Morning Coffee: Death of third young banker in 12 months reignites long hours debate. London bankers can safely use WhatsApp again

The investment banking industry has, to say the least, a great uneasiness with the way that it treats the young people at its lowest ranks.  Most of the time, the workload is a matter for dark humour and a twisted kind of pride; everyone in banking has come through this kind of treatment themselves, and many of us have at least some fond memories of being young, bonding with our colleagues and learning the trade.  But now and then, something awful happens, and bankers have a moment of introspection in which we worry; are we actually doing something very bad here?

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It's important to recognize at this point that there are almost no details in the public space about the death at home of Carter McIntosh, an associate in the Dallas technology media and telecoms (TMT) banking team at Jefferies last weekend.  Rich Handler and Brian Friedman have sent condolences from the company, and the Dallas police have made a short statement describing the death as “unexplained”.  And in an industry with tens of thousands of people working for it, some will die each year, simply as an actuarial fact.  Everything else is speculation.

The speculation itself might be a kind of coping strategy.  People gossip about extraordinary workloads on some teams. According to some anonymous sources writing in to Litquidity, the Dallas tech group was run by an ex-Moelis banker, where McIntosh had been an analyst too; the implication might be that some of the Moelis long-hours culture might have been brought across. But other sources suggested that Jefferies had actually done a lot to tame working conditions in Dallas, including firing some senior bankers who had been “crushing juniors”.  It’s a natural instinct to try to assign blame, and to assume that when something unusual has happened, it must have been caused by an anomalous environment.

Similar rumours were prevalent in May last year, when Leo Lukenas and Adnan Deumic both at Bank of America, died young within a few weeks of one another.  In those cases, timesheets didn’t seem to suggest either was working particularly long hours.  But those timesheets were later disputed. The underlying concept is frightening. - Investment banking is, not just at a few particularly bad teams, but in general as an industry, bad for your health.

This is, unfortunately, a fact known to the medical profession.  Prolonged lack of sleep, particularly if it’s facilitated by consumption of nicotine and caffeine, is bad for your heart.  Fatigue and unhealthy living will weaken your immune system.  The effect seems to be measurable in everyone, and it’s a statistically significant increase in the small baseline risk of having a major cardiac episode of the kind usually seen in people much older than the average junior banker.

Banking is, of course, a business of taking small risks for great rewards.  But it’s best to take those risks on an informed basis, and to be prepared to cut loose if you get any signs that the risk has grown too quickly.

Elsewhere, the determination of the British government to demonstrate that they’re a growth focused, deregulatory state is finally delivering tangible benefits to bankers! The Financial Conduct Authority has made it known that it doesn’t intend to have a blanket policy prohibiting the use of messaging apps.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that London bankers can go straight back to discussing business over WhatsApp – the record keeping regulations still apply.  So do the rules on non-public information, and so do all the individual policies of the actual banks.  But it’s been decided that firms are capable of managing the problem themselves, and bankers can hopefully be at least somewhat trusted not to be as stupid as they used to be. 

In many ways, it’s more realistic to try to enforce a “no business over the apps” rule than to expect bankers to maintain separate home and work phones, and then never to use the personal one during business hours.  It feels more like treating bankers as grown-ups.  So the new rule in London is dance like nobody’s watching, but use your phone as if everything is going to be read out in a courtroom.

Meanwhile …

Another male senior former UBS banker finds himself denying that he has any “personal rift” with Ana Botín. This time it’s William Vereker, chairman of Santander’s UK operations, who is resigning, seemingly after a bit of strategic disagreement over the future direction, and a perception in Madrid that the London board were trying to manage things for themselves. (FT)

“Hundreds” of redundancies are coming at Swiss wealth management firm Julius Baer; at present there’s no detail on front/back office split or geography. (Bloomberg)

If you are good at mathematics, and you do something which makes a lot of money, then your newspaper profiles will invariably get round to dissing your hair.  Photographic evidence shows that Liang Wenfeng, the hedge fund manager turned DeepSeek founder, has a perfectly normal haircut and wears smart but boring clothes, but he’s “an engineer rather than a trader”, and so colleagues say he fits “the typical profile”. (WSJ)

An employee survey reveals a huge problem of “psychological harassment” at the European insurance regulator.  As always, this ought to be worrying for the industry – it can’t be good to have important decisions being made by people in such a bad state of mind. (Financial News)

Washington DC is filling up with young conservatives, who appear to be celebrating their victory by making outrageous statements to journalists.  It might not be a good idea for bankers to copy this style – you might be less likely to be publicly cancelled for saying slurs in public, but you never know which important clients are going to hear you and be personally offended. (NY Magazine)

JPMorgan, whose managers are apparently not superstitious, is in talks to lease the former offices of Credit Suisse and make their staff walk into the cursed building five days a week. (FT)

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