Morning Coffee: Vis Raghavan's latest ex-JPMorgan hire isn't like the others. Davos is making CEOs nervous about saying the wrong thing

It’s pretty uncommon, if by no means unknown, for people to have careers that go back and forth between advisory work at an investment bank, and management roles in the industries being advised.  Most commonly, you’ll see ambitious young executives shift from investor relations and corporate strategy jobs on the buy-side to middle-ranking positions in M&A or coverage teams, or senior bankers at MD level deciding that they want to take a chance building a company of their own rather than spending their time working on other folks’ deals.

What’s quite a lot more unusual is something like Alex Berkett’s career trajectory, which is now taking him to lead Citi’s media team reporting to Vis Raghavan via Dan Richards, the global head of media and communications.  Like many of Raghavan's recent hires, he's previously worked at JPMorgan; unlike many, he’s gone from banking, to industry and then back again.

If it hadn’t have been for the global financial crisis, Berkett might have had a more conventional career; he was at Bear Stearns for 11 years.  By the time that Bear got taken over by JP Morgan he had risen to the position of Managing Director; his social media suggests that he was given the title of “Executive Director” after the takeover, so it’s perhaps not surprising that less than a year later he went to FiveWire Media, an investment company (it would probably have been called a SPAC if it was launched ten years later) which had been launched by two private equity investors to make acquisitions of media businesses.

After that company made its deals and IPOed, in 2014 he went to a corporate strategy job at Viacom. After quite a lot of mergers and name changes, that company ended up being called Paramount Global, and after helping arrange its takeover by David Ellison’s investment company Skydance, Berkett left at the end of last year.  Now he’s back in banking.

This sort of career trajectory is often quite well respected by clients.  Although Berkett will have considerably fewer lucite tombstones in his office than someone who had been working in investment banking consistently for the last sixteen years, he has been on every side of the table you can think of – banker, client, investor and corporate executive.  Unlike people who have never worked outside banking, he can empathise with the people who will still have to live with the consequences of an M&A transaction long after the fees are banked and the celebration dinner digested.

Elsewhere, bankers are treading very carefully in Davos.  Not because it’s particularly icy underfoot – the pictures available suggest that you’d be fine in sensible footwear – but because the political climate seems to be more risky than usual.  Former Goldman Sachs banker and current Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a new “new world order”, UBS’s Sergio Ermotti has warned that selling off US assets would be a “risky bet” and in anticipation of President Trump’s imminent arrival, everyone is wondering what might happen next.

The representatives of global finance might be forgiven, therefore, for trying to keep a low profile, restricting their public statements to wondering about the future of AI or saying that Indonesia is at a crossroads.  But Larry Fink of BlackRock, at least, is flying the flag for globalism and the Davos Consensus. 

He’s delivered a classic of the “billionaires talk to millionaires about the working class” genre, telling the audience that capitalism isn’t working and that “wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain”. 

As the interim co-chair of the World Economic Forum (after the retirement of Klaus Schwab), Fink might feel obliged to continue the message of inclusive capitalism, but some might think that it all sounds unfashionably ESG-adjacent.

Meanwhile…

The anticipated gold rush in 2026 means that this is a good time to persuade bankers that they might gain from a rebalancing of their compensation between fixed and variable. The London offices of JP Morgan and Citi are having another look at “role based allowances”, which used to be used as balancing items to reconcile the global pay norms with the European bonus caps.  Sweetening the pill somewhat, a number of banks will also be rebalancing the overall compensation packages between long term equity-related units and immediately accessible cash. (Bloomberg)

Citi now has 4000 employees enrolled in its “Ai Champions and Accelerators” program, each devoting three to five hours a week to trying to persuade their colleagues to make more use of chatbots and similar tools. (Business Insider)

HSBC, on the other hand, is teaming up with a legal AI startup called Harvey, to help its in-house legal function do document reviews, contract analyses and compliance tasks a bit faster. (Financial News)

ABSA is building up its African investment banking business at the expense of local competitor Standard Bank. (Bloomberg)

While Houlihan Lokey is on the acqui-hire trail, buying Audere Partners in Paris, and the real estate capital advisory business of Melium Capital. (Financial News)

The Herbert Affordability Formula is a piece of real estate maths that’s meant to ensure that some of the space in your new urban development will be available for artists, giving the place an attractive and desirable bohemian vibe that will attract the bankers who make the overall project viable. (FT)

If the most reliable indicator of a bubble is “nearly all the Harvard MBA graduating class go into finance”, then we’re nowhere near one.  In fact, lots of newly minted graduates of elite business schools are finding it hard to get a job at all.  On would-be banker is now “considering luxury retail after spending some time in Paris”, the hardship is real. (WSJ)

Another former banker gives a view on the TV series “Industry”, adding to the consensus that it’s broadly realistic (enough to trigger some unpleasant memories), but that it’s more common to experience three or four of that kind of incident over the course of a whole career than half a dozen every week. (I News)

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