Morning Coffee: How to get a senior banker to like you, a technique. JPMorgan gives investment bankers cause for cheer
More or less everything about recruiting students into investment banking internships is awful, for everyone involved. Human resources departments get a pile of applications which is literally a hundred times the number of places available. University careers departments have to turn themselves into temporary therapists, advising elite young people how to cope with rejection when they’ve never experienced it before.
💥Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.💥
And the students are put through the slog of sending dozens of individualised applications explaining what they think is unique about every bank on the Street, putting endless time into preparation and extracurriculars, in order to prepare for an interview process that’s often as short as 2.5 hours. As one of them says, “It’s a pretty big mismatch”. Needless to say, introducing AI into the process has made things considerably worse.
About the only people who have any prospect of enjoyment at all are bankers with a bit of spare time in September, who might get a subsidised trip to their alma mater for an “information session”, allowing them to show off and consume cheap alcohol. But even this isn’t risk free. The cost of being a big figure on campus for one evening is that later in the year, you will suddenly get dozens of connection requests and social media messages, with keen students who “happen to be in town” and would like to “catch up for a coffee” and perhaps “pick your brains”.
It’s hard to say no to such an invitation; quite apart from anything, you never know if you might accidentally be offending a young relative of someone important. So bankers often find themselves spending time during the months from April to June being taken away from their desks to sip flat whites as prominent members of university finance societies try to form a bond with them.
The strategy adopted by one undergraduate at Western Ontario university is worth reproducing, as it sounds absolutely terrifying. According to Bloomberg, he says “Keep digging for common ground … even if the banker on the other end of the conversation sounds completely uninterested …I will not move on until the five minutes are done … You just keep circling, circling in until you can build that connection.”
In a normal banking interview, this would be absolute career death. Bankers are famous for using the “airport test” to make hiring decisions – since it will certainly happen at some point, is this a person that I could bear to be stuck with for six hours at an airport during a flight delay?
But, of course, the thing about interns is that you probably won’t get the ones that you spoke to, and even if you end up working with them long term they will hopefully have done a bit of growing up in the meantime. So the super-intense approach is likely to be less off-putting than it sounds.
Intern recruitment is never going to be easy. You are trying to identify the people who will make good investment bankers, at an age when they don’t know who they are, and when all they really know about the industry is that’s it’s prestigious and has a structured process full of tests they can pass. But it feels like there has to be a better way than this.
Elsewhere, it seems that thanks to Doug Petno of JP Morgan, the Barclays Global Financial Services Conference isn’t going to end on a gloomy note. Yesterday, we noted that Brian Moynihan of Bank of America had been guiding expectations downward for investment banking revenue, but that this might reflect company-specific issues (particularly, a sectoral profile of clients which wasn’t heavily weighted to tech) rather than general industry malaise.
But Petno says JPM is still expecting both trading revenue and fee income to be up “by a percentage in the mid to high teens”. This would be against a fairly tough base for comparison, and would certainly point to a very strong revenue year.
It isn’t clear quite why there’s such a difference. JPM does have a top rated tech team, which has traded the number one spot back and forth with Goldman Sachs over the last few years. But it was in roughly the same bookrunner position as BoA in the syndicate for SpaceX, and neither bank is slated to lead OpenAI or Anthropic, the other two megadeals for H2. Maybe it’s just a matter of small wins and calendar effects, or maybe some bankers are just naturally more optimistic than others.
Meanwhile …
“Am I in favour of blocking someone from entering the nightclub? The answer is no”. That was the official line from the Socialist Party in France about whether Evercore banker Matthieu Pigasse would be allowed to run in their Presidential primary. But things seem to have happened, and it appears that the punk rock superstar of sovereign restructuring will remain outside the velvet rope this time. (Le Monde)
Private equity firms seem to be moving beyond using ChatGPT to churn out pitchbooks, and are now specifically acquiring companies where they think that implementing AI solutions can help them make return targets. (FT)
Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management has been running “NextGS Investment Intensive”, a sort of boot camp for nepos, in which younger members of very rich families are taught how to invest their money when they inherit it. There are also modules on buying luxury watches and handbags. (NY Post)
As former BoA star Mike Lyons has departed to run Truist, another high-flying banker has been called in to replace him at fintech infrastructure provider Fiserv. Takis Georgakopoulos was once seen as a long shot for the top job at JP Morgan (FT)
Former hedge fund manager Derek Kaufman is taking the “get it done” approach which served him well at Citadel and JP Morgan and applying it to the politics of building permit reform. (Bloomberg)
If you ever have to use an ejector seat in a military aircraft, the company which makes the seats will give you a free tie and enroll you in what must be one of the world’s most exclusive clubs. (WSJ)
Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn.
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.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently 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. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
