The best company culture in finance isn't at a bank
We’ve released our Ideal Employer report for 2025. It was based on the over 15,000 responses to our Ideal Employer survey, which ran between March and August of this year. As in previous years, we sought the best employers in financial services – not just the most popular.
Respondents to our survey were asked what to rate their favored employer out of ten for the following metrics, with their collective score naming them the Ideal Employer for culture & integrity:
- This company has exceptional colleagues.
- This company has great leadership.
- I would be proud to work for this company.
- This employer is a place for someone like me.
- This company is a place of integrity.
The 2025 Ideal Employer for culture & integrity is Millennium Management. This is the ideal employer that they believe cultivates the best company culture in the industry.
Millennium is one of the biggest multistrategy hedge funds in the world. Founded in 1989 by Izzy Englander, it has over $79bn in assets under management and over 6,300 employees globally.
Interestingly, hedge funds occupied our top three spots for culture this year. Millennium ranked ahead of rival funds D.E. Shaw and Renaissance Technologies in second and third place, respectively. This is the first time that Millennium has won our culture & integrity category, which was won by Emirati bank ADIB in 2024 and Royal Bank of Canada in 2023.
Millennium scored above average for all our culture statements. The firm said that its culture was “central” to how it pursues it attracts and retains its staff members. “We seek to foster collaboration and an entrepreneurial spirit, which enables employees to make meaningful contributions to the firm.”
Second-placed D.E Shaw scored particularly well for the quality of its leadership. Its founder, Dr. David Shaw, had an interesting career: after leaving academia to start D.E. Shaw in 1986, he left the fund again in 2001 to pursue a progress in “computational biochemistry”. He’s currently Chief Scientist of D.E. Shaw Research, a biochemistry research company.
Third-placed Renaissance Technologies (RenTech), a hedge fund, ranked particularly highly for the quality of its workforce. It is one of the most interesting firms on the list – two years ago, CEO Peter Brown said that the firm hires “mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists with no background in finance and no connections with Wall Street… The company was founded by scientists, is owned by scientists, is run by scientists.”
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