The US investment bank I work for has become completely dysfunctional

I work for an investment America bank. I have been working in investment banking for 15 years and have had my fair share of long hours and pressure for most of my career. I have also changed banks and learnt most are the same. However, the bank I am currently working for is uniquely awful. 

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This bank is a maze of process and inefficiency, with a lack of accountability. It has been cost-cutting and restructuring for at least four years but hasn’t even touched the surface of its issues. 

The main problem is complexity. The related issues are incompetence and lack of ownership, along with nepotism and system failures. The outcome is that even though I have worked in this industry for well over a decade, I only now find myself crying in the bathrooms and buckling with exhaustion. I am not a junior banker, but I am working 16-18 hour days. I am burning out.

The drive to cut costs has made this situation worse because costs have been cut in the wrong way. If the bank had simply let go of a few people in each coverage, product and region team, things would have become leaner. It has done this, but it has also added a maze of complex support teams that are almost impossible to navigate. 

The problem is illustrated by the deal process. Seven years ago, when I was executing a deal, I had a tight team. There was a small stack of analysts, admin guys, managing directors and a middle office guy to ensure the pipe functioned correctly. We had one risk officer, who I knew well. When a deal was executed, I knew my team. From the analyst, to the middle office guy, to the IT guy who could help at 1am, we were a team, and we had great respect for each other. We got on with the work. I’ve done over 50 deals in this way during my career.

It’s not like that any more. The organization has become so opaque that I don’t understand it. Now, if I have to work on a model, for example, half the data entry team is off-shored. The off-shored team has different occupational health policies and doesn’t work weekends or bank holidays. The risk team is in Dublin; the middle office is in Poland. If I want to review a model back-up, I can’t because servers in London and servers offshore are different!!! 

To make matter worse, I have now been removed from the origination process by a new initiative to have only a few bankers focusing on clients. I am supposed to be all about execution and spend my days managing corporate finance workstreams, attending stakeholder committees, conducting investment analysis, and helping the clueless VPs who have entered the firm with the loads of new-hire MDs to negotiate the right terms with clients. 

On top of that, the regulatory burden is phenomenal. Every aspect of my work and investment analysis is audited. Simplistic errors in 90-page investment committee papers have become a source of angst. I constantly receive dozens of intimidating emails regarding products I know nothing about, in language I don’t understand, demanding that I fix things. I have no idea who can help, and have been trying for months to understand who would deal with this.

I’m exhausted. I am not the only one. Bankers are constantly resigning and leaving. I am desperately trying to keep deals moving and using all my skills and scraping every available resource to do so. 

My offshore resource centre helps, but they don’t really have the skills. I am working with disengaged people on different continents. When I go to our local investment banking analysts, they simply pass the buck. There are no MDs here taking ownership. Everyone comes to me and asks me to fix and sort things. And yet I am paid half of what the new counterparts tagging along with new managing directors from other banks are getting. 

Throughout this process, I see more and more people hired with big titles whose competency is questionable. These are people with no depth of client relationships, no commercial understanding, mediocre deal experience, no EQ or appreciation of frameworks of a global bank. They are bringing a different culture and philosophy and it is driving things further down.

My own role has stretched so much that I seem to be losing control. Ironically, I turned down two job offers because I love the transactional work I do. But this is changing. I have never been worked like this before and I cannot cope.

A major US investment bank is being ruined by incompetence. 

Jillian Rollins is a pseudonym

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