Morning Coffee: The strange & automated existence of JPMorgan's junior bankers. Armadillo racing offsite

As we reported earlier this month, JPMorgan seems to be planning to cut its junior bankers in London and New York by two thirds through a combination of AI and moving jobs to India. The third of junior bankers who remain could find the job very changed. 

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Business Insider saw Teresa Heitsenrether, JPMorgan's chief data and analytics officer, speaking at a conference. Heitsenrether said JPMorgan's future bankers will become managers sooner, but that they will be managing bots and not humans. She didn't use the word "bots", though: Heitsenrether spoke of managing "digital colleagues."

While AI is being anthropomorphized, human colleagues at JPMorgan are being digitalized. The Financial Times reports that JPMorgan is now allowing employees to use its large language model (LLM) to write year-end performance reviews instead of having to think about things to say themselves.

All that's required is that JPMorgan employees feed prompts about colleagues into the AI, after which it will reportedly produce some text describing their performance. The FT says Boston Consulting has done the same thing and reduced review-writing time by 40%. 

It sounds great, unless you're the employee being reviewed and were hoping for some meaningful thoughts from your embodied human manager. JPMorgan isn't commenting, but the FT says the bank's LLM won't be allowed to decide pay and that humans will have to review what it says about them.

Separately, offsites and office parties are less generous nowadays, unless you work for Citadel, or you're in a hot area of the market, like secondaries.

Nigel Dawn is in secondaries. Bloomberg reports that Dawn - who once went to Newcastle University - manages a New York based team at Evercore which specializes in helping private equity managers sell their holdings to each other or maybe even themselves. The market is booming: Bloomberg thinks that Dawn and his team of 150 people have made $150m in the past 12 months.

As a reward for all this hard work, Dawn and the others reportedly flew to a Texas "Dude ranch" where they rode horses and raced armadillos.  Dawn himself did not participate in the armadillo racing, though: in the style of a digital colleague, he left the race early to get more work done.

Meanwhile...

Michele Rabà, who ran private equity in Europe at Apollo and who left earlier this month, is joining Blackstone instead. Apollo manages $150bn in private equity assets. Blackstone manages $400bn. (Financial Times) 

Apollo is opening a Paris office next year. (Financial News) 

Goldman Sachs wants to triple its headcount in Saudi Arabia to 60 people. (Bloomberg) 

Amit Raja, aged 49, manages Citi's European equities business and wants it to become a "powerhouse." He manages 2,000 people. (Financial News) 

Lazard's share price rose and then it had to pay out £66.6m in costs related to deferred compensation for its UK business in 2024. This was 48% more than 2023 and it lost £21.3m as a result. (Financial News) 

JPMorgan has made its investment in US national security and resilience and funnelled $75m into an Idaho mining company. “With this investment, we are supporting a company in an industry critical to national security and American resiliency — precisely the focus of our new initiative,” declared Doug Petno, co-head of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment banking division. (Financial Times) 

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