UK
Where will hiring be hottest in 2010? According to Financial News, Financial Institutions Group (FIG) groups will be on fire.
The paper claims that BarCap, Evercore, Moelis, Jefferies, Fox-Pitt Kelton, Greenhill, Lazard, and Fenchurch Advisory Partners all want to build up FIG teams, while Citigroup and Rothschild may be hiring to fill gaps.
One (anonymous) headhunter confirms the BarCap build-out. “BarCap have got recruiting initiatives in most sector areas, but in terms of the really juicy stuff for 2010, it’s a FIG push,” he says.
However, after a big year for FIG hiring in 2009, the number of candidates willing to move next year may be woefully small. “The proportion of FIG bankers who’ve moved in the past year is so high, that they’ll struggle to find anyone who’s willing to swap houses,” says one headhunter.
Barclays Capital hired Stefano Marsaglia (who’s now said to be building out his team) from Rothschild in September. Resolution hired senior FIG bankers from Lazard and Goldman in August; Moelis hired Caroline Silver as head of FIG from Merrill Lynch in July, and Deutsche hired 12 US FIG specialists from Merrill in February.
“The pattern of moves this year has been at a very senior level. I’d say it will probably move further down the food chain next year,” says one search consultant.
However, another points out that FIG hiring is nothing new: “This has been going on all year, the same as in oil and gas and utilities – they’re the sectors that just keep going on and on.”
With all FIG activity going on, it’s not a big surprise. The big problem lies in that there are very few good FIG (esp. insurance) bankers around. The problem is further compounded by the fact that FIG valuations and modelling is highly specialised and probably more complex than your bog standard ‘widget’ valuations you learn in B-school. .
but still quite widget like
all a load of cr@p anyway
fig? you are kidding
it is really rubbish
no exit opportunities to KKR, BX
you work standard weeks of 140 hours, difficult people, yelling at you all the time
no way i would join fig.. extreme boring busienss as well… rwa, embedded values, non performing loans bleh bleh bleh
MD?! haha! first MD around, feeling intimidated…
Little wannabe, do you still think you will ever end up doing private equity?
Thats what I like of FIG, most of the wannabes as you that feed the industry become generalists, hence a pool of indistinguishable number crunchers…. did you heard about specialisation at uni?
BTW, most global PEHs are building FIG teams; I might give you a call to draw my internal presentations soon MD!
MD, the exit opps are to FIG-focused HFs and in the PE space there is JCFlowers snapping up FIG assocs.
Actually, to give an example that happened not too long ago, I interviewed two guys applying to us for two separate VP roles: one pure M&A and the other one specialising in exchanges/clearing houses. I was doing the fit interviews to see whether they’d fit into our culture. I didn’t ask them any technical questions, mostly general banter and the two candidates were the same. Personally, apart from their respective specialisations I couldn’t tell them apart.
And, well, long story short, we hired both of them, but we had to offer the FIG guy twice as much as the M&A guy simply because there are fewer people who can model FIG than who can model M&A.