Morning Coffee: JPMorgan shows the Europeans some love. Consultants embarrass themselves with AI
When Filippo Gori, JP Morgan’s co-head of global banking, relocated from London to New York at the start of the summer, European bankers might have felt a little bit disrespected. Although he said at the time that he would still be spending half his time in the EMEA region, investment banking has never been the kind of place where people are happy to say “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away”. It’s a business where face time matters, and where people want to know that the boss is paying attention to them.
Now, it seems, the uncomfortable arrangement whereby Gori kept his title as CEO of EMEA along with the global co-head role has come to an end. Conor Hillery and Mathieu Wiltz will be the new co-CEOs of EMEA.
Given Jamie Dimon’s famous hostility to remote working, this was always likely. You simply can’t tell all of your staff that it’s necessary to have permanent physical presence in order to work efficiently as a team, then have the CEO of an important region located six time zones away. But the decision to make two appointments rather than one is itself interesting.
For any investment bank, there is always a tension between banking versus markets. In the EMEA region particularly, there is also a divide between London and the Euro area. It’s noticeable that although both the new co-CEOs are both long term JPM veterans, one of them is a banker based in London and the other is a markets guy based in Paris. (Hillery is from a prominent Irish family and is grandson of the founder of Davys Stockbrokers; Wiltz is a Grand Ecole graduate).
This was presumably the thinking behind making them co-deputy-CEOs in the first place, and the promotion seems to have been driven by a realisation that Gori’s new job (which includes joint responsibility for corporate banking as well as the investment bank) is big enough that it can’t be combined with running EMEA.
And it’s also noticeable that most European stock markets have outperformed the USA so far this year. That hasn’t really been reflected in deal revenues yet, but JPM will be aware that in a highly uncertain geopolitical environment, it might make sense to spread its bets.
That would mean maintaining and reinforcing the European franchise, which in turn means that they have to keep the troops happy, particularly if they’re losing Gori, who was a popular leader. And that in turn might explain the co-head structure; now everyone in JP Morgan’s EMEA operations has someone they feel they can look towards as their connection to top management.
Elsewhere, the top consultancy firms have been encouraging their employees to make more use of AI in order to generate quicker reports for their clients. Now Deloitte Australia seems to have suffered the inevitable consequences.
In a report for the government on some problems with a welfare system, the use of “a generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (Azure OpenAI GPT — 4o) based tool chain” seems to have introduced some errors. Specifically, references to academic studies which never existed. It’s embarrassing enough for them that Deloitte have given the client a partial refund, which almost never happens.
Apparently, though, the “substantive content, findings and recommendations” weren’t affected by the AI hallucinations, and so there will be no full refund. Which does make one wonder – how much human time and effort would this also be true of?
Meanwhile …
A specialist lender (Shawbrook Group), a packaged food company (Princes Group) and The Beauty Tech Group, which makes LED facemasks. Not exactly bigtech, not exactly large cap, but the London IPO market isn’t in a position to be choosy. If these deals get away, there are quite a few more financial sponsors and dual-listing offerings planned, which might mark the end of an extremely long drought. (Bloomberg)
“I don’t see people ranking themselves on how much money they make. I’m not competitive, in a way”. To their credit, the Wall Street Journal interviewer does immediately reply to Bill Ackman that they don’t believe him. Other pushback includes reminding him that although he doesn’t like to be perceived as a “hedge fund, private jet guy”, he does actually have a hedge fund and a private jet. Although Ackman emphasises his philanthropy and relatively unshowy lifestyle. (WSJ)
SocGen continues to beef up its hiring in the USA, with Gabriel Petcu arriving from HSBC to work on healthcare M&A (Bloomberg)
Given that the latest list of Rising Stars has two separate sections for young bankers involved in datacentre infrastructure and in private credit, it’s hard not to come away with the conclusion that, as well as old familiars like “make a call every day to someone you haven’t talked to” and “always be direct in asking for more work”, the real career takeaway is “be in the right place at the right time”. (Business Insider)
“I am increasingly uncomfortable with the risks you are taking with your counterparties and feel quite strongly that you are trading beyond your financial means [..] in all honesty I might even be protecting you from yourself.” This was unquestionably the right call to have made with respect to Singapore-based trader Jan Ralph and Blackbrook Asset Management, but there’s always someone out there providing alternative trading services, and even Goldman Sachs and Citigroup ended up losing money when he finally collapsed. (Bloomberg)
Analysis of university endowment portfolios shows that apart from Dartmouth, the Ivy League were extremely vulnerable to political and donor pressure because they had invested heavily in private markets, without allocating enough liquidity to manage their GP cash calls. (Institutional Investor)
“Vibe-coded” software developed using AI tools seems to have lots of security flaws, with no real way to understand how they got in there. According to experts, people are beginning to reach the end of their willingness to forgive this. (WIRED)
Some clients’ judgement is fallible, some are infallible. Pope Leo XIV has removed an important asset management mandate from the Vatican Bank. (Bloomberg)
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
