eFinancialCareers

Yesterday’s unnerving bonus revelations from UBS have become more unnerving still now that there’s been time to digest them. The Times reports that as part of the new malus system for recouping bonuses in the event of everything from losses (group or division), asset writedowns, personal misconduct and missed performance targets, it will soon be possible for UBS senior bankers and 'risk takers' to accrue a negative bonus balance. The... Read more

Citigroup bankers who filed in to attend Vikram Pandit’s town hall presentation today, hoping for a few platitudes about how the bank has some of the most talented people in the industry, were sorely disappointed. Instead, Pandit announced another 50,000 redundancies on top of the 23,000 he's announced already this year. The Wall Street Journal quotes Citigroup chairman Win Bischoff, who told a separate Dubai business forum that all banks... Read more

First came the news that RBS is cutting several thousand people from its global banking and markets division. Now it transpires that Citigroup is cutting 10,000 people from its investment bank and elsewhere. RBS is saying nothing about whether the redundancy rumours are true, or where the axe might fall, but Pesto was heard on the Today Progamme this morning saying that layoffs in the UK will be limited to... Read more

Morgan Stanley is following in the footsteps of Goldman Sachs and cutting another 10% of its staff. After making 4,400 redundancies in June, the US bank now plans to make another 10% of cuts in its institutional securities group, and 9% of people redundant in asset management. Financial News says Mack is cutting back on prime brokerage, proprietary trading, principal investing and commercial real estate origination, and building up in... Read more

Stung into action by Goldman’s falling share price, chief executive Lloyd Blankfein has come out fighting. According to Blankfein, Goldman’s transformation into a bank holding company will not stop it from “doing anything we have done as an investment bank”. For the record, he also points out that, “Some of the biggest opportunities this firm has had came from times of stress,” promises that he won’t be provoked into “doing... Read more

Having exhausted their appetite for structured credit specialists, it seems banks are now opting for something a little less arcane: good old work-out experts who can help turn ailing businesses around. The Financial Times says banks’ commercial lending arms are shopping for the kinds of work-out experience more commonly found in private equity funds. The impetus appears to be debt for equity swaps, which could leave lenders holding equity in... Read more

So you thought Lehman bankers left to twiddle their thumbs or pick up big guarantees over at Nomura? So did we, but according to an article in last weekend’s Financial Times, this is not necessarily so. The FT says that some of Lehman’s traders were retained by PwC to unwind its trading positions and that these lucky individuals received a ‘new pay package with a hefty bonus component if they... Read more

It’s with great sadness that we announce that Tom Seaden, one of London’s leading financial services executive search consultants, died yesterday, aged only 45. Tom spent four years as head of Whitney Group in London, before moving to Korn/Ferry International last month. Always helpful, always knowledgeable, and always discreet, Tom was a force to be reckoned with in City headhunting, and will be sadly missed. He leaves behind a wife and son.

The outlook for bonuses at UBS has suddenly turned a lot bleaker. The Swiss bank was already threatening to claw back the bonuses it paid to its top executives in 2007, but Bloomberg reports that the country’s regulator now plans to cap UBS bonuses for 2008 at levels deemed “absolutely necessary”. The regulator’s intervention follows a $59bn aid package for UBS from the Swiss government and the central bank last... Read more

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are said to be implementing 12,000 job cuts as we speak. At Citigroup, the cuts are affecting salespeople and traders (and anyone more than nine steps from Vikram). At Goldman, the axe is reputedly falling on people in leveraged finance, syndicated loans, IT, back-office administrative positions, and structured credit and prop trading. The big shock seems to be that the people being let go aren’t all... Read more

JPMorgan Asset Management is showing how it’s done. After ushering no fewer than 44% of its staff out of the door over the past 12 months, Reuters reports that it may now be hiring again. The commitment to boost numbers isn't exactly firm – chief exec Jes Staley is apparently contemplating adding headcount if ‘the global situation does not get worse’. Sadly for anyone hoping to join in London, the... Read more

Any IT contractors thinking the last bastion of high daily rates was at Goldman Sachs should think again. The bank has issued a take-it-or-leave-it 15% cut to all its contractors, according to The Register. Goldman follows the example of JPMorgan – although both banks delayed the rate cuts, they’re deeper than the typical 10-12% reduction enforced by most i-banks this year. Merrill’s IT contractor rate cut, announced back in May, set the... Read more

Q3 profits at SocGen fell 84% year on year on credit-related writedowns. However, the bank didn’t lose a small fortune on equity derivative trades, and nor did its corporate and investment bank do at all badly: underlying revenues were actually up 21% excluding exceptional items. The safest staff are undoubtedly sitting in the fixed income, currencies and commodities business, where revenues more than doubled yoy. Risk professionals and private bankers... Read more

We knew it was coming, but Barclays has revealed just how much cash is coming from Middle Eastern investors - £7.3bn. The move will see investors including the Qatar Investment Authority, Abu-Dhabi’s royal family and others own around one-third of the bank. The official line, says Reuters, is that raising cash independently, rather than through the government bailout scheme, will give it the edge over its UK rivals which have... Read more

The relaxation of mark to market accounting rules might have driven Deutsche to an overall third quarter profit, but it didn’t do much for its corporate and investment bank, which made its third straight quarterly loss. Cost cutting doesn’t appear to have kept up with falling revenues (according to the Guardian a compensation freeze imposed in the first half has now been lifted): the ratio of costs to income in... Read more

Fidelity has killed the notion that asset managers don’t lay off as many people as investment banks. The world’s biggest mutual fund manager is apparently gearing up to eliminate 4,000 of its 45,000 global staff in two rounds of layoffs, starting very soon. According to the Wall Street Journal, the ‘core investment management arm’ will not go untouched by the cuts, which are down to the mass withdrawal of investors’... Read more