It’s possible that people have got banking careers all wrong. That instead of being about getting trained at a prestigious and highly-remunerative name whilst earning CV points, they’re actually about meeting people. – Meeting people and getting the sort of pedigree that will later allow you to borrow huge sums of money from them and the institution.
Gaël de Boissard
This has been the experience of the two ex-Goldman and one ex-Credit Suisse employees who set up Neyber, a fintech consumer lending company in which Goldman Sachs just invested £100m and Gaël de Boissard, the former co-head of Credit Suisse’s investment bank, and Henry Ritchotte, the former chief operating officer at Deutsche Bank plus others, just invested £15m.
It’s not clear whether Neyber’s founders – Monica Kalia (an ex-Goldman executive director in banks research), Martin Ijaha (an ex-member of Goldman’s European bank loan investing desk) and Ezechi Britton (a former structured products consultants at Credit Suisse), know de Boissard and their other investors personally. However, it’s telling that their fundraising rounds received publicity precisely because they were ex-bankers. Would they have done as well if they’d tried raising money straight out of university? Unlikely.
All three were more than just ‘pass-through bankers’ of the kind who spend 18 months on an analyst program before skipping off to something else. Kalia was at Goldman nearly six years. Ijaha was at Goldman nearly six and a half years (despite having fintech dreams throughout) and then spent 18 months in private equity at HG Capital. Britton was at Credit Suisse five years and then Lehman five years before that. These aren’t fickle analysts who’ve seized upon fintech as the next best thing.
If you want your banking career to provide a platform for doing something entrepreneurial in the future, therefore, don’t quit too soon. Don’t quit before you’ve build a reputation for yourself as a reliable pair of hands. And ideally don’t quit before you’ve built relationships with senior bankers who might one day invest in your ideas, or with the division of the bank that might have money to invest. If you leave without doing any of this, you’ve missed a trick.
Separately, Morgan Stanley is honing its appeal to Generation Z. Business Insider reports that the company has developed some special Snapchat filters which are only available to students at UPenn, Harvard, Villanova, Howard and 14 other ‘elite’ colleges. Keen students can use them to put Morgan Stanley artwork, logos and other designs over the messages they send. Fun.