Hedge fund bureaucracy doesn’t exist to the same extent [compared to big banks], but strategic thinking was lacking,” Prakash says. “Being able to invest in something in the tech space with the payoff three to five years down the road was not there.

“Hedge funds absolutely have cutting edge technologists, experimenting and actually using the latest technologies, and it was a great opportunity to work with them, but the investment horizon is limited to six to 18 months,” he says. “There’s no appetite to invest in something that does not show tangible returns in the short term.”

You’ve got nothing to fear from automation

Prakash says automation has two primary applications: making business decisions and executing back-office functions, including compliance and legal tasks such as contract creation and deciding what securities or assets to use as collateral. He feels that automation’s reputation as a job killer is overblown.

“People are worried about jobs being automated away, but it’s not really practical or on the immediate horizon,” Prakash says. “Your job shifts in terms of where your time is spent, and over time, it’s better for the industry and individual firms, because they can move employees to higher-value tasks.

“The total number of financial services employees hasn’t seen a significant or drastic reduction due to automation,” he says. “Professionals switch to higher-value tasks.

“Firms retool – they don’t’ replace them altogether, and that isn’t happening anytime soon.”
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Deutsche Bank has lost two of its most senior electronic trading professionals in Europe. Both are understood to have gone to Exane.

Market insiders and headhunters say that Yashar Asl and Edgar Harty both left Deutsche in the past few weeks. The two men were co-heads of equities in EMEA for Autobahn, Deutsche’s electronic trading system.

Asl is understood to be on three months’ gardening leave before joining Exane in London. Harty is understood to be joining Exane in the U.S.

Deutsche cut its bonus pool by nearly 80% last year, but this doesn’t appear to have been the catalyst for Asl and Harty’s exit. Headhunters said the two men were disgruntled after Neal Nadoo, Deutsche’s co-head of systematic trading in EMEA was given more responsibility. Nadoo was hired in from Goldman Sachs in 2013. Asl joined Deutsche from G-Trade, an electronic trading platform, in 2008. Harty joined from Bank of America in 2007.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

Asl and Harty aren’t the only electronic trading professionals to join Exane this year. In April, the French bank also hired Shane Dillon, a former executive director in electronic trading from Morgan Stanley. MiFID II is expected to increase the importance of electronic trading systems when it’s introduced in Europe in 2018.

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Photo credit: Deutsche Bank | London Wall by Justin Pickard is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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Last year I left Singapore for a few months to spend the summer interning at a US investment bank on Wall Street. Overall I performed well. In fact, I’ve recently started here as an analyst.

But the internship was far from plain sailing and one task particularly annoyed me and made me think poorly of my fellow interns.

At the start of the internship the bank gave us a goal to basically speak to as many MDs as possible – not just in our teams, but across the bank. The idea was that talking to MDs showed you had the potential to be proactive and pushy with clients – you were someone who wasn’t afraid of being ‘out there’ and showing initiative.

That may sound reasonable enough, but it needlessly helped to turn the internship into a dog-eat-dog environment. Many of the other interns completely overreacted to the objective, to the point where their behaviour just didn’t look natural.

They would approach MDs they had no connection with and blatantly bootlick them by making random small talk. Buying takeaway coffee and lunches for MDs, even when not asked, was another common ploy for striking up a silly chat.

I couldn’t take part in this Wall Street-style brown-nosing, because it seemed so weird to me as a Singaporean (I was the only intern in my team from an Asian country).

I’ve got quite a bubbly personality and I don’t conform to the crass American stereotype of the ‘introverted Asian woman’. But in my country – no matter how outgoing you are – it’s simply rude and disrespectful to walk up to someone senior for no real reason.

Ironically, I was doing well in my actual job – I was getting the work done on time and outperforming most of my cohort in terms of productivity and technical ability. But I feared missing out on a full-time offer because of an (incorrect) perception that my communication skills were somehow flawed.

Approaching MDs without a valid work-related reason didn’t come naturally. It was never on the agenda at previous Singapore-based internships I’d done. Who was I to start asking a middle-aged banker how their kids were doing or what they had planned for the weekend? Unlike my American counterparts, I struggled to have these kind of contrived conversations.

So how did I even end up with a job offer? A very helpful middle-manager in my team gave me a plan. She said I should approach MDs only after completing work that they would be affected by or at least interested in.

This was a good way of talking to them about something real and earning their respect, and it didn’t make me feel uncomfortable. I eventually spoke to enough MDs, but the process was much slower for me than for my colleagues, because I had to actually finish pieces of work first. There were still no random conversations with senior bankers by the water cooler.

Genevieve Goh (we have used a pseudonym to protect her identity) is currently a first-year analyst at a US bank.

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In the hyper-competitive investment banking job market there are deal-breakers, there are nice-to-haves and there are must-haves.

Scott Beiser, the CEO of investment bank Houlihan Lokey, says one of the biggest challenges he faces is ensuring that the boutique’s employees stay engaged and energized. The bank is growing, and as a smaller firm, it faces competition from bulge-bracket players. In an interview with Business Insider, he said there are three things that it takes to make it in finance.

The most obvious thing, and any graduate recruiter will tell you this these days, is that you have to have some sort of passion for finance. Beiser uses phrases like “love” and “it has to be part of your DNA.”

Secondly, as automation creeps into investment banking advisory, Beiser says that it’s not about the data â it’s about communicating it to the parties involved in the deal. “And whether that’s the client, whether that’s the seller versus the buyer, the lender versus the borrower, it’s a judge … or some other constituency. So you have to be successful in articulating what is important and how to convey that whether it’s your side or the other side. And that’s not necessarily a talent I believe they teach you in the schools anymore. So some people just have it, are born with it, or maybe they developed it through some other work experience.”

Finally, he says you’ll need to be able to work with people â specifically, you’ll need to be OK with answering to a lot of people who want to tell you what to do. MDs, VPs, clients â these are ultimately all your bosses. “So you have to have a talent to be able to juggle your schedule and work well with multiple people,” he says. And you may not get along with every single one of your fellow employees and every single one of your clients, but you need to be able to get along and in sync with the vast majority of them. And some people I don’t think are geared to be in the service industry, because they’re much better to work for one client, one boss, one task at a time.”

Separately, the powers-that-be on Wall Street may have been losing patience waiting for President Trump to fulfill his promise to “do a big number” on the Dodd-Frank Act, but slightly more than six months into his administration, regulators are preparing to ease a wide range of rules.

Trump is struggling to advance his legislative agenda in Congress. However, his administration has begun laying the groundwork to change some of the many rules that Wall Street wants to be watered down or overturned.

Financial deregulation efforts to roll back rules governing trading desks, bank boardrooms, corporations’ financial disclosures and more are gaining steam, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Multiple agencies are reviewing the Volcker rule that limits banks’ trading, while regulators recently dropped a plan to restrict bonuses on Wall Street that had been opposed by banks and brokerage firms. Further, the Labor Department on Wednesday disclosed an 18-month delay in the so-called fiduciary rule that requires brokers to act in clients’ best interests when they handle retirement accounts.

“It is a time to…determine where the pendulum has gone too far,” said Craig Phillips, counselor to U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a former investment banker and senior executive at BlackRock.

Meanwhile:

Many traders are taking vacation this month, and after a prolonged period of calm, drama is hitting the markets. (Bloomberg)

Democratic lawmakers have renewed their effort to get a powerful House Republican to investigate Deutsche Bank’s loans to Trump and the bank’s role in helping Russians move billions of dollars from Moscow to the west. (Bloomberg)

Barclays has hired Stephen Dainton, a former Credit Suisse executive, as global head of equities. (Financial News)

UBS lured David Chin out of retirement to run its investment bank in Asia after various defections of China-focused bankers. (Bloomberg)

J.P. Morgan will charge as little as $10k a year for equity research, the lowest price to emerge so far. (Bloomberg)

The City of London is going to suffer with or without a Brexit transition deal. (Business Insider)

Investment bank Gleacher Shacklock blamed the Brexit vote for a deals drought that has more than halved its profits and caused revenues to fall 37%, leading smaller bonuses for staff. (The Times)

A Wall Street analyst’s hot mic snafu had bankers listening in to Snap’s Q2 earnings call in stitches. (Business Insider)

One of the highest-paying jobs in regulating Wall Street is about to be open – and the boss is taking applications for the chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which oversees the country’s largest accounting firms and their audits of public companies and broker-dealers. (WSJ)

Brevan Howard Asset Management is preparing new liquid quant hedge fund offerings based in the U.S. (HFMWeek)

A banker is playing an increasingly powerful role in the HBO fantasy-drama “Game of Thrones.” (MarketWatch)

Should public schools teach all children how to code? (Bloomberg)

Commuting to and from New York City via helicopter was popular 50 years ago, and now it’s making a comeback. (Bloomberg)

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One of the top debt capital markets bankers at HSBC, who has held senior investment banking roles across London and New York, has become the latest senior financier to leave a big firm to go it alone.

Ben Katz, who was head of DCM for the financial institutions group for the U.S. and co-head of HSBC’s financing solutions group for the Americas, left in February this year and has decided to launch his own advisory firm. Katz Capital Advisory LLC was launched earlier this month, and was registered with the NYS Department of State in late July.

Katz spent close to seven years at HSBC in New York, having joined from Deutsche Bank in London where he was a managing director. However, he spent just nine months at Deutsche before jumping to HSBC in August 2010. Before this, he was managing director at Lehman Brothers in London for over 13 years until his departure in December 2009.

This is a big trend for 2017 – senior investment bankers are setting up shop alone, rather than joining another large investment bank. HSBC, which said in January that it was cutting 100 senior investment banking jobs, has seen various senior investment bankers depart for their own ventures.

James Simpson, the former co-head of advisory for EMEA at HSBC, teamed up with Matteo Canonaco, the former head of financial sponsors, sovereign wealth funds and IPC coverage at the bank, to launch a private equity boutique called DuCanon Capital Partners.

Meanwhile, Ben Leonard, co-head of UK FIG banking at HSBC, left earlier this year. He has just launched a fintech firm called META, which looks to bridge the gap between technology firms and financial institutions.

Outside of HSBC, Nick Hassall, who was head of consumer investment banking at UBS, has started venture capital firm Sequor Partners Limited, and Tahir Ali Wahid, who was a managing director and head of European banks and credit solutions coverage sales at Credit Suisse in London until December last year, has launched an advisory boutique called SSP (Strategic Solutions Partnership) Global.

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It wasn’t the greatest precedent to set. Alex, a third-year associate working on a FIG investment banking team in London, had just seen her notoriously hard-driving managing director go on maternity leave. Three weeks later she was back at work.

“What does this say to everyone else? You can’t have children if you want to make it to the senior ranks?,” says Alex. “I’m about to get married, we’re planning children – three weeks’ maternity leave is a terrifying prospect.”

Investment banking demands hard work. You need to clock over 70 hours a week or you’re not even in the game. But what you’re working for a real slave-driver – someone who never switches off?

“I worked with one executive whose badge of honour was that he had only taken two weeks of holiday in 9 years,” says Graham Ward, the former head of European equities at Goldman Sachs and now adjunct professor of leadership at INSEAD. “His marriage was broken and he had no children. He worked weekends and had no hobbies. At 43 he was a very angry man, both to be around and with his life in general.”

One former associate at a boutique investment bank in the City says that his team was forced to take a conference call with their boss when they knew he was in the ‘cabinets’. Another says that an analyst was worked so hard that he was regularly found sleeping under his VPs’ desk, which was the warmest place in the office.

Adapt to survive

“Adapt and learn, or resist and disappear,” says Ziad Awad, a former MD at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who is now CEO of boutique Awad Capital. “Ultimately, most managing directors are expecting utter commitment from their juniors, because they show the same. Everything is a learning experience.”

In theory, juniors are relatively powerless to resist a workaholic boss – if they complain, there are plenty willing to take their place. The key is simply to be savvy with your workload.

“It’s difficult to avoid weekend work you could not expect and that is time-sensitive,” says Marc Hatz, an ex-Goldman Sachs and Perella Weinberg associate who now offers advice on preparing for investment banking interviews. “But on the projects you already work on always think time-management.”

There will always be work that will drop in your desk unexpectedly, but the key outside of this is to work as efficiently as possible, he says. If you’re an analyst, always make sure that you prioritise workload with your ‘staffer’ – the associate managing you.

“Discuss the possibilities on projects you know you will realistically not be able to deliver on given your outstanding workload,” says Hatz. “Ask your staffer which project should be given the priority.”

Ward says that the key for juniors is to “deliver above expectations and then push back hard if more demands are made”.

“The best juniors are the ones that can work efficiently, it’s the only way to keep your workload in check,” says Awad. “Take financial modeling – banks will teach you a certain amount on Excel, but the top analysts spend the time working out all the shortcuts. A lot of people spend hours trudging through when they could spend one hour researching the best method.”

Ultimately, if the cause of the team’s anxiety is the senior managing director, it shouldn’t be the junior’s task to push back – use the hierarchy. “Always speak with your colleagues about your workload and ability to deliver,” advises Hatz.

Sitting it out

The most common way to handle these bosses, however, is to simply to sit it out – market dynamics have a way of sifting bad managers out of the organization, suggests Ward.

“His lack of perspective got him into trouble in the end,” says Ward of the workaholic boss. “He was unable to retain his best people, he was temperamental due to lack of sleep, and at scale he could not deliver. If he had not been fired, he would have been the richest man in the graveyard.”

Chris Roebuck, the former head of HR at UBS investment bank and now visiting professor of transformational leadership at Cass Business School, says there’s a generational shift – albeit a subtle one – and financial services organisations are conscious of missing out on young talent.

“I’ve known of people turning down jobs at Goldman Sachs because they didn’t want to be on call 24/7. Others have chosen other industries entirely because of the reputation for extreme hours in finance,” he says.

Roebuck says that when he was at UBS there was an HR issue when a managing director in his 40s refused to break his holiday for the third year running at the behest of a divisional chief executive in his 60s. “He said that he didn’t sign up for this, which was mystifying for a person of the previous generation,” he says. “Now, the younger generation want greater work-life balance – banks have to respond to this.”

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I’m writing this diary on a Sunday evening, and the investment banking analyst managing me has just emailed. In theory, weekends are supposed to be our own, but it never works out that way. He wants a file and needs it tonight, and he also wants to check some of the work I’ve been doing that’s due early this week. Standard weekend hassle.

Essentially, this internship has made me realise that junior investment bankers are always on call, even if they’re not in the office. It’s not a vindictive attitude, it’s just the nature of the business. I haven’t left before midnight during this internship despite it being the supposedly ‘quiet’ month of August, but when I finally manage to exit the office, associates and VPs are usually still at their desks.

My theory is that investment banking is less of a career choice than it is a lifestyle choice. If you’re happy burning away long hours in the office, eating takeaway food every day, being on call every day and cancelling plans with your friends and family because of work commitments then – great! – it’s for you. If not, it’s unlikely that you’re going to stick it out for very long.

I’m already seeing this among the summer analyst class this year. People are either super-determined to get a full-time offer, or they’re quickly losing enthusiasm. There are interns in my class who began the summer convinced that they wanted to be a banker, but after a few weeks of working the brutal reality they’ve realised it’s not for them.

Not that they’ve voiced these concerns to many people in the office. Right now, there are rumours that the headcount within the team is strained and that the number of full-time offers is likely to be limited. I’ve said previously that a lot of U.S. investment banks deliberately hire too many interns and pit them against one another. It’s less gladiatorial here, but now that everyone thinks there are fewer opportunities some interns have started showing their competitive side and it’s not a particularly pleasant sight.

For me, I’m more determined than ever to end the internship with an offer. I’ve worked hard, and I’ve enjoyed even the more tedious aspects of the work. I started out as a bit of an Excel and Powerpoint luddite, but I’ve learned all the shortcuts necessary to ensure that I’m not spending every waking hour in the office. It’s a lot quieter here, so we’ve been doing a lot of analysis work – it’s not exciting, but it’s a good learning experience.

A lot of interns have been invited to networking “social events” at other banks in London. In a way, this is hedging your bets slightly, because it allows you to meet senior bankers at other firms and potentially unlock another opportunity. For me, I haven’t had any time to attend these events because I’m in the office. Time to knuckle down and secure the offer here.

James Roberts, an pseudonym, is a summer intern on an M&A desk at a bulge bracket bank in London. He’ll be writing about his experience here.

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Before you meet a hiring manager, the chances are you will be contacting a recruiter. And before you meet a recruiter you’ll have an email exchange and telephone conversation. Don’t fall at the first hurdle – avoid these mistakes.

1. Mistakes, unacceptable mistakes

Never make grammatical or spelling errors. This applies equally to cover letters and emails as it does to resumes. Proofread your emails multiple times before hitting send, and be careful when you’re talking on the phone to avoid slang and a too-casual tone. In either case, misspelled words and grammatical errors will be perceived as a black mark.

“I’ve seen people have callbacks rescinded because their thank-you emails have been so bad or featured typos,” said Janet Raiffa, career coach, the former head of campus recruiting at Goldman Sachs and the former associate director of the Career Management Center at Columbia Business School. “The legendary case is the spell-check error where a student meant to write about being excited about the possibility of working for Goldman Sachs and ended up with ‘Goldman sucks.’”

2. Bro-dude chatter

Some recruiters are more casual than others and try to build a rapport with candidates by acting in a buddy-buddy manner and even cracking jokes. While it’s OK to adjust to the signals you’re getting and loosen up a bit, precision of language is paramount regardless of how well you seem to be getting on with the person who controls the hiring decision.

As the recruitment process plays out, candidates tend to let their guard down, according to Christian Novissimo is the managing partner of the accounting and finance practice at Lucas Group.

“Some start to build a rapport and all formality goes out the window,” he said. “Over the phone, be sure to use a proper greeting that’s not too informal, and pay close attention to the introduction and sign-off of your emails.

“A lot of people become informal and call people dude or bro, which is inappropriate. Save that for after you get the job and you’re closer to people, and always use proper grammar.”

3. Getting lost in translation

For international students whose spoken English is better than their written English, they should ask a native speaker to check their email before sending it along to the prospective employer.

“I have also seen students have callbacks rescinded or not gotten offers because interview follow-up has made employers nervous about their lack of fluency,” Raiffa said.

4. Being a complete pest

Sending annoying emails and even stalking employers are other problems that are more common than you might think.

“Do not send an email to 50 bankers at the same firm asking for a job or an informational [interview],” Raiffa said. “That email may end up being forwarded by a partner to a recruiter, who will think it is an important referral, and then get upset when he or she discovers it was a mass-email.

“Limit yourself to a small group of people and then work to get referrals from them,” she said. “And if you don’t hear back right away, don’t follow up too soon or too often. Nobody likes stalkers.”

5. Going AWOL

Don’t reach out to a hiring manager or recruiter only to go AWOL after they respond, whatever the reason.

“If you get an email with a request to do something and it may take you time to do it, acknowledge receipt of the email, and let them know that you’re working on it,” Novissimo said. “If you got it and are working on it but they don’t hear back from you, they might think you didn’t get it or are ignoring them.”

6. Being a multitasker

Your communication style can support or sink your candidacy, said Amy Adler, a career coach at Five Strengths. Multitasking is a no-no.

“Don’t answer your phone [when the recruiter or hiring manager calls] if you are truly unavailable,” Adler said. “Hiring managers or HR executives who want to hire you will leave a voice mail, and it’s better for you to collect yourself and find a quiet place to return a call than to accept a call in the middle of a busy restaurant.”

7. Embracing technology, or shouting

With the technology that is available to us today, you may be tempted to respond to a recruiter or hiring manager using a mobile phone or tablet rather than a laptop or PC. Proceed with caution.

“You should always take the time to sit down in front of a computer and craft a well-thought-out email during the application process,” Novissimo said. “It’s not necessarily that you can’t send emails from a mobile device, but just because it says ‘Sent from my iPhone’ don’t think you can send an email with bad grammar, improper punctuation and typos.”

Whenever you take a call, find a place where it’s quiet.

“You always want to speak slowly and clearly, especially if you’re speaking to someone who isn’t in your field,” Novissimo said. “For example, if you’re talking to an HR person, don’t use finance terms that will be over their head. Speaking clearly and not too quickly is a critical part of an initial phone interview.”

8. Lying by omission

From the beginning of engaging with a recruiter, be honest and open about your situation, including the status of your relationship with your current or most-recent employer, as well as salary information. Concealing red flags or the fact that you’ve already applied to the firm are big no-nos and will ultimately undermine your relationship with the recruiter.

9. Being cocky or stretching the truth

If there was a particular deal that you were a part of and you list on your resume, it’s natural to want to make yourself sound good. However, if you claim an important role in a transaction but can’t talk through the strategy or many specifics, then you will be found out in the phone screening or in-person interview – if you do eventually make it that far. Recruiters serious about hiring a candidate will always do a thorough background check that will expose any egregious truth-stretching.

10. Slacking off at work

Assume that your current firm is monitoring your call activity and email account.

“It should go without saying, but don’t use your current employer’s phone or email to call back or respond to a message,” Adler said.

At the same time, don’t use the wildman69@hotmail.com or hippiechick420@yahoo.com email address that you’ve had since high school, either.

“Have an email address that is proper,” Novissimo said. “A lot of us in our personal lives are goofy clowns with weird email addresses, but when you’re applying to jobs or responding to a recruiter, use an email address that includes your first name and last name or your first initial and last name, making sure that it’s vanilla and generic.’

11. Putting a hiring manager on hold

It’s important to never cut people off when they’re speaking, but it’s equally important to not put a recruiter or hiring manager on hold if you have a scheduled call.

“I don’t care if it’s a million-dollar deal – if your call is scheduled, dedicate that time to the person you’re talking to,” Novissimo said.
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Fintech is not for everyone. Six months after quitting his trading job at Morgan Stanley to launch a financial technology start-up, Jonathan Birnbaum has returned to finance by taking a role at Bridgewater Associates.

Birnbaum is now head of fixed income trading execution at Bridgewater Associates, having quit his role as COO of Morgan Stanley’s U.S. credit trading group in January to get two fintech firms off the ground.

He was singled out as one of the hottest young talents at Morgan Stanley by Forbes magazine last year, making into 2016’s 30 under 30 in finance list. Birnbaum was a VP at the bank, but still led a team of 100 people across investment grade, high yield and distressed debt trading, all at the tender age of 29.

Despite this fecundity of responsibility, Birnbaum left Morgan Stanley in January to launch the Vistia Group, a fintech platform that allowed homeowners to share equity in their property with investors. He also founded Crumb, a social payments app. He has since left both firms and returned to the financial sector.

Birnbaum is an example of the tech-savvy millennial traders that investment banks are attempting to keep hold of as they juniorise their trading floors. Before his last role at Morgan Stanley, he worked as an emerging markets trader and later moved across to an electronic trading role, working on technology projects to improve its platform and workflow.

He completed an MBA at Columbia Business School, which may have prompted his move into entrepreneurship.

Birnbaum was named by Forbes alongside some other fast-tracked young traders like Darren Dixon, the 29-year-old Goldman Sachs managing director who focused on Latin America credit trading. Other Goldman traders to move up the ranks quickly include Dan Avery, a 28-year-old index trader and Sam Berberian, a high yield credit trader, both of whom were promoted to managing director last year.

Birnbaum replaces Tom Zychinski at Bridgewater. The former head of fixed income trade execution at Bridgewater Associates joined Citadel in June as head of portfolio analytics and monitoring within its equity quantitative research function.

High profile hedge funds have proven to be alluring landing spots for young traders on Forbes’ list. Jonathan Bensoussan, who worked on BlackRock’s credit enhanced strategies team in Europe and was also named on the 30 under 30 in finance list, left in April to joined Steve Cohen’s family office Point72 Asset Management.

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The City job market is always a ghost town in the summer, but Brexit has ensured that fewer people are on the hunt for a new role and that the UK is “haemorrhaging” talent from its financial sector.

There were over 4,000 fewer people chasing a new job in the City last month compared to 2016, according to recruiters Morgan McKinley, even if the job market is holding up during the summer. It says that there were 7,080 jobs available last month, which is flat on June but 900 fewer than the same point in 2016. Just 9,187 people applied for them – a 33% drop on last year.

“Normally the City clocks out for July, but with the industry being swept from under them, people are scrambling to make the most of the time left in the EU,” said Hakan Enver, operations director at Morgan McKinley Financial Services.

Enver believes that a large proportion of those seeking jobs during the summer are EU nationals trying to secure employment before the UK potentially ends the freedom of movement in March 2019. “EU nationals who want to stay in Britain have a shrinking window of opportunity to get a job and permanent residency, and many are seizing it,” he said.

Not all of them, by any means. “The City is still haemorrhaging talent because of Brexit, and we risk losing jobs, too,” said Enver. “Employers and employees used to talk about ‘if’ they had to leave London. Now they’re talking about ‘when’ they leave London.”

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Interviews for relationship manager jobs in corporate banking can be daunting experiences. Get set to be grilled about every aspect of your client relationships, especially how you interact with them and make money from them.

But exactly what interview questions should you expect? Here are 15 that are almost certain to be coming your way.

1. What big names have you brought to your bank?

This is your chance to show off. “If an interviewer is looking for a UK industrials relationship manager, for example, they will want to see that you’ve attracted important names in that space for your current bank,” says an in-house recruiter at a corporate bank in London. “They will be looking to see if you can confidently say ‘yes, I brought in Imperial Tobacco, Croda, Aggreko etc.”

2. How did you win these clients over your competitors?

“The interviewer wants reassurance that you can accomplish the job, so impress them with your track record of success,” says the in-house recruiter. “They want to know how you won a client over competitor banks to see if it’s something you’ll be able to replicate with them. What skills and strengths of yours made this possible? Or did you just have a strong brand name and competitive pricing behind you?”

3. How much revenue did you generate last year?

You will probably be asked this question before you’ve even taken a seat in the interview room. “At this time of economic uncertainty, banks want to ensure they employ a productive RM who’s able to justify their investment,” says Maggie Li, a director at recruiters Executive Access in Hong Kong.

4. And what have you done to achieve your targets so far this year?

An obvious follow-up to the question above – banks want to know about your ongoing performance, not just your track record. “Be very specific on your monthly, quarterly and annual targets and show that you’re matching your bank’s goals,” says Ellen Lai, a manager at recruiters Michael Page. “But don’t just focus on your own billings – talk about clients who you helped to break in and projects you facilitated to maximise the bank’s revenues. Banks are interested in your sales style.”

5. Would you consider yourself a hunter or a farmer?

Unless the job description suggests otherwise, you are advised to describe yourself as a hunter – someone with strong sales skills – rather than a farmer, who merely manages accounts. Say something alone these lines: “I have an independent portfolio of clients that I grew from 10 to 30 in a span of just one year, so I would definitely consider myself a hunter as my strength lies in originating new deals.”

6. How do you build strong relationships with clients?

Hunters and farmers alike need to have a good answer to this question. “Show how you take time to learn everything there is to know about a client and their business needs,” says Nicola McGuane, a consultant at recruiters Morgan McKinley in London. “RMs with the strongest relationships will go the extra mile and also take an interest in clients’ families and their personal interests. Prove how you’ve exceeded expectations to build trust and gain long-term commitment.”

7. Tell us about a key role you’ve played in a major transaction

Interviewers don’t just want to know that you’ve brought big clients to your bank, they want details of the deals you’ve done with them in the meantime. “This question is to see if your can back up your list of clients with real transactions, ideally ones that are well known in the market,” says the in-house recruiter.

8. How strong are your credit skills?

Some RMs jobs require writing your own credit proposals, while in others you will be fully supported. Either way, make sure you can talk in detail about your credit-assessment ability, says Jasmine Tan, an associate director at recruiters Kerry Consulting in Singapore. For example: “During my early career I worked as a credit analyst for three years supporting RMs to write credit papers. This gave me 360-degree knowledge into credit processing and onboarding.”

9. How have ever you managed an entire mandate?

Interviewers will be impressed if you’ve taken a corporate-banking deal from origination to revenue conversion, so come armed with examples. You need to talk through the process step-by-step, explaining how you first listened to the client’s challenges, proposed potential solutions, implemented them and then followed up with the client.

10. How many clients can you bring to us?

Banks obviously like to hire RMs who can transfer some of their portfolio, so emphasise the strength and length of your relationships as evidence that your clients would be happy moving with you. For example: “I’ve worked with mid-tier energy-commodity companies since the start of my career and have an independent book of 20 legacy clients. So yes, I do have a transferable portfolio.”

11. What is the turnover and size of the companies that you cover?

You should answer in detail about the turnover size of your clients. For example: “I cover a range of corporates in the mid-markets segment that typically have a turnover of $100m to $300m.”

12. And what industries and geographies do you cover?

“Banks always need to ensure that your client segments align with their own business objectives,” says Lai from Michael Page. Make sure you focus on clients and markets that are similar to those covered by the new bank.

13. How would you advise your clients about dealing with falling oil prices?

Not all the questions in a corporate banking job interview will be about revenue and relationships – some, like this one, are designed to test your market knowledge and therefore your ability to advise. Your answer should show that you understand your clients’ challenges and how a new regulation or market trend, for example, will impact their business now and in the future, says Norman Leung, a vice president at recruiters Charterhouse in Singapore.

14. What kind of products do you sell?

Even if you have brilliant all-around product knowledge, you need to focus your answer on products that the new bank specialises. “RMs from different disciplines have various product areas that require unique skill sets,” says Li from Randstad. “RMs in SME banking are more focused on vanilla products like deposits, trade finance, insurance and investment products, while those with global clients have more experience with structured products and strategic deals.”

15. How do you probe your clients to understand their product needs?

“You should talk about your soft skills – your capability to listen and ask relevant questions,” says Leung. “And give specific examples, without divulging client names or confidential info – show how your dialogue came to a fruitful conclusion and how you closed the deal, enhanced revenues and benefited the client and the bank.”

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What type of bankers make a success of moving from bulge brackets to boutiques? Ken Moelis is in no doubt, at least when it comes to hiring senior staff for his eponymous firm.

The key, says the Moelis & Co founder, is to have a fancy title at a large investment bank and have the mettle to give it up.

“The people who chose to leave their title — most of the people at our firm were heads of their groups, really accomplished — I give a lot of credit,” Moelis told Financial News. “They’re confident enough to take that journey and leave being the co-head of the Americas for some bank that gets you into the right country club.”

Moelis would appear to be channelling the industry zeitgeist right now. Scores of investment bankers on both sides of the Atlantic have shifted to or set up boutiques this year.

But Moelis isn’t buying this. He believes that, as a rule, bankers remain reluctant to give up the trappings of big firms. The people he hires are the outliers, who don’t care so much about their job titles. “I have many bankers say ‘Why would I do this? I’m the head of-’ and then they give me a title. What’s amazing to me is how many people get wrapped up in a title and forget to have a career.”

Separately, Wall Street is currently beating Silicon Valley on the gender diversity front – just. Female employees are actually in the majority at three of the largest US banks, reports Quartz. That places them far ahead of all the major tech firms – at Google and Microsoft only 29% and 25% of the workforce respectively are women.

The catch? The banks with the highest proportion of women – Bank of America, J.P. Morgan and Citigroup – are all big players in US retail banking, a sector in which female representation has traditionally been high. At Goldman Sachs, a firm more purely focused on investment banking, just 37% of staff are women.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEO), which collates companies’ diversity numbers, puts traders and investment bankers into its ‘professional’ category. And in banking most of these professionals are men. Which jobs do women dominate in banking? They fall under the so-called ‘other’ designation, which includes bank tellers, sales representatives, personal assistants, secretaries, and administrative support workers.

Meanwhile:

Keep it simple. Don’t pay bankers any bonuses. (Financial Times)

Convicted ex-Barclays Libor trader Jonathan Mathew asks for his case to be reviewed. (Bloomberg)

Standard Life Aberdeen co-chief executives want to stay in their jobs…for 10 years. (Financial News)

Volatility vigilante “50 Cent” made $21m on Thursday. (Business Insider)

HSBC UK names new chief officers for finance and risk. (Reuters)

HSBC tries to make operations jobs less boring. (Finextra)

Lazard hires Jerry Wiant as a managing director in financial advisory. (Business Wire)

Will MiFID II spell the end of the morning note? (Bloomberg)

Lloyds is to expand in wealth management. (Money Marketing)

GIC has appointed its first chief technology officer. (Straits Times)

KKR is growing in China. (Finews)

The courses that might get you a job in fintech. (City AM)

How J.P. Morgan saved Wall Street. (Daily News)

The algorithm that works out how your CEO really got fired. (WSJ)

How business class just got better. (WSJ)

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Senior investment bankers and managing directors within firms’ markets functions are increasingly deciding to go it alone. After decades of experience working for a bulge bracket bank, many are deciding it’s better to be their own boss.

The latest examples come out of Barclays and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Abhinav Shah, a managing director at Barclays in London, has just launched an event-driven value investment fund called Rosevine Capital, according to his public profile. He spent the last 13 years at Barclays, having joined from Societe Generale in 2004.

Meanwhile, Richie Revill, a managing director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has launched Sherwood Forest Capital Partners, according to new filings on Companies House. Revill worked at BAML in London for over seven years, as a senior distressed credit professional. He joined the bank in June 2010 from Barclays where he was an executive director in distressed credit, but has also worked in leveraged finance roles at both Lehman Brothers and Citigroup. Revill was also head of leveraged credit research at J.P. Morgan in London in the late-1990s.

Both men are tapping into the current trend for senior investment banking professionals in both London and New York to escape big firms for their own boutiques. Despite the difficult operating environment for hedge funds, many MDs in banks’ markets divisions or senior buy-side professionals are launching their own firms.

David Perez, a former Goldman Sachs managing director who moved to expansionary hedge fund MKP Capital Management, recently launched an alternative lending platform called YAD Capital. Maxime Kahn, the former star SocGen trader who unwound €70bn worth of Jerome Kerviel’s trades in 2008, left the bank in November and unveiled his new hedge fund, One Eleven Capital, in July. Meanwhile, Kevin Flaherty, the former head of structured product syndicate for Europe, Asia and Australia at Deutsche Bank, launched a new fund called Neptune Capital a few weeks ago.

Stephen Yang, a former portfolio manager at Man Group/GLG launched his own long/short equity hedge fund Curam Capital Management in the middle of last year and has just started hiring. He brought in Robert Walker, an M&A analyst working at HSBC in London.

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In July last year, after more than 22 years in investment banking, Deutsche Bank’s global head of equity trading, Andre Crawford Brunt, decided it was time to get “intellectually honest” with himself. This meant leaving the industry.

Crawford Brunt started out as an open outcry trader at Deutsche Bank in South Africa 1994, and has since spent his entire career at the bank in senior roles across London and New York. Over the years, he managed to survive and thrive in a sector of investment banking that has become almost entirely electronic. He has, he admits, “been blessed with a long and fruitful career”.

“But If I was intellectually honest with myself, the challenge was no longer there. Banks were being disrupted and were, in my view, far more likely to defend the status quo than ‘drain the swamp’,” he says.

Investment banks’ equities desks in particular have been decimated over the past few years. Goldman Sachs said earlier this year that it had 600 equities traders in 2000, and now has two people supported by a team of programmers. Even this year, banks are still chipping away at their equities teams – Deutsche Bank said in February it was cutting another 17% of its equities staff globally. Electronification of equities is not the only issue, however, says Crawford Brunt.

“Banks are under huge pressure in their equities business – the starting cost bases are too high, technology continues to compress commissions, equity research is being democratized, there’s less capital commitment and banks proprietary businesses have been closed,” he says.

“Add in a complex regulatory environment and a proliferation of new players and it’s increasingly difficult. The real challenge is an exercise in cost reduction and efficiency, which flies in the face of any ambitious banker whose mantra would be investment, growth and building a power base,” he adds.

Crawford Brunt has been lucky, he says, to live through one of the most interesting times in investment banking. But banking careers are not what they were. Investment banking is no longer at the forefront of innovation, and high-ranking financiers hanging on to the glory days should think about doing something more dynamic, he says.

“Without being disingenuous, there are some very average people – of which I would class myself as one – working in the financial sector who have done very well thanks to a rising tide and being in the right place at the right time,” he says. “Being able to apply what you’ve learned in the wider world without the corporate safety net is a scary prospect for a lot of people. So, while a lot of senior bankers want to move, not all of them can or do.”

Crawford Brunt now simply describes himself as an ‘investor’. He’s committing personal capital to projects and companies that he believes are likely to change the status quo. Some of this is technology – he pumped $2.9m into a New Zealand-based tech start-up MyWave, for example – but he says he’s just looking for “investments that interest me”.

“I’m now pursuing investments that interest me, sometimes just committing capital or offering advice where I can,” he says. “The worst thing that can happen is that I’ll write a cheque, meet some interesting people and lose my money. If it goes well, I learn a lot, end up making significant returns and hopefully make a positive impact on the world as well as having some fun.”

Crawford Brunt is a board member of a South African firm that tests embryos for genetic abnormalities, called Genesis Genetics. He’s also chair of an Oxford University-based spinout focused on the blood diagnostics sector (“or, as I call it, the Theranos that works”) and has funded Deep Science Ventures – a programme that brings together scientists, experts and investors to get new science-based ventures off the ground.

If this seems a far cry away from the trading floor, he tells us that investment banking has helped open up doors for potential investments.

“Being in investment banking over the last two decades has enabled me to travel, meet some very dynamic and interesting people around the world, some of whom I have ended up investing in,” he says.

Crawford Brunt says that the idea of sticking around in a senior high-paying investment banking job now is a missed opportunity.

“For me, working in investment banking and earning 10% less every year was not a motivating prospect,” he says. “Right now, it’s the easiest period to get a business off the ground – capital, both financial and intellectual, is abundant and technology continues to impact and disrupt many businesses, it’s an exciting time to get involved.”

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Barclays is going through something of a renaissance. Dealogic’s recent first half review for M&A and capital markets activity in the Americas shows the British bank coming sixth behind several U.S. banks but ahead of its European rivals for investment banking fees for the first half of this year. Like most top investment banks, Barclays in the U.S. is inundated with applications for its summer internships. So important are internships to securing a full-time job that it receives 37 candidates for every available job. For the 400 roles available this year in the Americas, it got more than 15,000 applications – meaning you have a 2.67% chance of getting in.

The majority are based in New York, but Barclays also offers internships in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Menlo Park, Calif., as well as Toronto and Calgary in Canada. This year’s interns came from 80 different universities in 40 countries, but New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University are the top three.

We spoke to Margaret Copete, director and Americas head of campus talent acquisition and junior talent management at Barclays, about what to expect from an internship there.

What communication do you have with students between the time that they’ve accepted an offer and their start date?

Summer interns start at the beginning of June.

The campus recruiting process is starting earlier and earlier, especially on undergrad side. We used to meet students during their junior year, but that’s been migrating to the point that now we start talking to students when they’re freshmen. We get to know them very well from an early point in their college years.

Interns are connected to mentors at various levels, from analysts and associates to more senior people, to prepare them for the internship and hopefully a career at Barclays.

It’s critical to maintain that contact and communication between the time of accepting the offer and when they start, because it could be a several-month lag. Mentors make suggestions for what they should be reading and how to prepare so they are successful during the internship and beyond.

We also host office visits, and some businesspeople involved in recruiting will host dinners for students who they’ve recruited from their alma mater.

What can they expect during the first week or two?

We have a very robust training program, which we run organized by division. We take one approach for banking analysts and associates, a separate one for marketing and research, and so on – different streams depending on the department they’re in.

On day one, all interns attend an orientation. This includes a welcome from the recruiting team, an overview of all of the resources available to them such as mentors and employee networks, tell them what to expect and emphasize how we’re here to support them to be successful over the summer.

After the day-one overview, interns will participate in business skills training and technology training. For banking interns specifically, there is Excel and PowerPoint training, since those skills are critical to their success. Our markets and research program interns get financial markets training as a large component of their onboarding experience so that they’re ready to contribute once they hit the desk after training.

Our flagship summer intern event is held each year at the Barclays Center [in Brooklyn]. The event is held on the Barclays Center floor and features senior executives who come to meet with the interns, which has a big wow factor. It’s great for networking across the bank, and it’s one of the highlights of the summer.

What are the various factors on which interns will be evaluated over the course of the summer?

Our evaluations look at each individual’s skill set and test their ability to do the job at hand, as well as their presence, communication and teamwork.

The ability to network is also important, because we want them to build relationships across the firm and have people who are rooting for them at the end of the summer.

The review form is standard across all the divisions, with two additional components for technology and banking.

Our technology interns have an additional assessment around programming skills since that can be an element of the roles they are performing.

For our banking interns, we include questions on the proficiency of their modeling skills and whether they can turn comments quickly and accurately, since those are two critical components of the banking analyst role.

Approximately what percentage of summer interns typically get an offer?

For the last three years, our full-time offer rate to interns has been above 85% across our revenue-producing businesses. What’s more, over 90% of the interns who receive full-time offers accept that offer to come back after graduation. This shows that our interns have an excellent experience at Barclays, and each year they cite our open, supportive culture, challenging work and terrific colleagues as reasons why they are eager to join us full-time upon graduation.

We also have very passionate alumni and mentors who help us keep our acceptance rate high by developing great relationships with interns.

What are examples of interns who did not meet expectations and did not receive an offer?

There are a handful of interns every year who don’t get a full-time offer. Most of the issues stem from not knowing how to manage competing priorities. We let interns know that if they have an issue and don’t know how to handle it, then they should come to the recruiting team for guidance.

Occasionally an intern doesn’t feel like finance is the right fit for them, and we completely understand that – we want them to be excited about the opportunity.

What advice can you give to summer interns to help them make the most of their experience over the next few months and lay the foundation for a successful career in banking?

There are a couple of key things. They have to be good at communicating and willing to go the extra mile. When someone asks you do something, don’t just do A and B; figure out what C might be and do that too. Be proactive.

If they do hit a roadblock, they should ask for help and also ask a lot of questions. Nobody expects an intern to figure everything out, but some are nervous to ask questions – they may think they’ll look like they don’t know what they’re doing, but it’s very important to seek out guidance when necessary.

Immerse yourself in everything possible during your internship. We offer so many opportunities for networking and professional development, from on-site events and client events to training and courses. Make sure you’re getting the job done but doing those extra things as well.

For banking in particular, we really try hard to help students get a realistic picture of what the job will be, both the good and challenging aspects. Interns will be working on live deals and pitches – it’s real life, so to speak, and they like that experience. They know exactly what they’re getting into, and we can test them on their abilities in a tangible way.

Our sales and trading summer program is rotational in nature, so interns can rotate across products, for example, one in equities, the next in macro, the next in fixed income, so get to see all the different roles available across sales and trading. At the end of the summer, most will get a desk-specific offer so they know what they’ll be doing if they decide to join us.

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Lead photo credit: BananaStock/Thinkstock; image of Copete courtesy of Barclays
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The man leading Deutsche Bank’s technology functions for its corporate and investment bank has departed after three years at the bank.

Michael Grimaldi, Deutsche’s chief information officer for its corporate and investment bank, has resigned from its London operation. We understand that he is set to join J.P. Morgan, but this was not confirmed by the bank at the time of writing.

Grimaldi was part of the gravitation of Goldman Sachs technologists at Deutsche Bank that began three years ago as the German bank sought to develop a risk and pricing platform to work across asset classes to rival Goldman’s SecDB – its ‘secret sauce’ that helped it navigate the global financial crisis.

Grimaldi joined Deutsche in 2014 to lead technology for its investment bank. He had previously spent 21 years at Goldman Sachs, latterly as head of its securities and equity research technology functions. Around the same time, Richard Shannon, the former global head of platform services in Goldman’s securities division, joined as Deutsche’s Americas CIO, while Jim Adams, CIO for Goldman’s sales, research and securities data services team, came on board as chief technology officer for Deutsche’s markets business.

Goldman was Grimaldi’s first investment banking job – he joined in 1993 from GTE Government Systems, where he was a senior engineer.

Deutsche Bank confirmed his departure.

Grimaldi’s departure is the latest in a series of shake-ups to Deutsche Bank’s technology team in recent months. The bank, which is in the midst of a wide-ranging project to simplify its technology infrastructure, promoted Pascal Boillat to the newly-created role of group chief information officer. Deutsche has around 30,000 people in technology across the organisation. It also hired in Elly Hardwick as its new head of innovation in December last year.

Henry Ritchotte, the former chief digital officer at the bank, left last year after 22 years and is now funding fintech start-ups.

Lower down the hierarchy, Nick Doddy, who previously held the role of European managing director of group technology and operation strategy and innovation, joined Barclays earlier this month. Meanwhile, Dean Mazboudi, who led its innovation lab in New York, left in June for Bank of America.

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Hedge funds are quietly courting some of the top technologists and quants in Silicon Valley, offering them six-figure starting salaries â or million dollar packages â but they remain something of an enigma.

“An engineer at Google is one of 10k at the Mountain View office, and a lot of them are not going to get to work on the coolest stuff if they’re not the CTO or the head of a department,” says Andy Legg, a director and the head of quant tech data (QTD) at GQR Global Markets, a recruitment firm. “For the best graduates in the world applying to Silicon Valley firms, hedge funds are enigma – they don’t advertise, because they don’t want to give away the details of what they’re doing to competitors like a secret society, which is an appealing quality of hedge funds for graduates.”

Google has long been more successful at luring quants than hedge funds. Luke Ellis, CEO of Man Group which has been pushing into the quant space, said that the firm had hoovered up all the quant and data science talent. Hedge funds are starting to fight back, however. Right now, they are actively to hire candidates with artificial intelligence and machine learning experience from the likes of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, collectively known as FAANG, and luring them across with big pay packages.

Successful Ph.D. graduates can see around $150k their first year out of college, whereas experienced portfolio managers can see more than a million dollars with good performance, said Matthew Robert, senior consultant of quantitative research and trading at Selby Jennings. Fresh Ph.D. quantitative researcher candidates are getting $100k-$120k as their base salary with a discretionary bonus on top. Quantitative portfolio managers are seeing a base in the $200k range and approximately 10% of their P&L, the portfolio’s current value minus its previous value.

Hedge funds that employ systematic trading strategies such as AQR Capital Management, Point72 Asset Management, Bridgewater Associates, Two Sigma Investments and Citadel are always on the lookout for good quantitative research, data science and trading talent, including Ph.D.s and experienced Silicon Valley executives.

“Hedge funds can choose to pay people much higher bonuses,” says Roberts. “They can go to guys at Google with millions in equity, employee stock options, and say ‘We guarantee we’ll pay you X bonus regardless of how well the firm does. The buy side is more creative by nature, and they typically hire the best of the best from the sell side and now increasingly Silicon Valley too.”

Victor Tang, a senior associate of quantitative analytics and risk in the financial services practice at The Execu|Search Group, a recruitment firm, says most firms prefer candidates with a Ph.D. in statistics, mathematics or computer science with experience working in C++ and Python programming languages.

Hedge funds will also hire candidates right after graduation. Tang said Two Sigma recently hired a candidate with a Ph.D. from Princeton and internships at Google and Apple at a hefty starting salary.

If a candidate’s got a Ph.D. in the right subject from Stanford, Caltech, MIT, NYU-Tandon or an Ivy League university and internships at Apple, Netflix, Google, Facebook or another Silicon Valley giant, then they will get an offer in the $350k range right off the bat, Tang says. With the right type of research, hedge funds will generally make a standard offer between $300k and $400k all in for recent Ph.D. graduates.

Quant hedge funds have been successful in hiring senior staff across from big tech firms in the past few months. Two Sigma, the hipster quant hedge fund that offers board games and a recording studio as a perk for its employees, made a big splash in 2015 when it hired Alfred Spector from Google as the Chief Technology Officer and head of the engineering organization.

Citadel in particular has been targeting these profiles in recently.

In the past couple of months the $150bn hedge fund has hired Li Deng as chief artificial intelligence officer from Microsoft, Laszlo Korsos, who recently left a senior position at troubled transportation and tech company Uber, where he worked on its famous surge-pricing algorithm, to join Citadel as a managing director and chief data officer in New York as well as a host of senior technologists from other banks and hedge funds.

But hiring senior technologists can be expensive and is not the most sustainable approach, so big quant funds are also trying to uncover talent by other means. Citadel is offering $25k prizes to students to compete in 18 ‘datathons’ aimed at uncovering the best student quants and Two Sigma partnered with data science platform Kaggle, offering $100k for the best machine learning algorithms – and raising their awareness of jobs in finance.

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Compliance professionals have been in high demand globally since the financial crisis. Despite the advance of regulatory technology, vacancies continue to open up as banks grapple with new regulations and try to avoid billion-dollar fines.

But more people are also entering the sector as compliance roles become more interesting and lucrative. If you’re applying for a job in compliance, getting your CV in shape is a crucial way to fend off the competition.

Here’s some expert advice on how to write the perfect compliance resume.

1. Don’t come across as a generalist

As compliance increasingly splinters off into different specialisms – from monitoring and surveillance to financial crime – it’s dangerous to write a one-size-fits-all resume. “A compliance CV that’s too generic risks being overlooked by a hiring manager, who wants specific details of sector coverage, jurisdictional exposure and longevity at top-tier banks,” says a London-based compliance recruiter. “If your CV focuses on the obvious and is too repetitive, you’ll come across as just another generalist.”

2. Add your IT skills to your compliance resume

“The addition of IT skills is now essential on a compliance CV,” says Leo Bellometti, a compliance consultant at recruitment agency Morgan McKinley. “The increase in specialised roles within compliance has also created a need for skills in specialised IT programmes, so highlighting these will benefit any application.”

3. Focus on regulatory relationships

“Employers are keen to see what and how much interaction you’ve had with the regulators, and how adept you are at interpreting and implementing current and upcoming regulations,” says James Findlay, a director at recruiters Selby Jennings.

4. Highlight your product knowledge

“Product-based compliance is becoming more prevalent as banks struggle to meet requirements laid out by new financial regulations,” says Findlay. “Listing your specific product knowledge pins you as a specialist in your field and allows you to have a greater shot at most front-office facing compliance roles, for example product-advisory compliance.”

5. STARS works well in compliance CVs

You can’t dazzle readers with your sales figures if you work in the middle office, so you need to carefully structure your achievements for each job. The STAR technique (situation, task, action, results), commonly used in job interview answers, works well in compliance CVs, says a middle-office recruiter at a global bank. For each achievement write one sentence on the ‘situation’ (i.e. the business need) and then add bullet points about the tasks you were accountable for and how you performed them. Finally, explain what you accomplished as a result – how you added value to your team and gained new skills.

6. Don’t clutter your CV with keywords

“I often receive CVs that have bullet point sections that just list a stream of compliance keywords without any context about how the candidate is skilled in those areas,” says Pathay Singh, managing director of recruitment agency Compliance Grid. “This makes it difficult for a bank to assess key competencies and can dilute the impact of your profile. You need to provide a narrative and examples to back up your skills.”

7. Don’t downplay your management skills

“One of the key areas that experienced compliance professionals consistently miss on their CVs is highlighting their management experience – this is one of the first questions that banks will enquire about,” says Singh. “You need to clearly state the number of direct reports you have as well as their level/titles. If you don’t have reports, provide examples of leading projects or contributing to leading the promotion of a ‘compliance culture’ throughout a business.”

8. Show how well you work with ‘the business’

As compliance policy becomes more critical to banks, jobs in the sector increasingly demand liaising with different departments and influencing their decision making. “Include details of your interaction with business stakeholders. You’re the contact between regulators and the bank, so effective communication is an essential soft skill,” says Orelia Chan, an associate director at Pure Search. Singh adds: “Clearly state which stakeholders you work with and how you’ve established strong relationships with them.”

9. Have the right hobbies

“Your ability to work with the business comes in many forms – these days the reader of your CV is even looking at your interests and hobbies for evidence,” says the in-house recruiter at the global bank. “Travelling, music and reading are unlikely to set you apart, but if you have interests that highlight competencies such as team work, competitiveness, dedication or networking, they will be worthwhile additions to your compliance resume.”

10. Be careful if you’ve changed jobs a lot

Ideally your compliance resume should be full of lengthy tenures, but if not you need to give legitimate reasons for leaving each role and make it obvious if some of your jobs were contract positions. “Retention is a major issue for compliance managers,” explains the in-house recruiter. “And if you’re a manager yourself, add a sentence about how you’ve attracted and retained staff – that could add enormously to the reader’s perception of you.”

11. Local regulations matter on your compliance CV

While the compliance world is still aflutter with Basel III, FATCA and other regulations with a global reach, most banks like resumes that show a strong understanding of local regulations. “As a lot of regulations differ across countries, so it’s important to state exactly how familiar you are with the domestic regulatory scene,” says Chan from Pure.

12. And so do qualifications

If you have a compliance-related qualification, include it in your summary section at the top of your CV, don’t just bury it at the bottom underneath your university degree. “Just like having a CFA is important in other areas of finance, having an ICA or specific anti-money laundering training will set you apart,” says Findlay from Selby Jennings.

13. The summary section is vital in compliance resumes

You can highlight your compliance specialism from the get-go by writing a summary of your skills and experience at the top of your CV. “Don’t leave employers in any doubt that your product or functional coverage matches that of the job description,” says the London recruiter.

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Citi’s Sanjeev Behl believes the banking sector is currently going through a transition phase in the types of talent it hires.

“As technology and digitisation have transformed the banking industry, the types of roles and talent we need will evolve as well. Some people in our industry are performing tasks that are below their real abilities – this means we’re not making full use of their skills, and this is a waste of valuable resources,” says Behl, Asia Pacific Head of Treasury and Trade Solutions Client Operations, and Global Head of Trade Operations at Citi.

But Behl says there are potential solutions to this emerging problem: robotics process automation (RPA) – with further enhancements in due course through artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning. There are other automation options that are coming up as well, which would support these simpler, more mechanical tasks to be performed by machines.

Citi is actively involved with multiple automation initiatives, including RPA/AI evaluation with its operations processes. Behl’s department, for example, has been working on robotic process automation and the initial stages of a few other AI initiatives. For example, one of the initiatives launched this year is a RPA pilot automating trade import payments in India and China which will help achieve a significant reduction in manual processes, resulting in a large improvement in basic-tasks turnaround time.

“The next frontier in driving operational efficiency is through these automation options, like RPA and at a later stage with machine learning. At Citi, we are increasingly using these to take on routine and manual tasks,” says Singapore-based Behl. “The jobs we have will require different skills as a result – they’ll be for the best of the best.”

“The effect of automation on jobs in the banking industry will only be positive. Gen Y and Z, in particular, don’t actually want to do the type of jobs that we want digitisation and automation to perform. They don’t think that manual transcribing of data from one source (paper or digital) into a system or application, for example, is exciting and they’d rather be working on something more innovative at Citi,” he says.

New skills learning and up-tiering current skill sets are important components of talent development. In some markets, governments are already putting initiatives in place to strengthen their workforce’s motivation to re-skill, upskill and acquire new skills. The Singapore government, for example, has an initiative that promotes the upgrading of skills and knowledge of its people, with the aim of building a more resilient workforce that can adapt as job roles and technology in the financial services industry evolve.

“So, while people’s jobs will change because of all the automation like robotics, that doesn’t mean an equal number of people will become redundant,” says Behl. “As part of this transition, a number of jobs at Citi will move up the value chain as the bank continues to drive innovation – by which I mean become more interesting and important – especially those in design, development and in my area, operations delivery and service.”

“As an illustration, we’ll soon see new types of operations specialists, who will monitor the robots and ensure they are performing as they are designed to perform. I use the analogy of air traffic control – the technology keeps improving in that field, but you still need human controllers to keep a close watch on the radar screens and take vital decisions to ensure safety of all the planes in the sky,” says Behl.

“RPA/AI is still at the very initial stages of its evolution, and will need some time to mature as a fully commercialised tool/practice. The risk and controls around these technologies are in the process of being developed and tried, and hence Citi is highly focused on the required control steps and oversight functions integral to these processes, supported by the new technologies.”

Behl says there will also be increased demand in the near future for machine-focused change managers. “If you make a key change through an automation of a process you’ve developed, you need people to ensure that it always performs as expected and that contingency plans are in place, no matter which other elements in the wider ecosystem may go through their planned or unplanned changes,” he explains.

Such automated solutions can also have a positive effect on front-office roles in banking. “When I hear from the front-office about their challenges, they often relate to not having enough time to serve clients as they’d like,” says Behl. “With greater reliability and scalability, combined with faster turnaround times, automation frees up more time for our people to spend with clients.”

Behl says automated solutions, including RPA/AI, have the power to make all areas of the bank communicate more seamlessly and better with one another. This again helps improve the overall atmosphere in the organisation and support the key objective of a common purpose and goal to offer the best solutions to clients.

“Banks typically operate several large legacy platforms in each different business vertical. And after many years of separate development, it’s very complicated, time-consuming and expensive to build pipes connecting them all together into one cohesive IT system,” he says. “The advent of non-intrusive technologies helps us overcome these challenges.”

Citi may not be the only company striving to develop more innovative technology to help its employees and customers. But Behl says the working environment at Citi helps set it apart from both established tech giants striving to get into the banking domain as well as start-ups in the battle for talent.

“Compared to a small fintech company, we have a much broader client base – from financial institutions to mid- and large-sized companies – and a huge presence in global capital markets. And we have a very loyal and happy retail client base as well. So we truly know what a very wide and demanding market segment wants in terms of new innovations,” says Behl. “The banking industry is also heavily regulated, and that means that when we launch new initiatives, they have gone through stringent legal, compliance and risk reviews.”

Citi can also offer wider potential career opportunities than a tech company. “At Citi, for example, you could move from a coding job to become a project manager, operations or service specialist, or even a product or credit/relationship manager in our front-office,” he adds.

But Behl says Citi can’t be complacent with its innovation drive if it wants to keep on hiring and retaining the best people.

Image credit: Zapp2Photo, Getty

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1. Don’t come across as a generalist

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6. Don’t clutter your CV with keywords

7. Don’t downplay your management skills

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10. Be careful if you’ve changed jobs a lot

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