Morning Coffee: JPMorgan's rebellious employees now meek and compliant. Abrupt exit of Standard Chartered CFO for something better
As the many complaints about returning to the office 50% of the time at the UK Financial Conduct Authority show, homeworking is a popular thing and attempting to get people back into the office can prompt insurrection.
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The sound and the fury may pass, though. At JPMorgan, where people are now in the office five days a week and employees initially complained that management was "tone deaf" and divisive, the complaining has fizzled out.
The Financial Times reports that only 2,000 of JPMorgan's 300,000 global employees have signed a petition against homeworking; less than 1% of the total. This time last year, the petition had 1,200 signatures. Growth is not exponential.
The remaining 99% of non-signatories are either happy to be in the office five days a week or quietly resigned to their fates. One of them tells the FT it would be "career suicide" to publicly complain. This is not irrational. When the petition was launched, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon publicly declared, “Don’t waste time on it … I don’t care how many people sign that f—ing petition.” Last year, Nicholas Welch, a technology support analyst at JPMorgan was fired and then rehired for publicly challenging the return to office mandate. Welch was subsequently outed for posting rants against Dimon on Reddit (now deleted) and his whereabouts is unknown.
The suppression of return to office whinging is not the same as people joyfully sitting at their desks, though. At banks like SocGen, where people are now expected in the office four days a week, employees have taken to calling CEO Slawomir Krupa "Captain Krupa" in an act of minor defiance. Last June, Krupa declared that “people on a screen” were “not part of meetings”, the FT notes.
Separately, Mark Mason is stepping down as Citi CFO, but he is doing so in incremental steps over a four month period. Diego De Giorgi is also stepping down at Standard Chartered, but he is doing so immediately.
De Giorgi is going to Apollo, where he will be head of Europe. Standard Chartered announced De Giorgi's unexpected leap at 5am this morning and said he is going with "immediate effect." Reuters notes that Standard Chartered's shares fell 4.1% at the open. De Giorgi was expected to replace Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters. Now he's found something better instead.
Meanwhile...
Marc Rowan at Apollo says the group will outpeform rivals in the future as it didn't invest in software companies hit by concerns about AI. “I expect that we will be, along with a handful of other managers, prettier than we have been historically.” (Financial Times)
Everyone wants to work in secondaries, says Todd Miller at Jefferies. "It's a very hot industry. Everyone's trying to get into this space. I get a massive amount of inbounds on LinkedIn. I've had kids writing to me on LinkedIn out of college, sophomores at elite schools. They want to do this job."(Business Insider)
To hit its new targets, Barclays said it will make efficiency savings of about £2 billion, adding to the £700 million made last year. (Bloomberg)
Bankers are disappointed with bonuses. “People have amnesia. They remember how good it was towards the end of the year, but forget the market discombobulation in the first three months.” (Financial News)
"I have yet to set Claude loose on Deutsche Bank. But as a first attempt, it proved remarkably capable." (Marc Rubenstein)
Morgan Stanley junior points out the uses of AI: “We have hundreds upon hundreds of deal folders, with decades of models and analysis and PowerPoints, and truly everything you do in banking could be aided by finding precedent analysis. If you have a good precedent, your life becomes much easier.” (Bloomberg)
Singapore stopped being cool. (Marginal Revolution)
The trouble with jobs in private equity: "Junior guys hustle to find deals while senior guys decide which ones they like without being close enough to make the right decisions. This frustrates the junior guys, who do all the work. It's a cycle where junior guys eventually do their own thing, and senior guys bring in new people, repeating the process." (X)
Co-Chief Executive Officers Doug Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz pledged more than half of their Blue Owl stakes to secure loans, but value of their collateral fell $260m as Blue Owl shares have slumped. A margin call could make things far worse. (Bloomberg)
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