AU
Sector: Sales & Marketing
Are Aussie brokers becoming corporate drones?
Working for a niche brokerage firm in Australia? Your days of independence look numbered as the chimes of consolidation ring round the brokerage industry. Southern Cross Equities’ recent sell-out to Bell Financial, which follows CMC Markets’ takeover of Andrew West, is another nail in the coffin for standalone brokerages in Australia (Sydney Morning Herald). Other [...]
Sitting tight at UBS
You’d think UBS would be finding it hard to hang on to people: a first-quarter loss of US$12bn, writedowns of US$19bn and job cuts in Europe – including the chairman himself, Marcel Ospel. The strange thing is, no one seems to want to get out of there. Recruiters, whose inboxes are usually crammed with CVs [...]
Want to leave? Pay back that bonus
Investment banks are coming up with innovative ways to keep some staff on their payrolls, even while they let go of others in the wake of the credit crunch. This inventiveness mostly takes the form of long-term stock grants, or measures that let banks defer cash expenses in hopes that revenue growth will pick up [...]
Australian bankers spared redundancy
Wholesale redundancies don’t seem to be on the agenda right now for Australia’s major and regional trading banks, or for most of the investment banks. That’s the word from senior recruiters, although the marketplace is still full of downsizing rumours, including one that Bank of America will scale back from a trading bank to a [...]
For sale sign up at ABN AMRO Australia
Who’ll buy ABN AMRO’s Australian unit? And what will happen to its 700 local staff? With a reported AU$1bn price tag, and most banks struggling to find cash at the moment, sale advisers Lazard Carnegie Wylie certainly have their work cut out. Analysts regard ABN AMRO’s mergers and acquisition division as one of the key [...]
Exile on Wall Street?
Wall Street is definitely not the flavour of the month at the moment, especially when it comes to investment banking. It’s not really surprising, therefore, that many Australians working in the Big Apple are checking out their job options for fear they may not have a job in the very near future. According to Adam [...]
False sense of security?
The US financial services industry is burning, but who’s to say Sydney’s so safe? Bear Stearns doesn’t have an Australian office and Macquarie and Babcock made healthy profits in 2007, but that doesn’t make Australia immune to what’s happening on Wall Street. Australia’s market has dropped 20% since November, with finance stocks down 30%. Notions [...]
Working hours – do China’s bankers have the right idea?
Forget slogging your guts out for an investment bank, you’re much better off working for the public sector. This, at least, seems to be the conclusion reached by a senior banker in China. Wilson Feng, former chairman of China investment banking for Merrill Lynch, told Bloomberg last week that he was quitting banking to work [...]
Babcock’s bounty
Managers at Babcock are busy informing their minions how much they’ll earn in bonuses this year. It should be (very) good news. The investment bank announced last month that its net profit had jumped 58% in the latest year, to AU$407m, and that its bonus pool had risen an impressive 38.5%, to AU$573m. Based on [...]
Guest comment: M&A careers are passé
Working in M&A is sooo yesterday, says William D. Cohan, author and former MD at JPMorgan and VP at Lazard. With US$5 trillion worth of transactions likely this year, the global M&A market is booming and on track to have its best year ever by a wide margin. But does that news bode well for [...]
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