As Citi & JPMorgan swap staff, people are wondering who will be next

Summer is drawing to an end, but the propensity for Citi to hire from JPMorgan and for JPMorgan to also hire from Citi has no obvious conclusion. It is a roundabout that is still turning.

Last week's news that Robin Rousseau is leaving Citi for JPMorgan is the latest spin of the wheel. Rousseau was briefly the head of EMEA M&A at Citi before being 'promoted' to become the global chair of M&A after William Mansfield arrived from Deutsche Bank to take his old Citi job in June. Now Rousseau's off to be the vice chair of M&A at JPMorgan in EMEA instead. 

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Rousseau didn't respond to a request to comment for this article. His move might be taken as further evidence that being a chairman in M&A isn't as good as actually running the business. Or - given that he's going to be a vice chairman at JPMorgan - maybe he just wanted to work for JPMorgan instead. 

Rousseau may have left Citi, but Citi has also been poaching more managing directors (MDs) of its own from JPMorgan. And JPMorgan has, in turn, been attempting to prevent further departures by promoting the people it suspects Citi might like to pinch. There are unconfirmed suggestions that another swathe of JPMorgan equity capital markets (ECM) people will depart for Citi at the end of this year, when alleged non-solicitation agreements for Citi's recent JPMorgan hires, like Aloke Gupte, lapse. 

In the meantime, Citi has more than just JPMorgan as a repository of potential senior recruits. Deutsche Bank is also a target. This year, Citi has raided Deutsche Bank for Mansfield as co-head of EMEA, for Stuart Ord as head of UK M&A and for Henning Wagner as head of private client coverage in Frankfurt. 

The roundabout is likely to keep on turning. Vis Raghavan, whom Citi hired from JPMorgan in 2024 to run its investment bank, said in June that Citi employs 100 fewer investment banking MDs globally than its rivals and that he wants to increase Citi's MD numbers by 15%. Cassandra Verwey, who runs EMEA M&A for JPMorgan is also hiring after reportedly doubling JPMorgan's EMEA M&A team in the past two years. And, after JPMorgan hired tech banker Dan McDow from Citi last week, Dorothee Blessing, JPMorgan's co-global head of investment banking, declared that JPMorgan is still in the market for some more senior technology, healthcare and financial sponsors bankers of its own. 

JPMorgan may therefore yet lose people (like Ina De) to Citi. And Citi might lose people to JPMorgan. 

Those Citi people include M&A bankers in London. Citi's European M&A business is now run by Mansfield and Mansfield is thought to be working closely with Citi incumbent Matias Brechner, with whom he once worked at Credit Suisse. It's not clear how Edward Joudray feels about this. Citi hired Edward Joudray from Bank of America to be its co-head of European sellside M&A (with Brechner) only last October. If JPMorgan wants another experienced financial sponsors banker, Joudray fits that description. It probably helps that he began his career at JPMorgan in 2010 and is thought to be close to Alex Bruce, who runs JPMorgan's sponsors team in Europe.

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