Morning Coffee: JPMorgan's overlooked banker found a bigger job elsewhere. Inside the Goldman Sachs client menu

If you're planning an IPO in London and are looking for Shameer Patel on the JPMorgan London syndicate desk, you will need to cast your eyes elsewhere. After 18 years at JPMorgan, IFR reported yesterday that Shameer has taken himself to BNP Paribas instead. 

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At JPMorgan, Shameer was just an executive director in equity capital markets (ECM) syndicate in EMEA. He didn't respond to a request to comment for this article, but we understand that he was around five notches below the bank's global markets leadership. At BNP Paribas, by comparison, Shameer will be running the whole of global equity syndicate. BNP Paribas wanted Shameer so much that Bloomberg reported (on the terminal) that the French bank created a whole new role for him. He will move up several notches and report to Andreas Bernstorff, BNP's global head of ECM.

Shameer's exit looks like a bit of a loss for JPMorgan, which didn't even promote him to managing director. The bank declined to comment for this article, but it's thought that Shameer had been a mainstay on the JPM syndicate desk for years. BNP Paribas presumably saw something in him that JPM had overlooked.

Shameer's departure is understood to have been a while in the offing, but it follows the arrival of ex-Citi banker Suneel Hargunani as head of EMEA syndicate at JPMorgan in March. Hargunani's arrival is not thought to have provoked Shameer's departure, but nor is it inconceivable that Shameer may have wanted Hargunani's job. 

None of this matters now, because Shameer is now an even bigger beast at BNP Paribas. Moving to a European bank is often an opportunity to take on more responsibility. Hopefully Shameer will thrive in the more European culture there. BNP Paribas declined to comment.

Separately, Goldman Sachs has been entertaining its most important clients at its annual annual leveraged finance and credit conference in California. Bloomberg reports that nearly 500 clients attended and that the main topic of conversation was funding AI and its enormous infrastructure requirements. “There’s such an enormous capex need across data centers, power, chips, that is so large that it really touches every market that we are involved in,” Miriam Wheeler, Goldman Sachs global head of leveraged finance, declared in a side interview. “For our capital solutions group right now, AI is probably the number one theme that we’re spending time on.”

The conference took place in the Waldorf Astoria's Monarch Beach Resort, which offers a private beach club and an array of blue umbrellas. While they considered how to muster up the trillions required to sustain the AI boom, Bloomberg says attendees were treated to a combination of mahi-mahi, crumbed chicken, lemon potatoes and gnocchi. Mahi-mahi is a reportedly a dolphin-like fish associated with food poisoning in some situations but there is no sign that the data centre developers of the future experienced any indigestion as they discussed invetment to come.

Meanwhile...

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are expected to feature on Anthropic's enormous IPO. (Bloomberg) 

Deutsche Bank's fixed income traders are unhealthily successful. Since Christian Sewing took as CEO over in 2018, FIC revenues have grown over 30 percentage points more than those in the corporate bank. “The plan is for the corporate bank to grow faster than the investment bank,” says Fabrizio Campelli, head of the corporate and investment bank. (Financial Times) 

ArrowPoint Investment Partners, an Asia-focused hedge fund, has $2bn of capital and wants $3bn by the second half. It has 20 investment teams and has signed up 10 more. (Bloomberg) 

Cambridge University graduate and quant trader Richard Ho was charged with using Headlands Technologies' source code to set up his own firm. He argued that the charges were too vague, but the case is now going ahead in the US. (Bloomberg) 

Questions are being asked about interactions between Mary Erdoes at JPMorgan and Jeffrey Epstein. “If Erdoes was not as senior or as powerful as she currently is at JPMorgan, I don’t think she would still be working there. They would have most likely let her go,” says one investor.  (The Banker) 

Paul V. Morris, a private banker who worked with Jeffrey Epstein, left his job at Bank of America. (Bloomberg) 

Goldman lost US$960 million on three days during the first quarter, followed by Bank of America with $376 million and JP Morgan with US$182 million on two days apiece. (Global Trading) 

Christopher Willcox, head of Nomura's investment bank, says banks will cut thousands of jobs due to AI but it will be a good thing for small banks. (Financial News) 

This summer's internships will be about AI and intuition. "It's much less about pure technical ability, and it's much more about emotional intelligence," he said. "We need kids that are going to become great long-term professionals, not kids that are going to make great analysts, because they're going to have to go out of that analyst job very, very quickly." (Business Insider) 

Revolut wants 200 people in France. (Bloomberg) 

BlackRock, Fidelity, Neuberger, Allianz, AllianceBernstein and Schroders all set up wholly owned mutual fund businesses after China opened up the sector in 2020. They have a 0.1% market share. (Financial Times) 

It's not easy being Andrew Bailey at the Bank of England; it's not bad either. "He’s got a shocking giggle. He’s quite a gossip. You’d wander by his desk, sit down, have a Quality Street — there was always a box of chocolates open — and share some stories or funny things that were happening. He was just quite fun to be with in a surprising way, at all times.” (Politico) 

25% of Americans in their 40s go at least five years without a real boost in pay or position. (WSJ) 

Inside a contemporary maths exam. 'Students were pulling out phones and taking photographs of the test to submit to LLMs before copying down machine-written responses into their blue books.' (TheNewCritic) 

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