Morning Coffee: Boutique bank Centerview Partners contemplates possible $10bn IPO. The earnest phrase that will get you hired
Welcome to 2025. After an extended period of seasonal sleeping and feasting, we are now resuming our normal schedule and peering once again into the corners of the hiring market.
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2025 is supposed to be - hopefully - the year when IPOs resume and financial services hiring goes wild, and boutique bank Centerview is doing its bit for the first of these things. The Wall Street Journal reports that "big investors" are interested in buying into Centerview and that the boutique is considering either selling a stake or an IPO. If it opts for an IPO, Centerview could be worth $10bn.
A $10bn IPO would be a happy day for Centerview's 80 or so partners, who own equity in the firm. The WSJ notes that some are over 60 years old. They would presumably quite like to cash out and sail around on yachts.
It's less clear what an IPO would mean for Centerview's hard-working, highly paid rank and file. Last year, Centerview generated $1.9bn in revenues, or $3.5m per employee, mostly from M&A advisory work. Rival boutique firms like PJT Partners pay nearly 70% of revenues in compensation. Centerview doesn't disclose its own global compensation numbers, but if it's like PJT, it pays around $2.5m on average to each person. For this, people are expected to work hard: relentless 100 hour weeks are the norm. There is fun too: senior staff have been known to wear elf hats to award bonuses.
Can this quirky-yet-grinding culture survive outside investors? Ask Goldman Sachs' pre-IPO bankers, or the Perella Weinberg bankers who took their firm public in 2021. For the moment, Centerview's co-founders Blair Effron and Robert Pruzan insist they're not rushing into anything. They're saying things like, “It’s going to be a high bar.” But $10bn is a lot of money and the bar already looks impressively high. The real danger is that the firm IPOs and its critical partners become inordinately rich and sail off into the sunset.
Separately, if you're a female banker and you're trying to get hired, one phrase will make all the difference to your CV. - "I seek a happy and meaningful life. I believe that my work can contribute to the achievement of this purpose."
A new academic study has determined that if women add this phrase to their resumes when applying for jobs in economics, finance and budgeting, they can increase the rate of employer callbacks to 51%, from 30% without.
Men can power-up their CVs too: if they add the phrase above, employer callbacks go from 16% to 30%. Other sorts of statements didn't do so well: If you say you're into protecting nature and the environment, callbacks will fall.
Meanwhile...
Profits at hedge fund Marshall Wace fell by two thirds last year. Partner pay seemed to go from £22m to £8m each. (Guardian)
Chinese Masters in Finance graduates can't find jobs. "My dream job was to work in investment banking," says Sun Zhan as he prepares to start his shift as a waiter in a hot pot restaurant. (BBC)
Japanese firms are so desperate for graduates that they're housing them in dorms with wide screen TVs and beer vending machines. (Bloomberg)
What if there's a bubble? Current cross-asset valuations, in real terms, are higher than 88% of the time in data going back to 1962. (Bloomberg)
AQR's Apex fund returned over 15% last year, roughly matched the performance of the key funds at Ken Griffin’s Citadel and Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management. (Bloomberg)
Nick Clegg earned $100m at Meta, or roughly $500k a week. (The Times)
Neo-medievalism is emerging as a consumer trend. It embraces medieval aesthetics and reflects a rejection of modern tech culture. (Business Insider)
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