Some ambitious college seniors on their way to investment banking jobs are already networking for private equity roles that start in 2027.
Edwin Tan/Getty Images
Private equity reps are asking to meet with college seniors headed for jobs on Wall Street.
These "coffee chats" often lead to interviews for jobs that won't start for two years.
The May start has soon-to-be bankers on edge at a time when they should be celebrating.
Graduation season is supposed to be filled with commencement speeches, family dinners, and tearful goodbyes. Newly minted graduates headed to Wall Street, however, are finding themselves trading libations for leveraged buyout models.
Soon-to-be junior bankers told Business Insider that they have been summoned in recent weeks to introductory meetings with buyout firms and headhunters for associate jobs that won't start for two years β when their investment banking analyst programs end.
The communications reviewed by BI were for introductory meetings, often referred to as "coffee chats," and informational webinars. They came from employees and headhunters representing firms like Apollo; Hellman & Friedman; KKR; General Atlantic; Clayton, Dubilier & Rice as well as recruiting firms like Ratio Advisors, Gold Coast, CPI, and Amity. Spokespeople for these firms either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
Students said the coffee chat requests, which often precipitate more formal interviews, are taking place earlier than expected β putting them on edge about the industry's infamous recruiting frenzy, known as on-cycle recruiting.
For some, the feeling that official interviews could kick off at any moment has cast a pall over graduation season. Rather than occupying themselves with photo shoots in their caps and gowns, some finance grads are stressing over when interviews could break out.
"It's constantly monitoring your email," said an incoming first-year investment banker about the recent onslaught of meeting requests. She said she and her friends have their notifications on β "calls, texts, everything" β in order not to miss out.
The student, who hopped off the phone with BI just as her own graduation ceremony was commencing, said coffee chat meetings started hitting her inbox in early May, about four to six weeks earlier than classmates who received similar overtures last year.
"It's awful," said the student, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her future employment. "You never get a break."
On-cycle could kick off sooner than ever
Matt Ting, the founder of Peak Frameworks, which helps students prepare for Wall Street job interviews, said he's seen demand for his courses spike in the last two weeks as students gear up for on-cycle to kick off any day now.
"A lot of college grads go on a grad trip around now, which muddies things," said Ting, adding: "Some are still in school. Many firms had issues last year since it kicked off while many grads were backpacking somewhere in Asia."
The problem with the industry's on-cycle recruiting process is that no one knows when the hurricane will hit. And once it makes landfall, aspiring private-equity dealmakers are expected to drop everything to participate.
A second-year investment banker recalled getting an email around 10 p.m. when he participated in on-cycle recruiting last June. The firm's representatives asked him to interview the next morning at 8 a.m. Fortunately, he was within driving distance of the company's office. Some of his friends weren't so lucky.
"I personally felt it was too rushed, like I was taking the opportunity just because it presented itself, not because I was very calculated about it," he told BI about the experience.
The second-year banker said there is a clear distinction between coffee chats and official interviews that would signify the start of on-cycle. On-cycle recruiting, he said, only starts when a headhunter uses the word "interview" in their communication with candidates.
"The coffee chats are just an interview to get an interview," he said.
The process used to start after investment bankers got some job experience under their belts, but has been moving progressively earlier every year. Last year, the process kicked off on June 24, before many graduates had even started their jobs. The year before, it took place in July, prompting some investment banking analysts to skip out on training.
The sudden rush of coffee chat requests has students bracing for on-cycle to kick off earlier than ever this year. A college student running a college finance club said he'd heard on-cycle could begin after Harvard's graduation on May 29. An industry recruiter predicted that on-cycle recruiting might not get underway till late June, in keeping with 2024's cycle. They asked to remain anonymous to protect their relationships with prospective employers and private-equity clients.
Inside the coffee chat
Coffee chats, the step before PE firms proceed with formal interviews, may sound casual on the surface. In fact, they're a high-stakes way for recruiters to pre-screen candidates for official interviews, students told BI, so a lot is on the line.
"My advice has always been, no matter what, every coffee chat is an interview, implicitly or directly," said the second-year investment banker who participated in last year's on-cycle process.
These jobs, of which there are a coveted few, can vault early-20s professionals into the highest tier of American earners. Many tout comp prospects of more than $300,000, inclusive of salary and bonus, so the pressure for rookie masters of the universe to leave a good impression on recruiters is palpable.
A recent graduate about to start an investment banking job at a bulge bracket firm agreed. "I've had a firm tell me that I'm shortlisted," he said of his coffee chats, adding, "I've had headhunters follow up with me and say, 'Hey, by the way, this firm had great feedback on you. Let's stay close here,'" he added.
He said he moved to New York City immediately after graduation, motivated in part by the sense that he should be in a position for an early on-cycle recruiting process.
"I don't even have a couch," he confessed, so he spent his first few nights in the big city sleeping on a mattress on the floor. "Now I've got a bed frame."
"But if you want one of these jobs, you've got to play the game," he said. "And I'm just playing the game."
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon addressed various topics Monday at the firm's investor day meeting.
He said the bank would allow investors to buy bitcoin, while warning of stagflation.
He sounded dour on the economy but hopeful about a regulatory reset.
Jamie Dimon isn't a fan of bitcoin, but he plans to start offering it to clients of JPMorgan Chase, nonetheless.
"We are going to allow you to buy it. We're not going to custody it. We're going to put it in statements for clients," Dimon said Monday at the bank's annual presentation for investors.
"I don't think you should smoke. But I defend your right to smoke," he said in explaining his position.
The bitcoin comments came as the JPMorgan CEO, often considered Wall Street's elder statesman, took the stage to answer questions from investors and research analysts. In the roughly 40-minute session, he touched on various topics, from the economy to what he expected from President Donald Trump's regulators.
Dimon sounded a dour note on the economy, saying he thought the risk of stagflation was "two times" as high as many think and making dire predictions on credit as an investment class.
"I think the worst one for a bank and for most companies is stagflation," he said, adding: "I think the odds of that are probably two times what the market thinks."
He also said the bank had lost some commercial opportunities as a result of Trump's trade war. "We've lost business because of that," he said in response to an analyst's question.
He sounded upbeat, however, when it came to the president's regulatory agenda.
"I think that the secretary of Treasury, the president of the United States, the new head of the OCC, the new head of the CFPB, Michelle Bowman at Federal Reserve, and the SEC have all made it clear that they want to fix some of the things they think are broken," he said. "I think they'll accomplish some of that. Some will take longer than others, but they all want to do it."
He called on regulators to consider lightening regulations for publicly traded companies, which he said had been halved since the 1990s, from 8,000 to 4,000.
"We're driving companies out of the public marketplace because of expensive reporting, litigation, cookie-cutter approaches to boards, compensation, and litigation," he said.
"I would love to be a private company," he added.
Dimon also raised questions about the rapid expansion of investments in credit, including through funds raised to make nonbank loans, or private credit.
"I don't like making forecasts, but I am not a buyer of credit today. I think credit today is a bad risk," he said, adding: "I think that people who haven't been through major downturns are missing the point about what can happen in credit."
As interest rates rise and economic conditions soften, the risk of credit defaults rises, sometimes leaving borrowers strapped for cash and lenders struggling to recoup capital.
Earlier in the day, Marianne Lake, JPMorgan's CEO of consumer and community banking, said the firm was "closely monitoring the whole ecosystem" of lending but not giving up despite warning signs.
"The environment is very challenging for home lending and auto," she said, adding: "but we remain committed."
JPMorgan Chase is telling managers to "resist head count growth" and boost efficiencies.
CFO Jeremy Barnum told shareholders that AI will help the firm tamp down its hiring.
Another exec promised staffing reductions of 10% in a unit that handles fraud and account support.
JPMorgan Chase's hiring spree over the past five years may finally be winding down.
The bank's CFO on Monday told investors that starting this year, less of its $95 billion in annual spending will go toward hiring as the bank seeks to do more with less, thanks in part to AI.
"At the margin, we're asking people to resist head count growth where possible and increase their focus on efficiency," CFO Jeremy Barnum said at the company's annual presentation to investors in New York City.
Barnum said the bank will continue to hire strategically in what he called "high-certainty areas," including bankers, advisors, and branches.
"It should go without saying that we'll never compromise on safety and soundness and we'll continue to hire and invest in the high- certainty areas where there is a link between adding employees and growth revenue," Barnum said.
JPMorgan plans to hire in "high-certainty areas."
Screenshot
Despite economic headwinds brought on by tariff turmoil, Barnum told investors that America's biggest bank by assets is on track for 17% ROTCE (a measure of returns for shareholders) and annual spending of $95 billion.
The comments echo remarks made by CEO Jamie Dimon earlier this year when he told workers at a town hall meeting that "attrition is your friend" and encouraged them to welcome job-stealing AI.
JPMorgan's head count has grown by more than 23% in the past five years. The company reported it had more than 317,000 employees at the end of 2024, up from 256,981 at the end of 2019.
Following Barnum's presentation, Marianne Lake, the CEO of consumer and community banking, took the stage and predicted a 10% head count reduction in operations, a division focused on fraud, statement and payment processing, and account services.
Lake, who said advancements in AI would enable a reduced workforce, said 10% was a conservative estimate.
"I would take the over on this projection and bet that we will deliver more," she said.
JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum spoke at the bank's 2025 Investor Day presentation in New York City on May 19.
"It's actually pretty amazing, and from what certain of my colleagues tell me who are actually trained professional computer scientists, it actually helps them quite a bit too with their efficiency," Barnum said. "It's not just the amateurs who are helped by these tools. It's amazing stuff and we have high hopes for the efficiency gain."
Improving efficiencies has been a key theme at the bank this year as Dimon seeks to convince workers that returning to their desks Monday through Friday will help clients, including by boosting productivity.
In one slide shown to investors, the bank predicted a boost in productivity in its home lending unit while reducing head count.
A slide from JPMorgan's 2025 Investor Day presentation.
As of Monday, the bank's stock was trading at about $267 per share, up about 37% over the past year. Last year, the bank earned a record $58.5 billion in net income.
This story is developing. Please check back for additional updates.
Goldman Sachs has been building out its generative AI toolkit.
The firm aims to release one of its tools, an AI assistant, to most staff this year.
Here's a look at five such tools β the promise of what they can do, plus who's using them and how.
Last summer, Goldman Sachs' tech chief, Marco Argenti, shared a "completely not scientific" prediction with Business Insider that, in about three years, almost "100%" of Goldman's global workforce would interact with artificial intelligence while doing their jobs.
"It's going to be just like email at the end of the day," Argenti, the bank's chief information officer, said about AI in the 2024 interview, calling it "something that in some form is going to touch everyone." About a year later, the firm appears to be well on the way toward its goal.
Argenti came to Wall Street in 2019 by way of Amazon's gigantic cloud business, and now finds himself at the nexus of the bank's accelerating AI strategy. With his help, the firm has rolled out multiple AI-powered tools for about 10,000 members of its more than 46,000-person worldwide workforce. It's planning to expand some β like its AI Assistant chatbot β to all employees by the year's end.
On the firm's most recent earnings call, CEO David Solomon told shareholders he was expecting big things from AI β like his belief that it will "transform our engineering capabilities" and "modernize our technology stack."
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.
Reuters
Top executives report witnessing some of the benefits Solomon was pointing to. Melissa Goldman, a partner and global head of engineering in the banking and markets division, told BI that software engineers using the developer copilot had seen efficiency gains of up to 20%.
Goldman's growing suite of tools so far aims to boost employees' productivity. The firm is creating copilots designed to remove some of the drudgery from bankers' lives, for instance, like assembling presentations and prepping for client meetings; and AI polyglots fluent in several languages, saving research-distribution teams days burned doing manual translations.
All the tools were built on the bank's proprietary GS AI Platform, which debuted in 2024. It's equipped with access to some of the most prominent large language models, like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, but a protective layer was added to insulate the firm's sensitive data from outsiders.
Over the past year, BI has talked to multiple Goldman executives, including Argenti and Goldman, about their AI strategy. Through interviews and a review of the firm's public comments, we compiled intel about five of Goldman's AI tools, including what they do and whom they were made for. Details about each one tell a story about where the bank stands today on its AI journey.
Here's everything we know.
GS AI Assistant
What it does: Goldman Sachs' in-house version of ChatGPT
It uses a chat interface, similar to that of ChatGPT, but can pull its responses from the bank's confidential data repository. Right now, it's available to about 10,000 workers; the firm is intending to get it in the hands of the rest of the bank's workforce of over 46,000 by the end of the year.
It can perform a variety of functions, helping executives draft presentations and plan off-site meetings, or serving as a "personal tutor" for quant strategists. What's more, this system is a backbone of Goldman's AI offerings β a wellspring from which several other tools, like Translate AI, described below, have emerged.
As seven Goldman employees ranging from analyst to partner recently told BI, the GS AI Assistant is becoming part of daily life at the firm. These regular users spoke about use cases ranging from learning about printing call options and authoring original lines of code to preparing notes to guide intense strategic discussions.
"I use it every day for getting a head start on traditionally time-consuming tasks," said one engineering associate about how he leverages the tech. It's been "saving me hours every week," the associate, Konstantin Kuchenmeister, added.
Banker Copilot
What it does: Streamlines some aspects of investment bankers' jobs
Members of Goldman's investment banking division are also set to get an AI boost with the bank's so-called banker copilot, which makes access to high-level, protected data about matters like deal-making available to eligible users. Only a small group numbering in the dozens has access to it right now since it's in the early stages of development.
But the promise of what the AI assistant could represent for the banking business is hard to deny. Solomon himselfΒ has acknowledgedΒ the potential for AI to automate large chunks of tedious processes, like drafting S-1 regulatory disclosures for initial public offerings, for instance.
The banker copilot is expected to help users in several ways: among them, compiling data on clients and deals, analyzing corporate filings for hard-to-find cues that bankers would want to know about, drafting lengthy documents, or summarizing notes. It will have access to special subsets of data only to those authorized to see it.
Legend AI Query
What it does: A search tool that uses AI to navigate the bank's vast repository of data
Goldman uses a system called Legend, an open-source data management and governance platform. Accessing Goldman's vast vault of knowledge used to require users to know what they were looking for β as well as where they were looking β ahead of time, using a tool called "Legend Query." Think of this process as being like perusing dozens of stacks in a library, but without a librarian to help.
Enter Legend AI Query, a query tool that saves time by tapping artificial intelligence to serve as that librarian. Legend AI Query, which is in early stages of its rollout, is the firm's digital research assistant for accessing data using natural language descriptions. Neema Raphael, Goldman's chief data officer, told BI that this interface, combined with the bank's data, amounted to an "information superintelligence to help the human build a better mental model faster and quicker."
Here's how it works: To access files that could be deep within the bowels of Legend, all a user has to do is enter a query into the system in plain English and AI will do the rest. Examples of requests could look like:
Show me all swap trades with financial institution Y in Americas by the rates desk on May 1, 2025
Give me a list of commercial loan facilities that are maturing today.
Can I get the last price for April 25 crude oil futures with ticker XYZ?
Legend Copilot
What it does: A fast-tracked way to upload data onto Legend, and keep the system organized
Legend Copilot, which launched in October, is a tool primarily designed for use by data engineers to maintain Legend's infrastructure, and keep its information streams organized for others to access.
Legend draws on data that originates in other databases, but still needs to be routed into the centralized Legend system. The AI-powered assistant enables Goldman's engineers to generate end-to-end data models or APIs in minutes, though it used to be a much lengthier process when they did it manually.
The copilot also gives engineers templates on which they can create new reports, models, or APIs, streamlining the whole process.
Translate AI
What it does: In-house language translation to and from English
As a global bank, Goldman Sachs has clients worldwide. Sometimes, those clients have a preferred language that's not English.
To reach clients in their non-English speaking language, the bank would historically outsource some of this translation work, but turnaround times could stretch into days. That's why Goldman built Translate AI, an in-house and generative AI-powered solution that can translate text in seconds or minutes, on top of its GS AI Assistant platform.
Teams within groups like asset and wealth management or global investment research are using Translate AI, which translates to and from English. Kerry Blum, a partner and global head of the equity structuring group who manages assets of high-net-worth individuals, told BI that members of her team were using the tool to translate writing in nine different languages so far.
Wall Street bonuses are on track to fall this year, a new report predicts.
Johnson Associates' bonus report is an important bellwether for Wall Street.
Among its predictions: IB bonuses could be down 7.5%, while hedge funds may fall by 10%.
So much for the Trump bump.
Wall Street bonuses are on track to be in the red this year as Trump's tariff policies continue to keep corporate boards on the sidelines when it comes to dealmaking and fundraising, according to a report from industry compensation consultancy Johnson Associates.
The report, released on Thursday, warned that bonuses will be down across a number of sectors, from investment banking to private equity dealmaking. The only bright spot, the report said, will be the desks that execute trades on behalf of large investors, which have seen a jump in activity thanks to stock and bond market volatility.
Banks and investment firms could be flat or down between 2.5% to 10% compared with last year's dizzyingly high numbers, the report predicted. In 2024, the average bonus for employees in New York City's securities industry rose to $244,700, up 31.5% from the year before, a separate report released last month by the New York State Comptroller found.
Johnson's latest report warned of several headwinds facing Wall Street's year-end pay, from a dimmer outlook for M&A to investors' efforts to stave off risk to their portfolios.
"No one saw this coming," Alan Johnson, founder of Johnson Associates, told Business Insider of the about-face from this year's apparently dashed expectations.
"I think people will be very disappointed, because I think the perception is this is self-inflicted," he added. "The continued uncertainty will increase the stress levels of different firms and individuals. Will this end? When will it end? How will it end?"
Some of Johnson Associates' year-end projects for Wall Street's 2025 bonus compensation for bankers, traders, and others in asset management, hedge funds, and private equity.
Johnson Associates 2025 Year-End Compensation Report
Johnson Associates laid out three possible paths, coalescing around a 50% likelihood of its "base case" βΒ some tariffs and trade war uncertainty persisting throughout the year, but still some "muted economic growth." This path could drag down Wall Street bonuses between 5% to 10%, Johnson's report asserted.
But it also warned of a worse picture: a 30% chance of a more severe outcome involving a "broad trade war" and recession that would produce "significant market declines / layoffs." This could result in a "sharp decline" of 15% to 20%.
Here are more details from the Johnson Associates report.
Investment banking: Down between 5% to 20%
Johnson's report predicts that investment banking bonuses will be "down broadly."
Bonuses in advisory β the segment of investment banking handling corporate mergers and acquisitions β could sink between 5% to 10% from last year's levels, the report said, pointing to an "expected M&A 'mania'" that has left market participants deflated as a result of "economic uncertainty."
Other segments of the business are also expected to feel the pain. Equity underwriting bonuses could plummet between 10% and 20% amid a locked-up IPO market, the report continued.
A breakdown of expected 2025 incentive compensation across a range of sectors on Wall Street, from banking to hedge funds.
Johnson Associates' 2025 Year-End Compensation Projections
Trading: Up between 5% to 25%
The bright spot in banking that Johnson's report pointed to was equities and fixed income trading. "The traders certainly are the winners," Johnson told BI. "They're always the beneficiary of the volatility."
Trading revenues have soared in recent weeks βΒ as many investment banks reported during their recent earnings disclosures βΒ as volatility has driven some investors to rejigger their positions.
Equity sales and trading bonuses could be up between 15% to 25%, the report said, predicting slightly more modest increases in fixed income sales and trading (10% to 20%); and debt underwriting (5% to 10%).
Asset and wealth management: Down between 2.5% to 10%
Financial advisors' bonuses could be down between 2.5% and 7.5%, Johnson said βΒ less than other sectors, because their clients are more resistant to short-term market shocks and are playing the long game with their investments, he explained.
The picture is tougher for asset managers that expose clients' retirement accounts to products like ETFs and index funds, he continued, citing investors' efforts to derisk by shifting away from stocks in lieu of bonds. Here, Johnson predicts a reduction of 5% to 10%.
Additional details from Johnson Associates' 2025 year-end compensation projections.
Johnson Associates' 2025 Year-End Compensation Projections
Private equity: Down between 2.5% to 10%, some areas like credit expected to remain flat
Large private equity firms are expected to see bonuses dip by 2.5% (for real estate strategies) up to 10% at small- to midsize firms.
Most PE firms have been reticent to deploy their war chests of accrued capital amid prolonged uncertainty. The smaller firms have had a tougher time raising capital than their larger counterparts, meaning small- and midsize firms could feel the pain the most. "The rich have gotten richer in recent years" as mega-funds have gobbled up the lion's share of available capital, Johnson said.
Larger firms could also benefit from more diversification across their products, like in private credit. In this segment of lending, bonuses are expected to be flat, not down, thanks to "strong demand for talent" and sustained interest in the space.
Carter McIntosh, a 28-year-old Jefferies banker, died of a toxic mix of drugs, BI has learned.
The Dallas medical examiner ruled the death an accident.
McIntosh was an associate on Jefferies' tech, media, and telecom team in Dallas
The 28-year-old banker whose death prompted online attacks against Jefferies died from the "toxic effects" of fentanyl and cocaine, the Dallas medical examiner said.
Carter McIntosh, an associate with the bank's technology, media, and telecommunications coverage team in Dallas, was found dead in his apartment in January, leading Jefferies CEO Richard Handler to issue a memo defending the bank from "unfounded" speculation about the banker's cause of death.
The police initially ruled it an "unexplained death." An autopsy report by the medical examiner's office now says McIntosh's death was an accident caused by the "combined toxic effects" of fentanyl and cocaine, according to a copy of the report obtained by Business Insider.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid up to 50 times stronger than heroin, has proved a rising threat in the US, fueling an alarming surge in overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says overdoses remain the No. 1 killer of Americans ages 18 to 44.
"Our hearts grieve for Carter and our sincere condolences to his family, coworkers, and friends. Carter is missed by many at Jefferies and beyond," Handler told BI in a statement on Wednesday.
In the wake of McIntosh's death, Handler and the firm's president, Brian Friedman, released a memo to staff expressing their "tremendous sadness" and offering support to employees.
Handler also criticized what he called "unfounded, vitriolicattacks" against Jefferies' work culture.
"At this point, nobody knows exactly what happened and engaging in speculation with cynical assumptions serves no useful purpose and only adds to the grief that the McIntosh family is suffering," the memo said.
McIntosh worked at other financial services firms before joining Jefferies, including stints in equity research at Goldman Sachs and as an investment banking analyst at Moelis & Co., his LinkedIn page said. Before that, he attended Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.
Goldman Sachs laid off some employees last week. Recruiters advise on how to bounce back.
Business Insider
Goldman Sachs' annual head-count-cutting ritual is underway.
The layoffs have targeted various titles and roles, people with knowledge of them said.
Here's how to bounce back from a layoff as deal activity slows, according to Wall Street recruiters.
Goldman Sachs' annual head-count-trimming ritual continued this week, and people with knowledge of the fallout said they found some of the names that have emerged surprising.
"I think some people are fantastic. I think other people are not as fantastic," said Meridith Dennes, the managing partner of Prospect Rock Partners, a Wall Street recruiting agency. Dennes told Business Insider she received roughly a dozen calls last week from affected personnel.
The annual culling, known internally as the Strategic Resource Assessment, is aimed at purging the firm's bottom performers. The cutsΒ areΒ taking place earlier than usual and expected to affect between 3% and 5% of Goldman's more than 46,000-person workforce.
Dennes and a former Goldman insider who's close to the bank said they had learned of cuts across multiple roles and divisions, including investment banking advisors handling mergers and capital markets activities. They described cuts across various titles, including analysts, associates, and vice presidents. (The former Goldman employee requested anonymity to speak freely about the situation.)
"This is part of our normal, annual talent management process, which we execute consistently across the firm," Nick Carcaterra, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs, said, adding: "We don't comment on the specifics in any given year."
David Solomon, the chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs.
How to respond to a layoff could become increasingly important as the industry grapples with the fallout of President Donald Trump's policy changes, which have dampened dealmaking momentum.
Three recruiters, including Dennes, walked BI through what to do if it happens to you.
Don't delay
The first thing to know is that your career is by no means dead in the water. Getting laid off "isn't a death sentence, a career ender, by any stretch of the imagination," said Kevin Mahoney, a managing partner at Christoph Zeiss Partners. The key, all three recruiters said, is not to wait indefinitely.
If you have savings, you might be tempted to take a rest and start the recruiting process in the fall after a summer holiday. The recruiters who spoke with BI discouraged such a decision, saying it could dull your competitive edge.
"Part of the fundamental issue is, if you take three months off and then start looking, it could take an additional six months to land," Dennes said. "Nobody's looking for somebody who's been out of work, I would say, six months or longer."
Title, pay, location
Being part of a layoff, for the most part, means swimming upstream to get back into an open seat, the recruiters said.
Caty Wilcox, a director at the recruiting firm Selby Jennings who regularly communicates with investment bankers and others across the Street, said knowing what you want would help speed up the process.
"If you're looking to leverage your network, the more specific parameters you can give to folks in your network in terms of what you're looking for, the better," she said. Are you open to roles that are in different geographic locations, for example? It also helps to have preexisting relationships with recruiters, she added.
The recruiters who spoke with BI suggested that freshly laid-off people keep an open mind when it comes to jobs with lower-tier banks, a lower salary, or even a more junior title. Accepting a step down from associate III to associate II could help you land a seat faster.
On pay, Dennes encouraged being realistic and said candidates should avoid holding out for lavish signing bonuses or multiyear guarantees. Take advantage of this down market, the recruiters said, by showing you're willing to accept lower compensation if necessary. Employers like to hire good talent without the premium price tag of a talent war.
'Own your story'
In conversations with prospective employers, it's essential not to conceal the layoff but to be up front and honest about it, the recruiters said. Hiring managers and headhunters are all but guaranteed to find out, and coming across as deceptive is far worse than admitting to having been laid off.
"When we do our searches, we do a lot of referencing on every candidate even before we call them," Mahoney said. "The first thing we do is we call their former group head."
Consider being honest if you struggled to drum up original business, which could be fine at a firm that's seeking an execution banker, not one focused on generating new inflow. The bottom line, Dennes said, is to "own your story" β sometimes you're not the reason for the setback.
"Frequently, there are wider macroeconomic factors at play. You might have been at the wrong place at the wrong time," she said. "We've seen quite a few folks bounce back" after losing a job, she said, adding that many went on to enjoy "illustrious careers."
Indeed, Jamie Dimon was famously pushed out of Citigroup in 1999 by his longtime boss and mentor, Sandy Weill. Now he's the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and widely viewed as Wall Street's elder statesman.
Three of JPMorgan Chase's newest managing directors. From left: Mei Chang, Shakir Iqbal, Ruchira Patel
Courtesy of JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan elevated 227 new managing directors in its commercial and investment banking unit.
The promotions last week vaulted execs into the firm's highest rank outside the C-suite.
BI spoke with five of the new MDs about their work habits, advice for young people, and more.
One got the news while traveling in Mexico City; another while attending a sibling's birthday lunch in Buenos Aires. A third was visiting his mom in Karachi, Pakistan.
These are just some of the places where, last week, members of JPMorgan Chase's newest class of managing directors answered calls from their bosses telling them they'd done it β earned the promotion that would vault them into the bank's highest echelon outside the C-suite, and the zenith of their Wall Street careers.
Every year, America's biggest bank by assets promotes new classes of MDs in business lines spanning tech to asset management. This year, some 227 executives were elevated to MD in the commercial and investment banking division, which generated about $70 billion in revenue last year β almost 40% of the firm's overall revenue for 2024. That includes 118 MDs in global banking and markets, groups that advise on corporate mergers and facilitate trades for large investors.
Business Insider spoke to five of these new CIB managing directors about how they got the news and their best advice for climbing the ranks. They're leaders across a range of businesses. One, for instance, is an investment banker specializing in healthcare services. Another is an executive in payments, a segment of CIB that manages cash and transaction services for companies. CEO Jamie Dimoncalled it out earlier this year, praising the business line for growing its fees "by double digits for the fourth consecutive quarter," and generating more than $18 billion in revenue throughout 2024.
We've presented the MDs' responses in their own words, edited for length and clarity, and organized them alphabetically by last name. Their insights reveal a class of leaders who seem to agree that their newfound prestige comes with greater expectations. As one of the MDs put it succinctly: "It's so much more than a title."
Florencia Ardissone
Florencia Ardissone
Courtesy of JPMorgan Chase
Division: Payments
Role: Customer Insights, Data & Analytics
Location: New York
Where were you when you got the news and how was it delivered?
I was at lunch with my family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, celebrating my sister's 40th birthday when my manager video called me to share the great news. It gave us yet another wonderful reason to raise a toast.
What does being an MD mean to you?
Becoming a managing director, a senior leader at JPMorgan, is a major accomplishment that I am very proud of, particularly as a Latin American woman and mother living in New York City. It's a great professional milestone at a very special time in my personal life, as I just had my second baby boy. Recently, however, I've lost some dear friends and family members to cancer, including my grandmother and my aunt. I only wish I could celebrate this with them, too.
What's one attribute you think helped you get ahead at work that some people tend to overlook?
Resilience. In my role, I have the opportunity to simultaneously create, test, and develop multiple products, with each project advancing at its own pace. When challenges arise, it often takes creativity and persistence to find an alternative approach. Instead of getting frustrated or giving up, I focus on finding a viable solution.
How do you manage your time day-to-day? Are there rituals or routines that keep you focused?
My primary goals are to maintain a healthy lifestyle and a positive mindset. I prioritize being a present parent, starting my day with my kids before biking to work. To stay active, I take the stairs, choose healthy meals, practice yoga, and maximize my steps. Professionally, I focus on setting clear, quantifiable goals, minimizing unnecessary meetings, and dedicating time for uninterrupted work. I adhere to mantras such as being genuine, consistent, responsive, and thoughtful, celebrating team successes, and leading by example.
How did you build support internally for this promotion? What did you do to stay on senior leaders' radar?
Building support internally takes time and involves engaging with different businesses and senior leaders who interact with the products I develop. Ultimately, it's about understanding your stakeholders, their goals, and how we can better serve our clients. Over time, I've built trust and gained exposure to senior managers who know they can rely on me.
What's something junior people think matters that actually doesn't?
People often assume that having a large team and many direct reports is crucial for promotion, but that's not the case. While a big team can sometimes enhance your promotion prospects, the firm is primarily interested in the impact and leadership you demonstrate, rather than the size of your team.
Mei Chang
Mei Chang.
Courtesy of JPMorgan Chase
Division: Global Banking
Role: Healthcare Investment Banking
Location: New York
Where were you when you got the news, and how was it delivered?
I was traveling in Mexico City and received multiple calls from the co-heads of my group and sector β not a bad place to be for a real-time celebration!
What's one workplace quality you think helped you get ahead that most people overlook?
Anticipation. As a junior banker, you have to get out ahead of requests from deal teams and senior bankers. As a more senior banker, you need to anticipate client needs and industry trends.
How do you manage your time day-to-day? Are there rituals or routines that keep you focused?
After 10 years in the industry, I've found that no two days look exactly alike, and part of the key to longevity is remaining nimble. I'm intentional in carving out regular time each week to step back and think "bigger picture" β whether it's ideas for clients or new industry thought pieces β to ensure I don't get caught up only in the execution of the day-to-day job. On a personal front, sometimes my days might end with a smoothie and boxing class; other times, the situation might call for a smashburger and fries.
How did you build support internally for this promotion? What did you do to stay on senior leaders' radar?
Define and gain alignment on your goals, demonstrate progress and success toward those goals, and touch base with key stakeholders regularly.
What's something junior people think matters that actually doesn't?
Only keeping your head down and working hard behind the scenes and not also pairing it with active communication and advocacy. While I believe banking is a meritocracy, meaning hard work is critical, relationship building is how we grow our external business β so it makes sense that that is how people succeed internally too.
Shakir Iqbal
Shakir Iqbal.
Courtesy of JPMorgan Chase
Division: Sales
Role: Cash Equity Sales
Location: Dubai
Where were you when you got the news, and how was it delivered?
I was actually in Karachi, Pakistan, visiting my mother for Eid holidays when my manager called me from London. She was the first person I told, which felt like being back in high school again!
What does being an MD mean to you?
It's so much more than a title. For me, it is a personal validation and recognition of my hard work that goes beyond business results.
What's one quality you think helped you get ahead that most people overlook?
Fearless networking. During my career, I've developed a network of clients, colleagues, and friends inside and outside the industry. Whether it's through my university affiliations, past professional roles, or at JPMorgan, I have actively looked to build relationships. I have never shied away from reaching out to learn about people's roles, regardless of their seniority, to connect with them and strengthen our shared networks.
How do you manage your time day-to-day? Are there rituals or routines that keep you focused?
I live and die by my to-do lists. This applies to my professional and personal life. At home, it annoys my wife at times, but if it's not on "The List," it will never happen!
How did you build support internally for this promotion?What did you do to stay on senior leaders' radars?
While business results are at the core of it, I made sure that all stakeholders were aware of my story. When your senior leaders, partners and colleagues have equity in your career, you are more likely to win. I also make it a point to look beyond my business, interacting with other business lines, which not only expands my network but ensures that the firm as a whole benefits.
What's something junior people think matters that actually doesn't?
Being in sales, one thing I have always told junior people is that it's not just about the most senior decision-makers. Invest time with deputies of your client CEOs and the other individuals from the client company. Not only is it respectful and rewarding, but they are also often the future leaders and decision-makers of those respective organizations.
Kevin Koblenzer
Kevin Koblenzer.
Courtesy of JPMorgan Chase
Division: Securities Services
Role: Fund Services
Location: Boston
Where were you when you got the news, and how was it delivered?
I was at a pub in Dallas, Texas, for a long-awaited gathering of old high school friends when I received a call from my manager on my cell phone. After the terrific news, I proceeded back into the pub to find my buddies, raised my arms, and had a celebratory toast. Of course, the next round was on me!
What does being an MD mean to you?
I am extremely proud of this accomplishment as it validates my contributions and the impact I've had on the business throughout my career. More importantly, it opens the door to even more possibilities to make a difference and influence our strategic direction.
What's one workplace habit you think helped you get ahead that most people overlook?
There's always an opportunity to improve a product, process, or activity.
How do you manage your time day-to-day β are there rituals or routines that keep you focused?
There always seems to be more to do in a day than one could ever complete, so I ensure that my priorities remain focused on activities that will have the most impact. One personal routine that I encourage is to set aside at least a 90-minute block on your calendar each day to catch up on key initiatives and priorities and to stick to it.
How did you build support internally for this promotion? What did you do to stay on senior leaders' radar?
Here are two suggestions: First, volunteer to drive strategic client initiatives, which shows your desire to contribute beyond your role. Second, know when to escalate a serious matter, and if you can proactively recommend a solution to the problem, even better.
What's something junior people think matters that actually doesn't?
The amount you speak in meetings doesn't matter; it's the quality of your contribution to the conversation when you do speak that counts.
Ruchira Patel
Ruchira Patel.
Courtesy of JPMorgan Chase
Division: Markets
Role: Fixed Income Financing
Location: New York
Where were you when you got the news, and how was it delivered?
I was on the trading desk when my manager called me into his office to deliver the message in person. Being a JPMorgan lifer, it felt like a full-circle moment to get the news on the same date I originally joined the firm as a college graduate.
How do you manage your time day-to-day? Are there rituals or routines that keep you focused?
No two days are ever alike for me. On any given day, I find myself juggling anything from managing risk positions to finding solutions to help clients navigate a volatile market, to helping a teammate figure out their next vacation.
What's something junior people think matters that actually doesn't?
Being the loudest voice in the room! As you become more senior, listening becomes monumentally more important than just being the loudest person in the room to prove your worth. Quiet leadership focused on thoughtful and meaningful contributions is often far more effective. EQ matters so much more as you continue to grow in your careers as leaders.
Employees at JPMorgan's largest US office are back five days a week as of last week.
The Polaris site in Columbus, Ohio, is a major tech hub with more than 12,000 workers.
Employees spoke to BI about jockeying for desks and parking in their first week back.
JPMorgan Chase's largest US office was put to the test last week as its roughly 12,000 workers returned Monday through Friday for the first time since the work-from-home movement swept the nation five years ago, at the start of the pandemic.
Whether the bank passed that test depends on whom you ask.
On Monday, April 21, an executive at the firm's sprawling Columbus, Ohio, campus, projected optimism about employees' first full week back in the office while acknowledging some pain points.
"Ample seats were available across the site," a memo from Becky Griffin, the location leader at the Columbus campus, said. "We did notice that some areas were busier than others," she added, "and we're continuing to monitor capacity to make sure everyone can easily find a seat."
Griffin said lines for the cafeteria at the campus, known as Polaris, were "longer than usual," but that they "moved efficiently, with a smooth checkout process."
She also addressed concerns about parking. "To make the parking process more efficient, we have already adjusted the shuttle service and provided updated instructions to our on-site parking attendees," she wrote in the memo, which workers received as they were wrapping up their first full day in the office together.
Employees who spoke to BI complained that some of these issues persisted as the week went on, leaving some workers jockeying for desks, hunting for alternative parking, and skipping lunch to avoid long lines. In a second memo sent on Friday, Griffin said the company would be "making ongoing adjustments" and offered a link to an email for employees to provide feedback. She added that the bank had established a "Polaris Commuting Resources" page on its internal system to keep employees updated on changes.
JPMorgan's Polaris campus in Columbus, Ohio.
JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan workers at Polaris who spoke to BI, however, said they couldn't see easy solutions to some of the problems discussed in the memo because the campus β which houses some 12,000-plus employees β has limited parking and a total seating capacity of 11,930, according to internal documents about the property reviewed by BI.
"There's really not a lot of space left on the property," said one software engineer at Polaris. "They'd have to make some serious changes for the site to be able to hold all the cars that come there every day."
The engineer was one of three employees who spoke to BI about working at the Columbus facility, which is home to many of the bank's tech workers and key to several of its cloud-focused initiatives. These employees asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss company matters.
"There's not really infrastructure in place to handle the number of people that are working there now," the software engineer continued, adding: "It's definitely put everybody in kind of a tough spot."
Griffin did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement to BI, Michael Fusco, a JPMorgan spokesperson, pointed to measures the bank has taken over the past week to smooth out the transition.
"We have been working hard to ensure our sites have the capacity and amenities employees need to return full-time," Fusco said. "Last week, we had more than 2,000 open seats available daily in Polaris, ensuring ample seating to accommodate all employees. We also increased the number of parking attendants and shuttles to improve the parking process."
Life at Polaris in a post-RTO world
In January, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called his workers back to the office five days a week starting in March. The return was delayed for some office locations to give them time to get ready. The firm's Polaris campus only switched to the five-day-a-week RTO model last week.
JPMorgan isn't alone in demanding workers to return to pre-pandemic norms. Employees at Goldman Sachs and Citadel were called back to the office five days a week in 2021. Tech giants like Amazon and TikTok have also ordered workers back to their desks Monday through Friday.
Some Polaris employees have pushed back, however, including by exploring unionizing, as BI has previously reported. Dimon defended his decision in an internal town hall at the Columbus campus in February, saying the mandate was issued with the bank and its clients in mind, not individual preferences.
JPMorgan has addressed the insufficient parking at Polaris by reserving additional spaces at a local church about a mile away. Once parked, workers can wait for a shuttle that will take them to and from the campus, about a 10-minute ride. Employees, however, described 30-minute waits to board the buses in some cases.
One back-office manager told BI that on-campus parking has also become strained. The employee said the site's central buildings are encircled by a road dotted with two-story parking garages, and the road has been logjammed.
"From the moment you hit that ring, you're sitting in traffic to get around the campus," said the manager, who added they had recently spent an hour and 15 minutes looking for a parking spot.
It's led some employees to search for workarounds β like finding parking at Polaris Fashion Place, a nearby mall, and ordering Uber transportation to the office, the second of the two engineers said.
This strategy hasn't proved a major time saver, however, this engineer added, citing the backlog of vehicles clogging the campus road in the morning. The manager described large orange construction signs punctuating the road and third-party traffic attendants to direct the flow of vehicles.
He questioned whether these measures were helpful, saying that, in his experience, traffic attendants "just wave you past closed lots. They don't tell you where to go."
'They can cheat the system'
Once inside, the employees said there's some jockeying for desks, mainly for people who don't have assigned seating and don't reserve a spot ahead of time through the company's booking portal.
"I actually have a close friend who had to move desks probably five times over the span of an hour," said the first software engineer.
It's not just individuals who are being Tetris'd around the office in an effort to have teams sit together. The back-office manager said their team's designated seating was moved earlier in April, and that they'll need to be relocated again in the coming days.
"Everyone is still fed up, and everyone is still scratching their heads as to why we're doing this," the manager said.
Both software engineers said some intrepid workers had discovered they could swipe into the office and then leave a few hours later if they wanted to go home early.
"They can cheat the system like that," said the first engineer. "Some people will just badge in, work for an hour or two, and leave."
Employees also questioned whether being back in the office is really fostering teamwork if it means some colleagues can't sit together.
"One of our guys" β an executive director on a particular team β "is sitting in a completely different wing, because we have no room left," the second engineer said. "Tell me how collaboration is a driving force when your teams are now scattered throughout the building instead of sitting in one area."
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images; Social Security Administration; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
The Social Security Administration faces a delicate moment. Its future teeters between a career bureaucrat and a former Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase executive who may bring order β or further tumult.
The agency maintains the country's largest safety net. It employs nearly 60,000 federal workers and provides benefits to over 73 million Americans. It has long been seen as untouchable in Washington β "the third rail of American politics" β and commissioners rarely leave, even as presidential administrations change.
That changed in February, when Michelle King, a 30-year veteran of the agency, abruptly left her role as acting commissioner.In her place, President Donald Trump installed Leland Dudek, an employee who wasn't in the agency's executive ranks.
The transition, which came as DOGE staffers accessed internal agency data, one worker's affidavit said, was a sharp departure from typical agency protocol. It "was a shock to every single person that works at SSA," Laura Haltzel, a former Social Security associate commissioner, told Business Insider. It was also a harbinger of the chaos to come.
Meanwhile, Frank Bisignano, a finance titan and formidable turnaround manager, is waiting in the wings as Trump's nominee to replace Dudek. The transition ahead could set the course for how β and how well β millions of Americans receive their benefits.
Some in the industry told BI they see him as a turnaround artist, which could serve him well should he take over the agency.
Bisignano's confirmation is awaiting a full Senate vote, which is expected after the chamber votes on nominees for multiple diplomatic positions. He has already appeared before the Senate Finance Committee, where he addressed concerns about privatization. "I've never thought about privatizing. It's not a word that anybody's ever talked to me about," he told lawmakers.
An official on the transition team shepherding Trump's nominees through the confirmation process declined to comment for this story or make Bisignano available for an interview.
Some who spoke with BI expressed surprise that he would join the Trump administration. An archived biography from First Data, where he served as chair and CEO, said he's "a strong supporter of diversity" and helped create affinity groups for women and LGBTQ+ employees at the company. He's donated to candidates on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, records show. In May 2019, Bisignano gave $125,000 to the Trump Victory PAC and another $83,900 to the Republican National Committee.
Frank Bisignano during his confirmation hearing.
The Washington Post/Getty Images
Born in Brooklyn, with a father who was an orphan and a grandfather who emigrated from Italy, Bisignano first landed on Wall Street in the 1970s. He started out at smaller firms before joining the legendary bankers Sandy Weill and Jamie Dimon as they built what would become Citigroup. There, he managed the company's global transaction services business, helping steer trillions of dollars in payments worldwide.
"He knew enough about the guts of the operations he was involved in to be able to be a very good manager," Weill, a former chair and CEO of Citigroup, told BI.
Later, he joined JPMorgan Chase, where he reversed multibillion-dollar losses in the firm's mortgage banking unit and rose to become its co-chief operating officer.
"Frank did a very good job in operations for JPMorgan, but I think that he was looking for something where he would be able to test his leadership skills beyond operations," Weill said.
In 2013, he took over First Data. Its owner at the time, the private equity giant KKR, was seeking a CEO with knowledge of payments and back-office systems. He steered the company through its $2.6 billion initial public offering and its $22 billion sale to Fiserv in 2019; he became Fiserv's CEO the following year. Under his tenure, the company's stock price has roughly doubled.
A post on the official White House website in late April touted the "Trump effect," crediting the president for spurring a series of private sector investments in American industry. Among those the administration pointed to: Fiserv's $175 million commitment to develop a 427,000-square-foot fintech campus in Kansas, which is expected to drive the creation of 2,000 jobs.
Leland Dudek's turbulent tenure
Currently leading the agency β and seen by some SSA insiders as responsible for much of the recent turmoil β is Dudek, the acting commissioner Trump installed in February.
One former senior Social Security official who was familiar with the senior-level employees usually tapped for the role remembered thinking: "Who is this guy?" A director-level employee who's on administrative leavetold BI that Dudek, 48, was "a nobody until a month ago." (Most of the SSA sources who spoke with BI left within the past few months.)
Most recently, Dudek had been serving as a senior advisor in the agency's Office of Program Integrity.
Dudek, who holds degrees from the Catholic University of America and the National Defense University, has long been enmeshed in anti-fraud and information technology work. According to an agency biography, he previously served as the chief information security officer for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. He has been with the SSA since 2009, though he does not appear on an organizational chart archived immediately before King's departure.
One former manager at SSA who met Dudek when he arrived at the agency said that he "seemed like a pretty earnest, straightforward kind of computer science IT type who had experience outside the agency." Dudek, this person said, was part of a larger group who felt the agency was slow to adopt technological advances.
"He generally seemed to be interested in things running more effectively," a former SSA employee said. They described him as being frustrated over "trying to make change and do things in a bureaucratic environment" and said other employees at his level felt similarly.
Another former SSA executive said they believed he had good intentions and genuinely cared about curbing fraud and improper payments.
His path at the agency was not straightforward. Elon Musk said on X that Dudek was "fired" for "helping @DOGE find taxpayer savings" before he ascended to SSA's highest perch.
There, he brought his own style.
"I think he felt like he deserved a voice at the table, and then he suddenly got one and didn't quite know what to do with it," the former executive said. The executive added that Dudek appeared to have competing priorities between staff cuts and making sure the agency ran smoothly. "It's been a bit of a yo-yo," they said.
"It's very unusual, very unusual leadership," said Kathleen Romig, who worked at the agency for nine years on and off and now serves as the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Many of his decisions seemed to be "hasty and ill-considered," Romig said. Some, like shuttering the agency or changing in-person identification guidelines, were ultimately reversed.
"I've never seen leadership like this before at SSA, by a long shot," she said.
On a press call in March, Dudek said some contracts in Maine that let parents register their newborn children for an SSA number were "canceled because I screwed up."
"I made the wrong move there. I should always ask my staff for guidance first before I cancel something," Dudek said. "I'm new at this job. It looked fishy." The contracts were ultimately reinstated.
Dudek and the Social Security Administration did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Trump Administration is targeting the Social Security Administration for suspected fraud.
VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images
His appointment pushed at least one SSA worker to leave. When they saw reports that he'd shared information with DOGE and was still elevated, "it just all became a farce," the former worker said.
A person who has spoken with Dudek said they believed some of his bluster might be a smoke screen. They said Dudek, like previous commissioners, said he feared that the system was on the brink of collapse and worried about people not receiving their benefits β a similar sentiment to what Dudek expressed in a recording obtained by ProPublica. They feel that he thinks he's doing damage control and running interference between DOGE and everyone else.
"It felt like a bunch of 6-year-olds with too much sugar had been put in charge of the agency and were just kind of running all over the place, randomly disconnecting and reconnecting things in different ways," the former SSA manager said.
Bisignano's high-stakes challenge
This is what awaits Bisignano, who has developed a reputation as a hard-charging, demanding executive who tends to see Saturdays as just another workday.
"He was always making sure that everybody had their nose to the grindstone," Weill said.
As he's moved from company to company, Bisignano has surrounded himself with a cadre of deputies, some of whom have been with him since his JPMorgan Chase days. Another person who knows Bisignano said some of these loyalists had shown they'd follow his lead without question, no matter how big the ask.
"They're going to pick up any call from Frank any time of day β morning, night, Saturday, Sunday, 7 a.m.," the person said.
Some of the decisions at Fiserv that played out on Bisignano's watch appear to have rankled some of his employees. A former Fiserv client project manager said that return-to-office policies rolled out late last year under Bisignano contributed to his decision to leave. The former manager described the culture as "a bit of a sweatshop."
Around Thanksgiving, Fiserv implemented new return-to-office guidance, calling some personnel managers back to their desks five days a week and instructing other workers to spend about nine hours a day at the office, an internal communication reviewed by BI shows.
The former Fiserv employee credited Bisignano with getting results: "I do think he was part of the reason Fiserv is so profitable."
In a statement, Fiserv pointed to a 122% rise in its stock under Bisignano's leadership, attributing his "vision" to driving innovation across technology and payments. The company also cited his "commitment to investing in people," including veterans and small-business owners.
Whether Bisignano's no-nonsense approach will be as effective in running the government's biggest safety net as it was in vaulting him to the zenith of corporate America is an open question. So is what a dynamic might look like with his peers in the administration, like the former Wall Streeters Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent, or Musk, who has acted as DOGE's public face.
He may soon find himself standing between policy whiplash from Washington and the checks that millions of older Americans depend on.
Bisignano "loves his reputation for fixing things," said one person who worked closely with him, "not for burning things down."
Honda issued an RTO order on April 23, requiring US-based staff to work in the office at least 80% of the time by October 6.
Kevin Carter/Getty Images
Honda on Wednesday issued a return-to-office order for its US-based staff.
The internal memo says that employees must work in the office at least 80% of the time by October 6.
The automaker joins a list of major companies, including JPMorgan and Amazon, issuing RTO orders.
Honda on Wednesday issued a return-to-office order for its US-based staff, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.
"As Honda faces a rapidly changing business environment and increasingly competitive market conditions, we believe it is essential for associates to return to working primarily at on-site offices. Therefore, effective October 6, 2025, Honda is requiring associates to work on-site at least 80% of their work week," the memo reads.
The memo says spontaneous interactions between staff members are "critical" to driving innovation at the company, and working on-site will promote essential in-person collaboration and problem solving. It was signed by Kazuhiro Takizawa, the president and CEO of American Honda Motors Co., and Kensuke Oe, the president of Honda Development & Manufacturing of America.
"This information is being shared with associates today to provide the longest timeline possible to begin to prepare for this transition," the memo continues. "Simultaneously, Honda is evaluation how this change will impact facilities, including cafeterias and common spaces, as well as studying other workstyle-related items to ease the transition and prepare sites for associates to be able to start reporting to the office as early as July 7, 2025."
Honda employs 30,000 associates in the US, with manufacturing plants throughout the country, including Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, according to its public employment statistics. Seventy-five percent of those employees work in manufacturing, and 24% in sales, research and development, and finance. It is unclear exactly how many Honda employees are remote workers.
"We understand that workstyle change is difficult, and associates will likely have many questions now and in the coming months," the memo reads. "But, we believe this will make Honda an even stronger and more competitive company for the future."
When reached by Business Insider, a spokesperson for Honda confirmed the RTO order and its October 6 deadline.
"Beginning October 6, Honda will return to a majority onsite work style requiring our associates to work on-site 80% of the time," the spokesperson said. "This decision is driven by the rapidly changing business environment, which requires increased collaboration and innovation that we believe can best be achieved through in-person teamwork. Our work policy will continue to provide flexibility for our associates to work remotely up to 20% of the time."
With its Wednesday memo, Honda joins a list of major companies, including JPMorgan and Amazon, that have issued RTO orders.
Read the full memo below:
This email is intended for US associates at American Honda, American Honda Finance Corp., American Honda Foundation, Honda Development & Manufacturing of America, and Honda Racing Corp. USA.As Honda faces a rapidly changing business environment and increasingly competitive market conditions, we believe it is essential for associates to return to working primarily at on-site offices. Therefore, effective October 6, 2025, Honda is requiring associates to work on-site at least 80% of their work weekIncreasing opportunities for spontaneous interaction and Y-Gaya style discussions is needed to drive innovation, strengthen our Challenging Spirit and maintain a customer-centric focus. This is critical to Honda's Second Founding.Additionally, in keeping with the Honda PHilosophy, working primarily on-site increases the likelihood of associates going "to the spot" to understand the real situation and address key problems by collaborating with teams, peers and leaders.This information is being shared with associates today to provide the longest timeline possible to begin to prepare for this transition. Simultaneously, Honda is evaluation how this change will impact facilities, including cafeterias and common spaces, as well as studying other workstyle-related items to ease the transition and prepare sites for associates to be able to start reporting to the office as early as July 7, 2025.We understand that workstyle change is difficult, and associates will likely have many questions now and in the coming months. But, we believe this will make Honda an even stronger and more competitive company for the future. We are committed to continuing communication, and you will see additional updates to support your team with this transition. If you have questions, please contact a member of your leadership team or local HR business partner.Thank you for your support.Kazuhiro TakizawaPresident & CEO, American Honda Motor Co., IncChief Officer, North America Regional OperationsKensuke OePresident, Honda Development & Manufacturing of America
People walking by JPMorgan Chase's Manhattan office tower
Momo Takahashi/BI
JPMorgan promoted 118 people in global banking and markets to managing director.
The bank began announcing the new MDs internally on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said.
Business Insider obtained the full list in global banking and markets β take a look.
JPMorgan Chase this week promoted 118 people in global banking and markets to the rank of managing director, the firm's highest designation outside of the C-suite.
The number is up slightly from the 116 executives the firm elevated to managing director in these business lines last year.
The new MDs sit within JPMorgan's commercial and investment banking unit, which advises companies with mergers and stock sales and facilitates trades for large investors. In addition to bankers and traders, the company also elevated people who work in functions like legal, risk, and compliance.
The bank began internally announcing promotions across the company on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said. It's part of an annual investment banking ritual the bank engages in each April.
Eighty-six of this year's new MDs in the division sit within banking, including M&A advisory and corporate lending; another 32 are in markets. An analysis of the new managing directors' LinkedIn profiles shows they stem from all over the world. Some are based in New York or Dallas; others in London, Frankfurt, or Singapore. As of press time, many members of this year's MD class had not updated their LinkedIn pages with their new roles, leaving the title of "Executive Director," one rung below MD, in their profiles.
The commercial and investment bank generated roughly $19.7 billion in revenue for the first quarter of the year, according to the bank's most recent earnings figures; that's up nearly 12% year over year. Banking and payments revenue of $8.7 billion was up 4% year over year; markets and securities services revenue was up 19%. (Markets-specific revenue of $9.7 billion was up 21%, the firm said, amid heightened equities activity.) Overall, JPMorgan said this month that it produced $14.6 billion in net income for the quarter.
"Clients have become more cautious amid an increase in market volatility driven by geopolitical and trade-related tensions," Jamie Dimon, the company's CEO, said in a statement accompanying the release. He also recently addressed a variety of issues facing the economy and US democracy, including stagflation and the specter of a possible recession, in his annual shareholder letter.
Last year, JPMorgan was the third-ranked M&A advisor globally (after Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) and second-ranked in the US (after Goldman), according to the deal tracking firm Dealogic. Globally, the firm advised on 403 transactions with a total deal value of about $760 billion; in the US, specifically, it worked on 228 deals with value of roughly $481 billion, Dealogic found.
Now, Marco Argenti, the chief information officer at Goldman Sachs, is bullish about the tech's growing analytical and reasoning powers, too.
"It is like the ultimate librarian that knows how to find the information," he told Business Insider in a recent interview. He said that AI's reasoning capabilities have reached the point of helping users analyze and synthesize conclusions.
It's not just mundane tasks that can be outsourced to AI anymore, but even intricate problems that Argenti predicted will one day be solved by "teams" of human and digital brains.
That deepening degree of analytical ability has prompted a shift in how Goldman's other leaders have come to think about AI, and spawned a suite of new products. Under Argenti's leadership, the bank has introduced generative AI-powered resources built using the AI platform Goldman launched in mid-2024. That foundation was engineered with access to popular large language models like Google's Gemini or OpenAI's ChatGPT, but includes a protective layer to insulate the firm's confidential data.
Goldman has since produced a range of tools, from a developer copilot for writing code, to a language translator, to its interactive "GS AI Assistant" β an AI sidekick for employees resembling the kind of chat interface that ChatGPT operates for its own everyday users.
During the bank's April earnings call, CEO David Solomon told shareholders that these tools, including the GS AI Assistant, promised "to scale and transform our engineering capabilities."
It's now available to roughly 10,000 members of the firm's more than 46,000-person-strong workforce, with the goal of expanding it to most others by the end of the year. The rollout comes as financial firms, including other banks, start to see cost and time savings from their AI investments. Case in point: Solomon has said that AI is doing 95% of the work on an IPO prospectus.
With AI's reach in finance only accelerating, some in the industry have openly worried about threats from the tech, like job redundancies and cost savings. Nonetheless, it's won over some devotees β like these seven Goldman employees, ranging from analyst to partner, who shared real-life depictions with BI of how they're making it work for them.
Their vignettes offer a picture of how AI is changing life in finance.
Ashish Shah, partner and chief investment officer of public investing, asset and wealth management
Ashish Shah, partner and chief investment officer of public investing, asset wealth management, Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs
Even though he's a senior leader in the firm's public investing business and among its top executives as a Goldman partner, Shah still welcomes help presenting his thoughts and opinions.
"With more analytical people, generative AI is really helpful as a starting point with some of the more creative aspects of their jobs," Shah told BI. "The GS AI Assistant helps get me to a first draft quickly. Once I have that first draft to react to, I have all sorts of opinions and can iterate easily from there."
It allows him to brainstorm and structure concepts he wants to get across and organize those specific threads "in a pithy manner," he said.
When Shah used AI to help structure a strategic discussion for an upcoming business on-site trip, he said it shortened "what could have taken three to five hours," and boiled "it down into 30 minutes of back and forth with the LLM."
"That kind of time saving," he added, "is incredibly valuable."
Kerry Blum, partner and global head of the equity structuring group, asset and wealth management
Kerry Blum, partner and global head of the equity structuring group within private wealth management
Goldman Sachs
Working with some of Goldman's wealthiest clients, like high-net worth individuals, family offices, and founders of companies, Blum's broader team talks with people all over the world.
"We're a global bank. Our clients are global. Our investment ideas are global," Blum said. "So we want to meet our clients where they are, and while our reach is already global, we can enhance the way we engage with our clients by speaking to them in their preferred language."
The bank is now expanding its Translate AI tool, which currently works with nine other languages, into the asset and wealth management division, Blum said.
Historically, Goldman outsourced some of this translation work, and turnaround times could sometimes stretch into days, making time-sensitive updates challenging or impractical at times. With Translate AI, output is seconds or minutes, she added, allowing her teams to share more time-sensitive updates rather than stick to the more evergreen content with a longer shelf life.
Raphaelle Jacquemin, managing director, global banking and markets
Although AI is new to Jacquemin's day-to-day toolkit, the managing director in equity derivatives structuring is already reaping the rewards.
Specifically, Jacquemin uses the tools to help her with software, whether it's doing something complicated in Outlook or maneuvering through coding languages.
"For example, I can say, 'I want to create in Outlook a search folder where I have all the emails which are bigger than 2MB, unread, and older than 5 years old. Give me a tutorial on how to do this,'" she explained.
She's also found it valuable in breaking down programming languages, like Python. The London-based employee has asked AI to make sense of coding commands, like "pd.MultiIndex.from_tuples," or suggest the best way to spin up tables of figures in Python.
Christopher Dixon, vice president, global investment research
Goldman Sachs' Translate AI tool is also available to its investment research teams to translate a wide variety of reports into some languages.
The content-management-group team has been using the LLM-based interface, which translates to and from English, for around nine months, said Dixon, a vice president at the bank. He said the firm has recorded a "high double-digit improvement" in productivity around translations, while also reducing translation outsourcing costs, he said, though the firm declined to offer specific figures.
Samantha Boden, vice president, global banking and markets
GS AI Assistant
Goldman Sachs
As a quantitative strategist focused on risk modeling, Boden spends much of her time developing new ideas.
"While this is exciting, learning entirely new topics can be challenging," she said. So Boden has turned to the GS AI Assistant as her "personal tutor," which has completely changed the way she approaches her daily work and masters technical topics.
For instance, if Boden wanted to learn how to price an American call option, she said she can ask the AI a series of questions about pricing methods or an "unsolved example to practice." If certain features are added, she can query how the model changes using the AI system, as well.
"The power lies not only in the AI's vast knowledge base but also in the speed of iteration," Boden said, adding that she can quickly request more details about a specific response, or personalize the learning experience.
Konstantin Kuchenmeister, associate, engineering
Goldman Sachs' engineering coding assistant and the GS AI Assistant are quickly becoming the primary tools in Kuchenmeister's daily workflow.
"I use it every day for getting a head start on traditionally time-consuming tasks such as code writing and reviewing models, saving me hours every week," said Kuchenmeister, who is also an adjunct math professor at Columbia University.
From routinely asking the tool to review team members' code changes, to running a line-by-line analysis to flag potential vulnerabilities, Kuchenmeister said he has started treating the GS AI Assistant "as both a collaborative tool and colleague."
The AI assistant has also shaved time off the weekly updates, routine project plans, and presentation decks Kuchenmeister has to put together. Recently, he prompted it to prepare the monthly update presentation he gives, while telling it to keep the draft under three pages, bearing in mind notes from the prior week's meeting, and to format everything like a bulleted list.
"It responded with a near-final version in less than a minute," he said.
Samruddhi Somwanshi, analyst, engineering
Software engineers across corporate America are increasingly turning to AI for coding help.
Nitat Termmee/Getty Images
As one of the firm's newest recruits, Somwanshi, who holds the entry-level role of analyst, turns to AI to save time navigating the bank's vast codebase. She also uses the bank's AI tools to write test cases quickly, explain specific parts of code, and document changes made to the code.
It's a new world for engineering analysts like her β just a few years ago, time-consuming tasks like these would have mostly been done by hand.
"Sometimes I just describe what I want to do, and it helps by pointing me to the right files or functions I should check for," she said. "It might sound like a small thing, but doing this every day really adds up and makes my work as a developer much smoother," Somwanshi continued, adding: "It's been a huge time-saver."
And as an analyst and newbie to Goldman's hard-charging culture, every second on the job can count.
Wall Street had high hopes for President Donald Trump's second term in office. Now, some are not so sure.
Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images
Wall Street earnings have shown early signs of how the Trump presidency is affecting banks.
Firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America said the locked-up M&A market hurt IB earnings.
Now, some corporate dealmakers who backed Trump are biting their tongues, insiders say.
Many soothsayers throughout Wall Street's C-suites had bet that a new administration, with values ostensibly more amicable to the business community, would shock the life back into a comatose market for dealmaking.
They may have spoken too soon.
Indeed, on every bank's first-quarter earnings calls in recent days, one person loomed over the proceedings, though not a single CEO mentioned him by name: President Donald Trump. Instead, they talked about uncertainty, worried clients, and a concerning economic outlook.
"While our corporate and consumer clients are resilient and in good financial health, the world is in a wait-and-see mode and is facing a more negative macro outlook than anyone had anticipated at the beginning of the year," Jane Fraser, the CEO of Citigroup, said on a Tuesday morning phone call. "We know that prolonged uncertainty generally hurts confidence."
Behind the scenes, bankers told Business Insider that they were feeling less diplomatic about the Trump administration and its tariff policies and pronouncements.
"I don't know how you couldn't be embarrassed" about the outcome, a managing director at a middle market-focused investment bank, who previously worked at one of the large-cap firms that reported earnings, told me by phone on Tuesday. "If you're an executive in finance and you talk to clients frequently and you understand how the world works, there's no way you can't be upset."
When I asked the MD what he'd been hearing from his friends throughout the industry who supported Trump's economic agenda before he took office, he didn't mince words: "They're pretty quiet."
Goldman said that the paralyzed merger market dragged advisory revenue of $792 million (collected from working on deals) down 22% as compared with the same period last year. "In investment banking, the volatile backdrop led to more muted activity relative to the levels we had expected coming into this year," David Solomon, the firm's CEO, said.
Bank of America said its total corporate investment banking fees were $1.523 billion for the quarter, down nearly 8% from the quarter immediately before. In advisory β the segment of the business handling debt and equity advisory and working on M&A transactions β the bank reported $384 million, down 31% from the prior quarter.
Watching the deals market sputter has surprised and deflated many insiders, particularly because of how recently they were convinced of the opposite outcome. One survey released in December found that 85% of respondents β corporate dealmakers β said they were eyeing more transactions than they had been six months earlier under the Biden administration.
Other firms like Citigroup said they were bolstering loan loss provisions, another bellwether of a weakening economy that marks the tightening of consumers' wallets. Mark Mason, the firm's CFO, said shoppers were "resilient," according to data he'd reviewed, but pointed to a tilt in how some were spending their money.
"We've seen a shift toward essentials, and away from travel and entertainment," he said.
The full impacts may be unclear for a few more months
Traders were among the only Wall Streeters to benefit from the volatility, earnings results showed. Firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America rode the wave to record revenues, with Morgan Stanley saying "strong client activity amid a more volatile trading environment" shot its trading revenues up by 45%.
The impact was so pronounced that compensation expert Alan Johnson predicted in an interview with me last week that traders will be the only people in finance to receive meaningful year-end bonuses. For bankers and underwriters, he said, the storm clouds were gathering.
A fuller picture of how Trump is impacting Wall Street may not emerge till the next earnings season later this summer. Many of the worst days of volatility, which left some with flashbacks of the opening salvos of the pandemic or the financial crisis, happened in April, which is in the second quarter.
Whether the White House will care, however, is another matter. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had a message for Wall Street from the briefing podium earlier this month: "Trust in President Trump."
For the time being, Wall Street may have little choice in the matter.
Goldman Sachs reported earnings for the first quarter of 2025 on Monday.
Goldman generated record trading revenue, but market volatility hurt its corporate dealmaking arm.
CEO David Solomon addressed anxious feelings from clients, and explained how he's counseling them.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon is advising clients to closely monitor how policy shifts from Washington impact the global business landscape, adding that he's hopeful for a resurgence in M&A volumes later this year.
"When you get outside of the US and I listen to CEOs, I hear a greater sense of short-term concern, but everyone would like less uncertainty and more clarity," Solomon told analysts and shareholders in a Monday morning conference call to break down the firm's first-quarter performance. "My guess is, over time, this level of uncertainty will come down, and my general message to people is to go slow and take a pause here until we have more clarity around a lot of these issues."
Solomon was referring to the recent political uncertainty and a global markets frenzy spawned by White House policy decisions to impose, and then back off from, aggressive tariff measures on foreign trading partners. The resulting markets volatility left Wall Street facing down a conundrum in the first quarter: Traders rode the wave to record revenues, while the momentum that bankers hoped would enable corporate dealmaking to flourish again was all but eviscerated.
Still, Goldman reported robust earnings for the first quarter of 2025, surpassing analyst expectations. The firm said it had generated net revenue of $15.06 billion during the first quarter, up about 8.6% from $13.9 billion in the previous quarter, which concluded at the end of 2024; and also up about 6% from the same quarter one year ago.
"Ongoing policy uncertainty and market volatility drove many clients to reposition their portfolios," lifting trading volumes in the firm's global banking and markets business line, Solomon said on the conference call, according to a transcript by the investment research platform AlphaSense. "In investment banking, the volatile backdrop led to more muted activity relative to the levels we had expected coming into this year."
Washington whiplash helps traders, hurts bankers
Solomon added later that some clients overseas had grown jittery as they watched the whiplash play out from Washington.
Since the start of the year, Wall Street has been strapped in for a bumpy ride as it has tried to make sense of the convulsive policy changes from Washington. Global indexes were thrashed last week as a result of President Donald Trump's policy announcements tied to tariffs and renegotiations with international trading partners.
"What we're hearing from clients β particularly it applies in Europe and other places around the world β is they don't like the level of uncertainty, and they don't like the fact that certain constructs for how they interact with the US economic system and the global economic system are potentially changing," he continued. "It's early to call heads or tails or direction of travel on how this will play out."
Traders have reaped the rewards of the selloff, which rattled economists, provoked fears of a bear market, and inflamed recessionary anxieties. Take Goldman's global banking and markets business line, where traders reported net revenue of $10.71 billion in the first quarter, 10% higher than the previous quarter and up 26% versus the same period last year. Record net revenue in equities β trading revenue was $4.19 billion, up 27% from the first quarter last year β was the big driver of success in this business line.
Investment banking faces 'a risk'
Overall investment banking fees were $1.91 billion, down 8% from the first quarter of 2024, citing softer performance in advisory. In recent weeks, bankers have turned to trying to drum up new business in a challenging environment, and keeping clients abreast of the seemingly hour-by-hour developments.
Investment banking advisory revenue dropped 22% from the same period last year, amounting to $792 billion this quarter. That's also down 18% from the nearly $1 billion Goldman generated in the prior quarter. The bank successfully defended its leading position on the M&A league tables.
Solomon offered a few reasons to be hopeful about the precarious investment banking landscape, saying that the pipeline of deals the bank was juggling was growing.
"As we stand today, our client dialogues remain elevated, and our backlog is up for the fourth consecutive quarter," the CEO said. "That being said, our ability to executive on these transactions will of course be dependent on market conditions."
In fact, he's vowing to win an all-important slice of the M&A pie β if it ever materializes.
"There's no question there's been a pickup in activity and monetization" from financial sponsors who hold billions in liquidity, but have been trepidatious about pulling the trigger on leveraged buyouts amid uncomfortably high interest rates. Solomon said "there's no firm better positioned to capitalize on that than Goldman Sachs" when the dam finally breaks under "enormous pressure" from investors to see returns on their capital commitments to various funds.
"For a period of time, there'll be some uncertainty around how certain things that were close proceed forward," he later told another bank analyst on the call. "But I would expect a significant amount of M&A activity through the rest of the year. But obviously, if the landscape got more constrained, there's a risk of it slowing."
Reed Alexander is a Wall Street correspondent at Business Insider. He can be reached via email at [email protected], or SMSthe encrypted app Signal at (561) 247-5758.
Trump's tariff pause was great for stocks, but for deals, it just kicks the can down the road.
The pause threatens to extend Wall Street's hiring freezes and further lower bonuses.
Bankers and PE execs share how they are spending their time as they wait for clarity.
Long hours, hiring freezes, and a souring bonus outlook. This is the life of the Wall Street dealmaker right now as M&A stalls amid continued uncertainty over Trump's tariffs.
"We're going to have three more months of paralysis," said Alan Johnson, a finance industry compensation consultant. "Buyers and sellers are going to say, 'I'm going to wait,'" added the Johnson Associates founder.
It's not just investment bankers who are sitting on the sidelines. Private equity deal pipelines are also on hold as investors and target companies try to understand how current and future tariffs could affect business revenues and supply chains.
"If you're an investor, unless you have an amazing conviction that you're insulated from the tariffs, you're sitting on your hands and waiting," said the head of a sector at a major private equity fund.
As one investor at a midmarket private equity firm put it: The news of the 90-day pause was well-received, but nothing to celebrate. "We pop bottles when we have great exits that earn our investors tons of money, not for short-term noise."
Inside the lull
What do dealmakers do with their time when there are no deals? The people who spoke to BI said they and their teams aren't going home any earlier. In fact, some are traveling more to stay in touch with skittish clients even as they predict year-end bonus declines. Others are working longer hours to understand what the tariffs will do to their portfolios.
Eric Stetler, the head of mergers and acquisitions at the independent investment bank D.A. Davidson, told BI that far more of his time is being spent keeping clients updated.
During a time like this, Stetler said, "just staying in front of clients" is paramount. "People want to know what's happening."
Stetler said senior bankers tend to devote about "75% of their time" to existing client mandates and the rest to drumming up new business. "At times like this," he said, "that reverses, or close to reverses."'
"That's not to say that our new business development activity is pausing because we're still having a lot of conversations," he said. "We're still pitching new business. We're preparing businesses for sale, and looking at processes with our clients."
The PE sector head said private equity deal teams are spending more time with their portfolio companies or updating their models with the latest tariff numbers.
"The announced tariffs were more severe than what was expected, so we've been having to update Plan B, Plan C, and Plan D to make sure we can mitigate the effects," the executive said before Trump announced the 90-day pause.
Hiring and bonuses
Hiring is largely frozen, according to a banker and Wall Street recruiter. "What I'm hearing is that it's kind of like, 'Maybe this is not a good week to push something through. Can we give it a week or two?'," the headhunter said.
Though the firms this recruiter communicates with had yet to invoke full-on hiring freezes β which are rigid postures that tend to presage layoffs β the word "freeze" had been mentioned in some conversations.
"If things don't get better," the recruiter added, "there will be layoffs."
Bonus expectations have also hit the skids as the prospect of closing a deal gets pushed further into the future. As Stetler explained: "It takes roughly four to six months to run the sale process" on a live deal. Even if a buyer decided to pull the trigger on a purchase today, "you are looking at a late Q3, probably, at best," for when such a merger might close.
Trump's tariff pause threatens to further dampen bonuses by pushing the timeline out even more β potentially to 2026, said Johnson, the compensation consultant.
"Would you do a deal now if you're a buyer? In 90 days, maybe he changes his mind again, or 90 days becomes 30 days, or 90 days is tomorrow, or 90 days is 180 days," Johnson said, referring to President Trump. "Maybe things will be a lot better in three months, the sun will start shining. But now we're in what, July? And then by the time the lawyers get involved and you sign an agreement, it's 2026."
Get in touch with these reporters. Reed Alexander covers Wall Street banks; he can be reached via email at [email protected], or SMS/the encrypted app Signal at (561) 247-5758. Alex Nicoll can be reached via email at [email protected], or Signal at @alexnicoll.01
Ryan Lund is the cohead of US technology and software at investment bank Houlihan Lokey.
The 48-year-old veteran investment banker joined the firm last year from UBS and Raymond James.
He told BI about his growth outlook for the team even as mergers stall and markets hit headwinds.
What's the typical diet for a Wall Street investment banker?
For some, it's steak dinners with clients. For others, it's eating crow over lost deals. For Ryan Lund β investment banker by day, self-professed vinophile by night β it's a lot of protein bars, airplane snacks to power him through the roughly third of the year he spends traveling, and a glass of Bordeaux or Burgundy to cap off a long day if he's home.
Lund, 48, is the cohead of US technology and global software banking at Houlihan Lokey, the restructuring and M&A advisory firm he joined last year to expand its dealmaking practice and win competitive mandates. He is responsible for helping run a team of roughly 150 bankers worldwide, alongside his two US technology coheads, John Lambros and Jason Hill; and Sasha Pfeiffer, head of European technology and software. Lund reports to Phil Adams, global head of technology. When he's not traveling, Lund spends much of his time in Florida, either working from his Tampa home or the firm's office in Miami.
Lund's journey to Wall Street began as an undergrad at Harvard where he was studying economics. Interested in a finance career, he cold-called the office of the CEO of Raymond James, where he eventually interned and landed his first full-time job.
He worked his way up to cohead of the enterprise software IB team before leaving Raymond James in 2020 for RBC Capital Markets and then the Swiss banking giant UBS, where he was the global head of technology.
Notable deals he's worked on include theΒ acquisitionΒ of eBay Enterprise (a division of the eponymous e-commerce behemoth) by a consortium of companies, including the private equity firm Permira, for nearly $1 billion. He's also worked on transactions that have enabled private asset giants, such as Blackstone and KKR, to expand their technology footprints.
According to deal tracking firm Dealogic, Houlihan Lokey has advised on 20 M&A transactions in the global technology sector since the beginning of 2025, amounting to $1.68 billion in deal value. The firm has advised on 97 deals so far this year, reaching $8.9 billion in value.
Last year, the bank worked on 99 global tech M&A transactions worth more than $18 billion; and 421 deals overall, amounting to $59.3 billion.
In an April interview, Lund walked Business Insider through the growth plans and vision for his division at Houlihan β including a five-year aspirational aim to double the roughly 150-person global tech and software banking team. He explained how he got his internship with that fateful cold call; dished about how he structures his day; the must-have snacks he craves on the road; and the career advice that has guaranteed his "longevity" in the industry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us how you got your start in investment banking.
My dad told me: "If you ever want to get something, call the decision maker."
So, in early 1998 while in college, I cold-called the office of the CEO of Raymond James β an investment bank that was local for me in the Tampa Bay area since it was headquartered in St. Petersburg β to ask for an internship.
Needless to say, I did not get the CEO, Tom James, on the phone. But his admin allowed me to leave a voicemail. I knew there were Harvard alums at Raymond James. I knew Tom was a Harvard MBA. I was an undergrad. So I certainly leveraged that.
I don't know how many days or weeks later, I got a call back from somebody in the organization who said, "Hey, I heard you called Tom about an internship. What did you have in mind?" And that's kind of where it all started, in 1998.
In '99, right after graduation, I started as a full-time analyst in Raymond James' technology and communications group.
You joined Houlihan Lokey last year. Why Houlihan? What drew you to the platform?
I was always a team sports guy growing up: I played football in college, golf when I was younger. In football, you need blockers, receivers, running backs, a quarterback. If one person doesn't do their job, it doesn't work.
There was a really consistent feel and messaging of the type of people here, the posture of how they want to do business and build teams β extremely collaborative and collegial. They put a lot of thought into how they built the business to incentivize collaboration and teamwork.
What does a typical morning look like inside the Lund household?
If I'm home, I'm usually greeted by my 6-year-old daughter at about 6:30 in the morning, so that's the perfect wake-up call. If I'm not at home, I'll still get up around the same time.
For breakfast, I'm a protein bar guy β they're easy and efficient β and I have some espresso. If I have more time, it's a bacon, egg, sausage kind of breakfast.
I actually start my day the night before. I look at my calendar to make sure I know exactly what the day looks like, and what I need to prepare for β assuming it's something that I haven't already been preparing for multiple days, like a big pitch or important meeting.
Take us through an average work day.
I start my mornings by triaging emails and reviewing my calendar. I try not to schedule any meetings before at least 9 o'clock, preferably 10. If I'm traveling, I try to take the 6 a.m. flights so that it doesn't wreck my day.
I wear multiple different hats. There's quite a bit of internal and admin work that we do, including personnel factors that take up a lot of time. We're meeting with the staffers to make sure our team is not overworked or underworked.
There are meetings throughout the day. I spend a good chunk of my time meeting with clients and private equity sponsors. We talk about live deals, markets, specific companies β a broad swath of topics.
Tell us about the tech and software team at Houlihan. How big is it, where are people based, and how do they work together?
The team is global and primarily split between the US and Europe. It fluctuates a little bit, but I'll just call it 150 to 160 people at any given time throughout the past 12 months.
It's probably 80 or 85 in the US, and the balance in Europe. The largest office in the US is New York, but we've got a fairly sizable office in San Francisco as well as some bankers like myself that are in neither. I'm officially out of our Miami office, although I tend to be on the road more or in Tampa where I live.
Europe has the balance of our team outside the US, with a sizable presence in London, Manchester, and Frankfurt. We've got bankers in France, Italy, and some in Spain.
Having bankers live in geographies where there's a concentration of activity or where their focus is key.
We are selling an intangible, and we're human beings who communicate non-verbally in a significant number of ways. You can't replicate that through Zoom. You have to be in three dimensions.
Walk us through the vision you have for the team and its growth.
We could easily double the size of our team and commensurately double or more of its revenues. Call that the five-year goal. That's not official, but I personally see the opportunity.
More of that growth is likely to come from the US than Europe, just because the US is a much bigger market and there's a lot of room to capture market share.
Last year we hired five MDs on the technology team. We've not yet formalized our hiring plans for the coming year, but we are actively looking to hire additional senior folks β whether that's one, two, three, or five more, or maybe more than that TBD.
Whether in the office or working from home, how do you make the space your own?
My home office is the one that I put the most effort into. It's messier than I would like. I've got a Florida Gators helmet β I grew up a big fan of the Gators, and I'm excited because my son's going there β signed by Tim Tebow and Steve Spurrier.
My wife and my oldest son both went to Florida State. So offsetting that helmet is a signed Florida State helmet and a ball from a game.
I've got a Harvard football helmet, which was from my glory days. I've got a bunch of my favorite deal trophies in the cabinet, which is fun to reminisce on the challenging but fun transactions. And many of those β I still stay in touch with the CEO or business owner who have become friends of mine.
Most important are the pictures of my family behind me. I can always glance over and see my beautiful family.
Must-have snack when the mid-afternoon work munchies set in?
I'm on the road, on average, three days a week, or about 150 nights a year. It's been like this for at least the last 10 years.
I never, ever travel with a backpack that doesn't have at least a couple snacks in it. You never know when you're going to miss a meal. Plane food is awful. I've got lots of protein bars and cashews and things like that.
For my office snack, it might be popcorn. I'm definitely a fan of good, butter popcorn β not movie theater style; it's too salty β or it could be a KIND Bar.
What helps you manage stress and decompress after a long day or during a deal?
I'm not a high-stress person. My philosophy in life is that every day is a privilege. I have strong faith, and I'm blessed to even be here.
So, for me, when something's not going right in a deal, I can pretty easily reflect and be like: "I know this is really important in the moment, but this isn't actually what's most important in life."
It takes a lot to rattle me. That doesn't mean I'm not human. I get stressed during the heat of the moment. I like to go for long walks outside; fresh air has a way of clearing the mind.
What about hobbies? Is there anything you obsess over outside of work?
I'm a big wine collector. My wife and I are big Napa fans β Napa is where my heart lives β but I also am a big fan of Bordeaux and Burgundies.
You have to think about which wines are ready to drink. It's not just, go pull something out and pop it. Sometimes it's a 15- or 20-minute journey to decide what to open and why. Afterwards, I tell her the story of where I got the bottle.
I always ask my wife: "What would you like to open tonight?" And she says: "You pick." Happens every time.
What is an example of a particularly challenging deal you worked on at Houlihan or over the course of your career?
The nature of the company's VC shareholder base is what made it so complex. RetailNext had raised money multiple times over the last 10 years β some very large growth rounds and smaller bridge rounds. It created what I would call a very complex Rubik's Cube.
The company was a venture-funded business that had many, many different owners with different hold periods at different valuations and at various raises with different terms. A situation like that can be more challenging than if you are selling a business for private equity firm "A" that controls 85% of it, where you have one clear decision maker.
This year hasn't delivered the surge in M&A and public offerings that some were hoping for. What are you hearing from clients?
Buyers are hungry for high-quality deals and want to put capital to work, primarily on the sponsor side. But we're seeing a meaningful uptick in interest from strategic buyers as well. The Google/Wiz transaction, for instance β that's an example that could lead to others.
Unless it's a very high-quality business, sellers are moving more slowly to bring them to market because of all the uncertainty. Perceived or real β it doesn't matter. People are being cautious and delaying the launch of the process.
We're encouraging clients that have identified quality assets they like to spend their time wisely with doing the work before they launch. You want to give yourself the best chance to win? Do the work upfront so you can put yourself in a position to.
Wall Street has been promising better days for several years. Why should investors believe the more optimistic sentiments this time?
I think the definition of "it's coming back" is what's misplaced. If people think it's going to be like 2021 again β that's not coming back for a really long time.
If you were to look at the M&A volumes, it's definitely been slower. But to me this feels like maybe it's like '16, '17, '18, where it's not bad. Our pipeline of business is growing.
The market is inherently cyclical. It always has been. It likely always will be.
You can't time it, but what you can do is build client relationships, put yourself in a position to be a valued partner to your sponsor clients or your companies. So, when the market turns, you're in a position to win that piece of business.
What advice would you share with your younger self?
You're not going to love every part of your job β if you did, they'd call it a hobby β but you need to love your industry segment or the material that you're consuming. That will keep you going more than high comp or prestige.
Don't be afraid to ask questions at the appropriate time β the questions that you truly want to understand the answers to. It shows you're paying attention and you're being thoughtful.
For an analyst or an associate, I really value when we walk out of a pitch or out of an important meeting and the junior folks will pull me aside and say, "Hey, how do you think that went?" Or, "You said this in there: Why did you say it that way?"
Early on, you may not understand why you're being asked to do all of this analysis, or why being perfect matters. Try to understand the "why."
This business is a grind and it's a lot of hours. But if you're intellectually curious about the stuff you do, you can do it forever. That's the secret to my longevity in the business β about 27 years.
Have a recommendation for our next interview or someone on Wall Street you'd like to hear from? Reed Alexander is a correspondent at Business Insider covering banks and financial services. Get in touch with tips or suggestions at [email protected], or SMS/the encrypted app Signal at (561) 247-5758.
These are just some of the management philosophies of Jamie Dimon, the billionaire banker and two-decade veteran CEO of America's biggest bank by assets, JPMorgan Chase, which will report its first-quarter earnings later this week.
In his newly released annual letter to shareholders β which the bank published on Monday β Dimon tackled a range of topics, from stagflation to the future of the US democracy. The CEO also outlined some of the "management tricks and tools" that have vaulted him to the zenith of Wall Street and corporate America.
Among them: Make follow-up lists. Refrain from pulling Dimon aside after a meeting to surreptitiously share grievances. Author your own memorandums and go right to the source when you want answers, even if it means breaking through the chain of command.
He reflected on a time when he worked through intermediaries while at Bank One, the firm he ran from 2000 to 2004 before JPMorgan Chase. One day, his wife phoned him to report that one of the firm's ATMs was malfunctioning.
Within the walls of the bank, one of the executives Dimon spoke with assured him everything was fine. But when the executive drove out to inspect the ATM β at Dimon's behest β he discovered it was, in fact, faulty. Dimon, in turn, instructed the exec to fire the third-party vendor to whom they'd outsourced monitoring the ATMs. "Now we track it ourselves," he said.
And, if your cell phone rings and "Jamie Dimon" pops up on Caller ID, it would be advisable to leave the fanciful corporate jargon at the door.
"Regarding communications, avoid management pablum," he wrote in the section outlining his leadership strategies and advice. "It's a pet peeve of mine. Talk like you speak β get rid of the jargon."
'Morale sucks because we suck'
Dimon is known for breaking with his buttoned-up counterparts across the Street when it comes to straight talk, including recently when he launched into an expletive-laced soliloquy to defend the firm's five-days-a-week return-to-office rule.
Dimon's pronouncement has been met with resistance inside JPMorgan, where some employees have contemplated unionization and strategized their next moves in private group chats. But this isn't the first time Dimon has remained steadfast in the face of complaints of plunging morale, he said.
He recalled visiting a local Bank One branch β one of the firm's roughly 1,800 retail outposts β and realizing that it was open for fewer hours than a rival bank nearby. Quickly, Dimon figured out that the shorter branch hours were actually a companywide issue β one that he was disappointed he didn't catch sooner β and he felt it needed to be corrected.
He decided to increase the branches' hours to match competitors, knowing this would likely damage morale.
"I said, 'We've got to change it. We're here for customers,'" he recalled. "Obviously, I care about morale β but morale sucks because we suck. Morale will get better when we're better as a company.'"
In yet another lesson, Dimon encouraged leaders to push back against tropes like "that's the way we've always done it" to justify misguided decisions. "It's important for leadership to always question what their company does and why," he wrote. The criticism comes amid a company-wide crackdown, led by Dimon, on bureaucracy and inefficiencies.
To illustrate his point, Dimon recalled dismissing a battalion of 500 management coaches the firm had been outsourcing. He cut the expense shortly after he joined JPMorgan.
"Lots of times bad habits form and people get lazy, take shortcuts or don't care enough," he wrote. "I did it because it's a leader's job to coach, and we basically had outsourced management," he added, explaining his rationale. "In my entire career, I've rarely seen this kind of outsourcing of responsibility succeed."
Dimon also said that a life of all work and no play risks leaving a person dull. Our jobs, he says, should still be enjoyable, even when we need to confront big challenges or own unpopular decisions.
"We spend the vast majority of our waking hours at work," he concluded. "It's our job to try to make it fun and fulfilling."
Reed Alexander is a correspondent at Business Insider covering Wall Street. He can be reached via email at [email protected], or SMS/the encrypted app Signal at (561) 247-5758.
"Whether or not the menu of tariffs causes a recession remains in question, but it will slow down growth," Dimon said in the 58-page letter, which was released Monday and addressed various topics, including immigration and the state of civil discourse.
"While inflation has come down," he wrote, "most of what I see in the future is inflationary: continued high fiscal deficits, the remilitarization of the world and the need for infrastructure investment, including the green economy and the restructuring of trade and tariffs."
Dimon said he expected rising costs to create a "tug-of-war" over the direction of interest rates, with long-term borrowing costs ultimately heading higher. "All things being equal, the slower the growth, the lower the interest rates, and the higher the inflation, the higher the interest rates," he said.
He even referenced "stagflation," a term popularized before the turn of the century to describe an unpleasant cocktail of high inflation, high unemployment, and tepid economic growth.
"This tug-of-war can go on for some time, but it's good to remember that in the stagflation of the 1970s, recessions did not stop the inexorable trend of rising rates," he wrote.
Dimon stopped short of saying the economy is headed for a recession. Following a two-day stock sell-off last week, the dreaded R-word has been on everyone's lips.
He also suggested that the stock market pain may not be over.
"No matter how you measure it, equity valuations are still well above their historical averages," he said, adding: "Markets still seem to be pricing assets with the assumption that we will continue to have a fairly soft landing. I am not so sure."
The CEO's much-anticipated annual letter to shareholders comes as the leaders of corporations seek to understand where the economy βΒ and the nation βΒ is headed under Trump, who has bold plans for reorganizing the federal government and US foreign policy.
Dimon used his letter to opine on various problems facing the US, as well as prospective solutions.
"To be able to attack our problems at home and abroad, we must be strong. And our core strength is based upon our commitment to our values, as well as our ability to work hard and think intelligently about our problems," Dimon wrote, adding that he supported some policy positions of both Democrats and Republicans.
The letter also touched on what he deemed "common sense" solutions to the nation's problems, including tightening security at the border and doing away with special interests, or what he called "selfishness on the part of our citizens and elected officials."
Some Wall Street watchers have long suspected that the billionaire banker β a regular pontificator on world events β has harbored ambitions to seek public office, though he said last year that he would not seek a position in the Trump administration.
Dimon bemoaned the increasingly acrimonious tone infecting the public discourse. Indeed, he said that Americans are "meaner to each other" and that "a little more kindness and understanding would go a long way."
Dimon added: "I am a firm believer that we should constantly talk with each other, air our views, hold each other accountable and try to respect all sides of an argument." He said social media algorithms had amplified the problem.
JPMorgan posted a record $54 billion in profit in 2024 and has since called employees back to the office five days a week, a mandate that has led some employees to explore their options, including unionization.
Last year, the bank also earned a record $58.5 billion in net income, up from $49.6 billion the year before, it said in its earnings filings. The firm's stock is up about 6% over the past year, trading as of early April at about $210 a share.
The principal investment bankers of Digital Offering, an independent firm that advised Newsmax in its public offering. Form left: Mike Boswell, Gordon McBean, Mark Elenowitz.
Courtesy of Digital Offering, LLC
Conservative television network Newsmax has seen its stock skyrocket since going public on Monday.
The investment bank that handled the public offering is a little-known firm called Digital Offering.
A Digital Offering exec explains how the firm won the deal.
Newmax's stock debut may be the talk of Wall Street, but the investment bank behind the deal is not normally associated with the sector's splashiest IPOs.
Rather than using a large advisory firm like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, Newsmax tapped a relatively obscure advisor: Laguna Beach, California-based Digital Offering LLC, which has just six full-time registered bankers. The stock debut has helped put the bank on the map and is already driving new business to the firm, said Mark Elenowitz, a managing director at the firm, based in New York.
"It's huge for us," Elenowitz told Business Insider in an interview. "The small-cap community knows who we are, but the rest of Wall Street didn't."
Digital Offering advises companies valued at $1 billion or less β what's considered small potatoes for some bulge-bracket shops. The bank also specializes in the unconventional method Newsmax used to sell its stock to the public for the first time.
Rather than hire a bunch of banks to underwrite the IPO and sell the stocks to large investors in a roadshow, Newsmax relied on a lower-cost, less onerous form of a public offering termed Regulation A+, a provision of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2012.
The conservative news station raised $75 million selling 7.5 million shares at $10 each through this process, sometimes called the "mini IPO." Despite Newsmax losing $72 million in 2024, the stock shot up 735% on its first day of trading and another 180% on Tuesday to close up over 1,200% for the week at $233.
It could lead to a surge in demand for this type of offering and more business for firms like Digital Offering. Elenowitz said some mid-cap investment bank advisory firms have already reached out in recent days to express their desire to partner on public offerings structured similarly to Newsmax.
"They want us to help them," he said of this type of stock offering.
Working with Newsmax
The bank's relationship with Newsmax began in August 2023, Elenowitz recounted. At first, Digital Offering helped Newsmax raise $225 million in capital from accredited investors.
Newsmax wasn't aware of the Regulation A+ method for taking a company public, and Digital Offering was able to enumerate its vision. "We felt that it would really create visibility for the company beyond just raising money, but actually creating visibility for the brand," he said.
Elenowitz spearheaded the Newsmax transaction alongside Gordon McBean, the bank's cofounder and chairman and a veteran of Lehman Brothers and Wells Fargo; and Mike Boswell, an MD who also has business interests in the defense sector and blockchain technology.
Digital Offering saw Newsmax as the right candidate for a Regulation A+ offering because of its consumer appeal. Whereas a traditional IPO prioritizes large institutional investors, a Reg A offering lets companies raise money from accredited and non-accredited investors, including mom-and-pop retail investors.
"Instead of buying, as an institution, a million dollars and really being concerned, these are investors that are buying $500, $1000" worth of equity, "which gives management the time to stop worrying about their stock price and focus on growth their business."
The past 48 hours have been a rush for Elenowitz. The phones have been ringing off the hook, he and his team rejoiced over a celebratory dinner, and he and his wife are departing to Paris this weekend.
He said the highlight was ringing the trading bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday. An exchange official handed Elenowitz a sheet of paper shortly after 10:51 a.m. that read, "Opening trade: 244,778 shares at $14."
"That, to me," he said, "was a historic moment."
Reed Alexander is a correspondent at Business Insider. He can be reached via email at [email protected], or SMS/the encrypted app Signal at (561) 247-5758.
