Morning Coffee: The ex-Citi banker poised to avenge himself at JPMorgan. Terrible times for M&A bankers

Maybe it's not personal. Maybe Anthony Diamandakis, Citi's former finest financial sponsors banker, got an offer he couldn't refuse from JPMorgan and decided to work there instead. But if he wants to become the nemesis of a former employer that irked him, 50 year-old Diamandakis - who Financial News reported yesterday is joining JPMorgan - will be in a good position to do so. 

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

As Citi seeks to grow its investment banking business under Vis Raghavan, the kinds of financial sponsors (private equity) clients Diamandakis specializes in, are a key focus. Sponsors account for a third of the global fee pool, observed Raghavan last month. But while Citi ranks around the top five for all investment banking fees, it's only ninth or 10th when it comes to financial sponsors and leveraged finance. 

Raghavan wants to remedy that. He will now be competing against Diamandakis as he attempts this. Ironically, Diamandakis is now at Raghavan's own former employer - JPMorgan - where he will be well-placed to thwart these efforts. Dealogic says JPMorgan ranks first globally for leveraged loans and around second globally for financial sponsors this year. Diamandakis has gone to the better bank.

Raghavan's arrival may be the reason Diamandakis left Citi in the first place. Diamandakis had spent a decade at the US bank, and seemed happy doing deals with the likes of Apollo there. Then Raghavan arrived and cast aspersions on the success of Citi's sponsors business, which he said was floundering partly due to low appetite for the risk of financing leveraged deals. Raghavan subsequently parachuted-in a new co-head of Citi sponsors banking in the form of Ashu Khullar, a former corporate banker from India, and Diamandakis decided to disappear six weeks later. Now he's back; Citi may regret seeing him go. 

Separately, these are not the finest times to be working in M&A. The Wall Street Journal reports that M&A deals are now at a 20-year low, at levels last seen in 2005.

The problems are legion: tariffs, geopolitical uncertainty, political uncertainty, high rates, and the emotional volatility of buyers and sellers amidst the volatility of everything else. "Emotion is driving a lot of this, it’s not logic,” Andrew Apfelberg, an M&A lawyer, tells the WSJ. 

However, it's not entirely illogical. “One day we have tariffs, the next day we don’t... Private equity funds, lenders, attorneys, accountants, pick whoever — you didn’t know how to evaluate a target company anymore,” Apfelberg also says of the decline. 

None of this seems good for M&A banking jobs, particularly at firms like Jefferies and Deutsche Bank, which stocked up on managing directors in the expectation of a deal resurgence. However, Jefferies this week said its advisory revenues in fact rose by 61% year-on-year in the second quarter due to market share gains. It may make sense to hire senior M&A bankers still. 

Meanwhile...

Barclays and UBS are also competing in leveraged finance. Barclays holds the fifth spot in the global leveraged finance revenues in the year to date. UBS is tenth, down from sixth this time last year. Barclays just poached Marc Warm, UBS’s global head of leveraged and debt capital markets, to be its global co-head of capital markets. (Financial News) 

Flavio Figueiredo says Citi's FX business is thriving under his leadership and has commissioned research to show it growing market share with hedge fund clients. “We’ve moved up in the ranks. When volatility hit, we brought the best of our firm to our clients, including increasingly active hedge funds.” (Bloomberg) 

Jane Street is going to Abu Dhabi. (Bloomberg) 

Jane Street is so addicted to OCaml that it's introduced a fork called OxCaml that makes it easier to use the language for very precise coding, where efficiency has high importance. If Jane Street didn't have OCaml it might have to impose non-competes on its staff. (Economist) 

RBC hired Tom Raynsford from HSBC as a managing director within its UK corporate broking business. (Financial News) 

Jes Staley's efforts at disproving his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein came to nothing. “In our view, the evidence that Mr. Staley had a close relationship with Mr. Epstein is overwhelming.” (Bloomberg) 

Students who use AI tools to complete assignments tend to do better on homework—but worse on tests. “They’re getting the right answers, but they’re not learning.” (WSJ)  

“We’re now seeing students sending 300 applications a year. Sometimes it’s 500 or even 1,000 applications from one student in one year. This wasn’t possible before AI, and it’s still accelerating.” (Derek Thompson) 

LLMs are dishonest and unpredictable and will threaten to kill themselves if they code badly. (Gary Marcus) 

Meta hired Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai from OpenAI’s Zurich office, according to people familiar with the matter. They set up OpenAI’s office in Zurich late last year and previously worked together at Google DeepMind. (WSJ)

A 35-year-old Boston fitness instructor has a hit Instagram account mocking private equity bros. "At every wedding I've been to over the last five years, I've been stuck with somebody talking at me about themselves...I'm a fitness instructor and I've never worked in finance, but I have an undergraduate business degree and a lot of my peers are in banking or finance." (Business Insider) 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  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 libellous (in which case it won’t.)