There’s been a mad dash for talent as Wall Street firms quickly overhauled their 2020 playbooks.
Equity and debt trading have surged as a result of the financial turmoil caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Hedge fund managers are responding to investors’ expectations to outperform amid the chaos by aggressively hiring experts to fine-tune their strategies.
But while many banks had pledged not to cut jobs during the pandemic, some have been starting to resume cuts. And upper-middle-management roles might be at risk, but firms are likely to want to hold on to senior executives and bankers.
The upheaval of normal life due to the pandemic has also put a huge focus on digitalization, accelerating plans for firms across industries to upgrade or build out new tech.
Here's a roundup of some of the biggest appointments, exits, and hiring initiatives across the world of finance:
Trading
Trader moves have been happening left and right.
- A Barclays trading desk lost more than $60 million this year amid a bloodbath in distressed assets
- Deutsche Bank has poached a senior trader from HSBC to bolster its distressed-credit business, a powerhouse group that's been hit with defections in 2020
- Bank of America just elevated Soofian Zuberi to cohead of equities in the 2nd management shake-up this week for the company's stock-trading unit
- Another Deutsche Bank credit-trading exec just resigned, adding to a slew of senior departures at the firm
- Inside an exodus at Deutsche Bank's vaunted credit-trading desk, where even rock stars are feeling a pay squeeze that shows nothing's off limits from the struggling bank's cutbacks
- A top credit-trading exec is out at Wells Fargo. The exit comes as the bank is pursuing billions in cost cuts.
- Exclusive org chart of the most powerful people in Bank of America's equities division, which just shook up senior leadership
- Bank of America is shaking up its global equities division and its European regional head is leaving, according to an internal memo
- JPMorgan's top Treasuries trader Rob Allen has been placed on leave amid a compliance review of his electronic messages
- Bank of America has poached a top junk-bond trader from Deutsche Bank, leveling up in one of 2020's red-hot trading markets
- Goldman Sachs just hired Kurt Hoffman, an expert in distressed situations and bankruptcy, to join a trading unit known for some of the bank's most lucrative deals
- RBC is snapping up key hires in distressed-credit trading as Wall Street preps for a feeding frenzy
- Morgan Stanley hired a top trader away from Deutsche Bank in distressed credit — an area primed for a boom as corporate debt gets crushed
Tech and operations
Banking
Banks have been busy hiring for different initiatives, from chief marketing officers to teams to build out tech projects. Dealmakers have also reshuffled to lean into hot coverage areas.
- One of Wall Street's top dealmakers just quit to run for New York City mayor. Here's why Ray McGuire is running and the challenges his campaign will face.
- Read the full memo Goldman Sachs just sent announcing a leadership shakeup in its powerhouse M&A group
- REVEALED: The 20 leaders in charge of the powerful Goldman Sachs merchant-banking division that's raising $100 billion for a new alternatives push
- Wells Fargo's longtime CMO will leave her role as part of a bigger marketing shakeup across the bank
- After flashy hires and a big buildout, Perella Weinberg's media and telecom team has been gutted. We tracked the exodus — and what it says about the landscape for blockbuster M&A deals.
- Bank of America is shaking up its financials dealmaking group and just poached a senior Credit Suisse banker as it preps for a wave of bank M&A
- Citi just poached a top operations and anti-fraud exec from Wells Fargo as it continues to build out its consumer bank
- Citi just launched a new team that will apply data science to dealmaking. It shows how much tech is changing investment banking.
- Goldman Sachs' top tech exec explains how a fresh slew of senior hires are transforming the bank's approach to building products
- JPMorgan and Bank of America are reassigning staff to focus on troubled loans and companies amid a wave of pandemic-driven disruptions
- Read the full memo Goldman Sachs just sent naming 4 execs to lead its private-equity investments across the merchant-banking division
- 2 coheads of Goldman Sachs' private-investing business are retiring, in a blow to David Solomon's fundraising plans
- Read the full memo Goldman Sachs just sent to staff announcing its new head of regulatory affairs. The former White House counsel will be tasked with helping clean up the bank's 1MDB drama.
- Goldman Sachs just hired 2 senior recruiting execs focused on luring top talent from other firms —and it's a huge departure from the firm's traditional promote-from-within mentality
Private equity
- Blackstone just hired an Amazon Web Services exec who helped the cloud giant do M&A. It's the latest sign that big private-equity firms are muscling in on specialty tech investors' turf.
- Meet Kewsong Lee, the private-equity exec who's now running the show solo at Carlyle. 20 insiders lay out why the move signals a big transformation at the $221 billion firm.
- Private-equity hiring is getting upended. From senior execs jumping ship to new timelines for scouting junior talent, 6 recruiters lay out what to expect.
- POWER PLAYERS: 13 Apollo execs, rising stars, and new hires who are propelling the firm's massive push into credit investments
- Big investors like Apollo and Carlyle are clamoring for a piece of the $30 trillion ESG space. We spoke to 15 insiders about how they're ramping up hires, raising money, and striking data-driven deals.
Hedge funds
There's been a shuffle of quant leadership in at big-name shops in recent months, as firms rethink their data plays.
- Opendoor just hired a top quant researcher from $34 billion hedge fund Citadel to oversee home pricing and data as the iBuyer gears up to go public via a SPAC
- $26 billion Coatue is down one of its top alternative-data buyers after the firm's quant fund that relied heavily on the unique datasets was rocked by market volatility earlier this year
- Citadel poaches a rising star from billionaire Lee Ainslie's Maverick Capital to join its Ashler stock-picking unit
- Hedge funds are winning the war for talent against Amazon and Facebook. 3 charts show which firms are poaching the most top data scientists and engineers from Big Tech.
- $34 billion Citadel is dominating 2020. Here's a look at how it's outperforming its rivals — and the hedge fund's plan for its latest Goldman hire.
- Leaked memo: Billionaire Steve Cohen is hiring a former PDT executive who founded a flying-car startup to be his top quant and lead his Cubist unit
- $33 billion Citadel just poached an AQR exec for a new leadership role to supercharge billionaire Ken Griffin's bond trading team
- The head of Point72's Cubist quant-trading unit is joining one of billionaire Steve Cohen's top competitors
- $60 billion quant fund Two Sigma just hired Goldman Sachs' first-ever chief data officer to lead its massive tech team
- $7 billion hedge fund WorldQuant is bringing on the former top quant at Goldman to help create the 'future of quantitative investing'
- Citadel just poached Two Sigma's data chief for its tech team — and it's the latest sign of how aggressively the $30 billion firm is pursuing top talent from Wall Street and Silicon Valley
- 2 portfolio managers featured in 'The Big Short' are set to join the new hedge fund being set up by Steve Cohen's former right-hand man
Wealth management
- JPMorgan could double its advisor force, hiring as many as 4,000, as it eyes ambitions plans to catch up to rivals, says wealth boss Kristin Lemkau
- Goldman Sachs is hiring dozens of advisors for the firm's wealth business, and says it's getting a boost from companies pushing early retirements and layoffs
- Morgan Stanley is putting the brakes on hiring junior financial advisors. Here's how the massive wealth manager plans to close out the year.
- Goldman Sachs just shook up its divisions to create a new consumer and wealth-management arm that will be run by Stephanie Cohen and Tucker York
- How Citi is angling to turbocharge its wealth efforts as an industry-wide battle for Main Street investors heats up
- Goldman Sachs just lost another wealth team to UBS in one of the industry's biggest financial adviser moves of the year
- Bank of America has made at least 45 hires this year for an aggressive push into the red hot — and super competitive — business of courting corporate HR execs. Here's why it's betting on the space.
- Greg Fleming's $43 billion Rockefeller Capital has hired 19 adviser teams from top wealth firms in 7 months. Execs lay out where it's focused next.
- Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf just hired another JPMorgan alum — this time, to run wealth management. Here's how Jamie Dimon's one-time protege has been building up his team.
- A veteran Wells Fargo Advisors exec who helped navigate sweeping regulatory changes to the wealth industry just retired
- Wells Fargo is moving a wealth exec into its scandal-plagued consumer bank to fill a new 'accountability' role as it seeks to appease regulators
- Wealth management giant Merrill Lynch wants its worst-performing markets to catch up and just created a new role to oversee their progress
Cloud providers
Google and IMB have been bringing on Wall Street talent in order to attract more clients from the finance sector to their cloud services.
- Google Cloud just nabbed another former bank exec as it looks to compete with AWS and Microsoft Azure for Wall Street customers
- Google Cloud just poached a long-time Citi exec. Here's why public-cloud giants keep adding Wall Street veterans to their ranks.
- IBM's new head of cloud says there's a $1 trillion opportunity in luring Wall Street firms and other holdouts onto the public cloud. Here's his plan to take on AWS, Google, and Microsoft.
- Bank of America's CTO, who played a key part in a private-cloud strategy execs praised for saving billions, has left the bank