Morning Coffee: Hundreds of thousands of students stampede for jobs in banks. Citi may eliminate the head of its investment bank
Brilliant students wondering why they didn't receive a job offer from top investment banks, today have an answer why. - They were competing with a lot of other people, many of whom will have been equally lustrous candidates.
Financial News has elicited some figures for the number of graduate jobs available at leading investment banks, and the number of people who applied for them. Its findings are shown in the chart below.
The numbers in the chart aren't entirely comparable: some relate to graduate jobs alone, some to intern jobs alone, some are only the investment bank and some are only EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). But even in the best of cases (JPMorgan globally), they show tens of applicants chasing each job and in the very worst of cases (Bank of America globally), there are more than 100.
Financial News doesn't have applicants per job for Goldman Sachs, which it says hired 2,900 interns this year, of whom 360 were in EMEA. Nor does it have figures for Deutsche Bank, which once boasted that it had 110,000 applications from students, even in a year when it was cutting jobs.
Despite a difficult year for banks, Financial News says applications from students interested in banking jobs are rising: applications for jobs at JPMorgan's investment bank in Europe are up nearly a third this year. At the same time, some banks are pruning their recruits - Morgan Stanley, for example, hired 309 EMEA graduates this year, compared to 326 in 2022. What makes banking jobs so appealing? It might have something to do with difficult times at top technology firms, or maybe it's the lure of earning around £100k in banking in the first year out of university.
Separately, Jane Fraser was formerly a consultant at McKinsey & Co, and as CEO of Citi she's putting some of her learnings there into practice.
Following the apparently reluctant departure of Paco Ybarra, the head of Citi's investment bank, the Financial Times reports that Fraser is contemplating a restructuring which would do away with the need to replace by Ybarra by eliminating the job he did altogether.
Ybarra ran Citi's institutional clients group, which Fraser is reportedly thinking of splitting into three segments - investment and corporate banking, global markets, and transaction services - each of which would report to her.
While this sounds like good news for the segment heads, each of which will now report to the CEO rather than to an intermediary, it might be less good news for people working in functions supporting the institutional clients group as a whole. Who will they now report to? Will their divisions be fragmented? And what will become of the other management of the institutional clients group, whose services will presumably become superfluous?
Ultimately, it's a cost-cutting exercise. But it also looks like more work for Fraser herself.
Meanwhile...
Citadel is complaining that some of its employees who left for Balyasny misappropriated its confidential information. (Bloomberg)
Four portfolio managers exited Balyasny in early August: Neville Irani, Colin Kronewitter, Ben Shapiro, and Jason Temerowski. Some are said to be joining rival funds. (Business Insider)
Hedge fund investor Boaz Weinstein is leading a rival group of bidders that includes Bill Ackman and Marc Lasry to acquire Sculptor Capital Management. (WSJ)
Sculptor rejected the bid. (Bloomberg)
Goldman Sachs' top shareholders still like David Solomon and are saying things like “most of this stuff is unfair to what the reality is,” and “While David may be unpopular [among staff], he’s done a solid job as CEO for the shareholders." (Financial Times)
Glenn Fogel, chief executive of Booking.com, was once a banker at Morgan Stanley. He still gets up at 6am and watches Squawkbox on CNBC. (Financial Times)
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
