• Jane Fraser is on a mission to bring Citigroup back to its former glory.
• Her strategy spans layoffs, hiring new leaders, and a multibillion-dollar firmwide initiative.
• Fraser still has a long way to go on several fronts.

When Jane Fraser took over Citi in March 2021, she inherited a bank saddled with regulatory problems and outdated technology that lagged behind its other household-name peers.

This year's market headwinds have been kind to Citi's stock price, which is up 33% year to date, but Fraser's overhaul has a long way to go. Banker R. Christopher Whalen wrote this week of the numerous drags on Citi's performance, including high-interest expenses, large funding costs, and undersized non-interest income.

"It is a big positive that the market following for Citi has improved, yet the financial performance remains a struggle," wrote Whalen. "Citi management clearly want to grow into new areas, but our basic question is where can Fraser realistically take the bank?"

It's not for lack of trying. Fraser has brought in several new executives to right the ship, including JPMorgan's Vis Raghavan, PwC's Tim Ryan, and Merrill Wealth Management's Andy Sieg. In September 2023, Sieg joined Citi to fix its ailing wealth business. Should he succeed – and should Fraser falter – he has a chance of becoming Citi's next CEO. Sieg has made many changes to the leadership ranks with four of his original 14 direct reports departing and a total of at least 33 senior executives leaving within his first year.

Citi has added to its leadership ranks, promoting 344 managing directors in early December, its largest class under Fraser. However, these promotions come at a tense time for employees. The bank has kicked off its grueling annual review process that rates employees from best to worst. These rankings influence who gets promoted and who loses their bonus— or worse. There is greater stress over the process than usual as the bank has laid off 7,000 employees this year and plans to cut 20,000 jobs by 2026.

Perhaps Fraser's biggest challenge is satisfying regulators who have rebuked the bank. In July, two regulators fined Citi $135.6 million for failing to make enough progress in fixing its data-management issues. The bank had agreed in 2020 to work on this problem and others, including poor risk controls, after paying $400 million in fines to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC said in July that the bank had made "meaningful progress overall" but that the agency wanted to ensure Citi allocated enough resources to address the "persistent weaknesses" regarding data.

These new fines are despite Citi dedicating billions of dollars to a firmwide initiative to overhaul the bank's technology. To run this "Transformation" project, Fraser picked Citi consumer-bank veteran Anand Selva, naming him as COO in March 2023. Eight current and former employees told Business Insider that they were surprised by his appointment given that he had never held a leadership role in technology or compliance.

Since the July fines, Fraser has tapped Ryan, the bank's new tech head, to lead the data effort alongside Selva. Still, she has been dogged by questions regarding the Transformation's progress or lack thereof.

That said, Citi might get some breathing room under Donald Trump's second presidential term. Trump has signaled he would cut down on oversight. In a speech at the Economic Club of New York in September, he pledged that if reelected, he would eliminate 10 rules for each new rule.

In a research note, Mike Mayo, a Wells Fargo analyst, called Trump's win a "regulatory game changer." He told BI that Citi was still in "regulatory purgatory" but that the bank would likely face less scrutiny for its data-quality issues.

If so, it would go a long way toward Fraser's legacy.

Latest News

• Citi's annual review process is kicking off. Here's an inside look at its unpopular method.
• Citi promoted its largest class of managing directors under Jane Fraser. Check out the 344 names here.
• Citi needs a white knight. Donald Trump's 2nd term might provide one.

Inside Citi's Transformation

• This is who Jane Fraser is counting on to clean up Citi's regulatory mess
• Citi's regulatory nightmare still haunts CEO Jane Fraser
• Citi's Massive Transformation Team Is Failing to Fix Its Regulatory Woes

Citi Wealth's New Era

• Andy Sieg Could Be Citi's Next CEO If He Can Fix a Broken Wealth Business
• Citi Wealth's horrible tech is infuriating clients and employees and endangering its turnaround
• At Least 33 Senior Citi Wealth Execs Have Left Since Andy Sieg's Takeover
• Citi Wealth loses 17 bankers to BMO after Andy Sieg replaces the head of its fastest-growing business

• 2025 is expected to be a robust year for mergers and acquisitions, and IPOs.
• Consequently, some investment banks are bulking up on hiring, industry recruiters say.
• Here's a look at which firms are staffing up and what sectors are seeing the most action.

When John Weinberg, the chairman and CEO of the elite boutique investment bank Evercore, sat down for a fireside chat in December at an annual Goldman Sachs conference, he revealed that his firm has been ramping up hiring.

"Most of the time, you don't really do much recruiting in November or December," he told listeners — but this year has been different. "If you could see my schedule, you'd see that virtually every day I am speaking with and recruiting" new talent, he said. "You could probably anticipate that our recruiting efforts will increase, not decrease."

Weinberg isn't the only Wall Street dealmaker for whom recruiting is top of mind. According to industry headhunters, hiring across the Street is expected to gain steam as 2025 gets underway. One headhunter said he's been so flooded with mandates as the end of the year approaches that his pipeline of work is up by as much as 70% over normal levels at this point in the year.

"We're probably up 60% to 70%," Kevin Mahoney, managing partner in the global financial-services practice at Christoph Zeiss Partners, told Business Insider. Next year is going to be "bonkers" in terms of hiring volumes, he said, adding: "We haven't been this busy in a long time."

After several years of lackluster deal activity, Wall Street is finally starting to see signs of a thaw in mergers and public offerings. A cocktail of lower interest rates, pent-up demand, and expectations for a friendlier landscape under Trump has left many dealmakers across the Street feeling bullish about the 2025 prospects for 2025. Robert Stowe, head of Americas equity capital markets at Barclays, told BI that he predicts some $50 billion in IPO volumes in the US next year. That would be a roughly 20% increase from 2024's just over $41 billion worth of IPO volumes in the Americas, as recorded by the deal-tracking firm Dealogic.

BI got an update on the latest investment-banking hiring trends from three top Wall Street headhunters: Mahoney; Meridith Dennes, managing director of recruiting at the firm Prospect Rock; and Brianne Sterling, head of the investment-banking recruiting practice at Selby Jennings.

Dennes said the industry's "musical chairs" will start to spike around January or February after bankers have received their bonuses. Many, she said, have gotten early hints about their bonus numbers this year and are privately grumbling.

"Bonuses are not coming out as strong as we expected them to be, and I think the reason is because there's been so much hiring at the senior level and at the MD level," she explained. "A lot of that compensation pool may be spoken for."

So, with moves on the way, which sectors will see the most activity? Here are a few key trends the headhunters say are worth watching in 2025.

The hot sectors

Banks big and small are already dialing up recruiting for their technology, media, and telecommunications teams, known as TMT in Wall Street parlance.

One reason, Mahoney said, is that those sectors are popular acquisition targets for financial sponsors. Indeed, private-equity firms are itching to deploy the billions they've raised from limited partners, but have been waiting for interest rates to decline.

"Something that I think will be interesting within the tech space, as well, is how teams are looking at staffing and positioning" for AI deals, as well as deals for cryptocurrency and digital-assets companies that may consolidate over the next year, Sterling of Selby Jennings said.

Tech has been a major area for banker movement, said Dennes, who also named healthcare, restructuring, industrials, consumer retail, and financial institutions (FIG) as hot. According to some of the early findings of her firm Prospect Rock's annual compensation survey, bankers in tech and restructuring displayed the highest levels of dissatisfaction with pay.

"Now, if they're not really paid," Dennes said, "they're going to want to jump — and there's opportunity for those folks to jump."

Tech dealmakers on the move

Union Square Advisors, a boutique technology-focused investment bank based in San Francisco, has onboarded a series of dealmakers recently, including tapping managing director Terry Jackson who previously worked at JPMorgan and Bank of America Securities. The firm also hired Todd Meadow to pitch in with sponsor coverage and brought on the banker Chris Appaneal to focus on software for governance, risk, and compliance.

Houlihan Lokey, a midsize firm long respected for its prowess in restructuring and distressed deals, has also been growing its wallet share in tech to win competitive M&A mandates.

This spring, the bank appointed Ryan Lund as co-head of US technology. It's been deepening the granularity of its software coverage with subsequent hires, as well — like Nana Kyei, a managing director who joined from Jefferies this fall and focuses on education tech. Geoff Rhizor joined the tech team in San Francisco in late summer; his coverage, in part, intersects with the fintech group's.

Barclays has also emphasized hiring managing directors focused on tech and healthcare deals, a company spokesperson told BI. Rob Patterson, who serves as head of data and information platforms coverage within tech investment banking, came over from Morgan Stanley. And the bank appointed David King, a former top-level banker at Bank of America, as global head of technology mergers and acquisitions this summer.

Big banks are staffing up

Some banks have already initiated widespread recruiting plans for juniors.

JPMorgan Chase, for instance, was engaged in a vigorous off-cycle recruiting spree for junior investment bankers as deal flow picked up speed this fall, according to industry sources and postings on its job board, as BI previously reported.

Goldman Sachs' careers portal recently displayed roughly a dozen openings for junior bankers in New York, San Francisco, and London. Vacancies included analyst and associate positions in coverage groups like financial institutions, entertainment banking, TMT, and industrials, as well as product-focused functions like equity capital markets.

Bankers need fresh blood: 'Send them our way'

The last time there was an M&A boom during the pandemic, many banks were caught unprepared and understaffed, resulting in complaints from overworked junior bankers.

This time, Wall Street employers say they won't make the same mistake twice — and many are eyeing boosting their junior ranks in preparation, the recruiters said.

Dennes expects an emphasis on associates and mid-level vice presidents to help juggle the ins and outs of executing the manifold deals coming down the pike. "Experienced bankers are always in demand," she said. "Anyone who has closed a couple of deals and is able to train junior staff is very valuable."

Dennes' firm, Prospect Rock, is currently working on filling four analyst roles, six associate roles, and two VP roles, postings on its website showed. Still, she doesn't see 2025 hiring following the same frenetic pattern it did during the pandemic-era M&A boom.

"In 2021, you just needed bodies — more horsepower. This is very different," she said. Now, banks are markedly more vigilant in emphasizing quality over quantity. "Nobody wants a 2021, 2022 redo," she added. "A lot of those hires were not strong."

Some senior dealmakers are already worried about short-staffing. A managing director at a Wall Street bank told BI he was confident that 2025 would deliver a volume of work comparable with 2021 levels, if perhaps not the same soaring valuations.

"Part of the conversation that we're going to have to think through is augmenting the team at the mid-level" to handle execution, he said. In this hiring market, though, "it's almost impossible" to find impressive associates or VPs, he cautioned. "Send them our way — because it's hard."

Are you an investment-banking insider or do you have knowledge of industry moves on Wall Street? Get in touch with these reporters. Reed Alexander can be reached via email at [email protected] or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at 561-247-5758. Emmalyse Brownstein can be reached at [email protected] or via Signal at 305-857-5516.

• The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate to between 4.25% and 4.5% on Wednesday.
• The central bank also projected two cuts next year instead of four, sending stocks tumbling.
• Here's how analysts, economists, and other experts reacted to the Fed decision and market reaction.

The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday to a range of 4.25% to 4.5%, bringing its decline since mid-September to 100 basis points.

Wall Street usually celebrates rate cuts as lowering borrowing costs drives spending, investing, and hiring. Reducing rates also signals inflation is under control, and makes risk assets like stocks relatively more attractive by trimming yields on safer assets like Treasuries.

Yet stocks tanked because Fed officials projected two cuts next year, down from four previously. Fed Chair Jerome Powell also said the central bank expects to ease its monetary policy more slowly in the months ahead.

Here's a roundup of how analysts, economists, strategists, investors, and other experts reacted to the latest Fed decision in their morning research Thursday.

Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown

"US markets played the part of Scrooge on Wednesday, tumbling as the Federal Reserve's hawkish tone dampened holiday cheer.

Investors should see this as a healthy spot of profit-taking rather than an end to the party, after what's been a fantastic run for markets since the US election."

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell

"Markets are normally good at reading the signs, but the sell-off on Wall Street last night would suggest investors had started on the Christmas sherry a bit early and were caught out by the Fed's announcement about where rates might go in 2025.

The 3% drop in the S&P 500 is a wake-up call that US markets are not a one-way ticket to the moon.

The fact futures prices are showing a rebound in the main US equities on Thursday would suggest we are not at the start of a full-blown market correction. Instead, it's more likely that investors are now sitting up and paying more attention to what could go wrong, rather than only focusing on the positives. That's long overdue and a healthy development."

David Rosenberg, founder and president of Rosenberg Research

"This is a Fed that really has no faith in its view at any time and is willingly reactive as opposed to proactive even though its actions affect the economy with long lags.

You would have thought that between the commentary and forecast changes that the world has changed dramatically since the jumbo rate cut just three months ago. It clearly does not take much to cause this Fed to swing its view around. I can guarantee that it will shift again."

Stephen Koopman, senior macro strategist at Rabobank

"'We had a year-end inflation forecast, and it's kind of fallen apart.'

Not exactly the confidence-inspiring line you'd expect from a Fed chair. But Jerome Powell's performance at yesterday's press conference wasn't his finest hour. In what might have been the most uncomfortable showing of his tenure, Powell ceded the stage to the hawks, visibly strained as he tried to sell a strategy he didn't fully appear to endorse.

Powell flagged inflation 'moving sideways' and 'higher uncertainty' around its trajectory. These admissions reveal a central bank increasingly unsure of its footing, with rates markets now expecting just one cut for 2025 (as we do), and with no real consensus on when that final cut would arrive."

Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group

"Markets have a really bad of habit of overreacting to Fed policy moves. The Fed didn't do or say anything that deviated from what the market expected — this seems more like, I'm leaving for Christmas break, so I'll sell and start up next year.

The good news is that this 10-day sell-off should lay the path for a Santa Rally leading into next week."

Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Northlight Asset Management

"Santa came early and dropped a 25-bps rate cut in the market's stocking but accompanied it with a note saying that there would be coal next year."

The market is forward-looking and ignored the good news of today's rate cut and instead focused on the paucity of rate cuts for next year."

Jochen Stanzl, chief market analyst at CMC Markets.

"What was heard last night from the Fed as an accompaniment to the interest rate cut is a showstopper for the stock market.

The Fed is sending a clear signal that it has almost completed the phase of interest rate cuts. The year 2025 will be a significant break in the Fed's rate-cutting cycle.

The Trump blessing could quickly turn into a curse. If the market expects yields to rise further, it is unlikely that the Fed will intervene against these forces. If inflation data continues to rise in January and February, then that could be it for the interest rate cuts."

Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial

"While the Fed is taking all the heat for today's sell-off, a reality check from overbought conditions, deteriorating market breadth, and rising rates was arguably overdue.

Overall, today's FOMC meeting brought back some unwanted clouds of uncertainty over monetary policy next year. At a minimum, market expectations have shifted toward a shallower- and slower-than-anticipated rate-cutting cycle. Technically, the near-term risk remains to the upside for 10-year Treasury yields, creating a likely headwind for stocks."

Jean Boivin, head of the BlackRock Investment Institute

"The Fed has poured cold water on already dwindling market hopes for generous rate cuts in 2025.

Given the risk of resurging inflation from potential trade tariffs and a slowdown in immigration that has been cooling pressure in the labor market, market expectations of only two more cuts in 2025 now seem reasonable.

We expected this policy outcome, so it doesn't change our recently upgraded view on US equities. US stocks can still benefit from AI and other mega forces, from robust economic growth and from broad earnings growth — and we see them outperforming international peers in 2025."

Isaac Stell, investment manager at Wealth Club

"With an economy that's going gangbusters and an incoming president with a fiscally loose agenda, you wonder why the Fed felt it necessary to cut.

Is this to curry favor with the incoming administration or is there a bump in the road the Fed can see that the rest of us are missing."

Michael Brown, senior research strategist at Pepperstone

"The FOMC delivered about as hawkish a cut as they could muster up yesterday, and market participants were not particularly pleased about what they heard.

It was, though, a little perplexing to see such a violent market reaction to Powell's remarks, particularly considering how 'every man and his dog' had been expecting this sort of a pivot in the run up to the meeting.

It feels, though, as if markets have overreacted to Powell's message, and that we may have reached something of a hawkish extreme here

Consequently, I'd be a dip buyer of equities here, as strong earnings and economic growth should see the path of least resistance continuing to lead to the upside, offsetting the fading impact of the 'Fed Put.'"

• Citi rates its 200,000 employees on a forced curve that assesses peers from best to worst.
• These rankings influence who gets promoted and who loses their bonus — or worse.
• Managing directors told BI how the process works and why it can pit employees against each other.

Citigroup welcomed 344 new managing directors earlier this month, marking its biggest class in years. Behind the scenes, the promotion process can be political and fraught, pitting employees against each other, four current and former managing directors told Business Insider.

Citi evaluates employees on a forced curve, requiring managers to rank them from best to worst using a four-level scale with a certain percentage in each bucket. This system means there's a finite number of top ratings, so employees could exceed all the requirements of their role and still receive a middling grade, said the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"We are a company filled with hardworking, achievement-oriented colleagues and we embrace meritocracy," a Citi spokesperson told BI in a written statement. "Our process aims to ensure that colleagues across Citi are held to consistent standards and are assessed by those who have the most direct knowledge of their contributions."

Over the years, the percentage ranges for each bracket have shifted slightly. A managing director said this year each business line could assign top ratings of 1 ("exemplary") and 2 ("exceeds expectations") to 5% to 10% and 15% to 30% of staff, respectively. The lion's share of employees — 50% to 65% — are labeled as "valued contributors." The remaining 3% to 7% who receive a 4 rating ("needs improvement") may face consequences such as being put on a performance improvement plan or losing bonus eligibility.

"It creates an air of distrust inside of cultures and a lot of anxiety for employees that are high performers but may not be recognized for the work they do," John Frehse, a senior managing director at the management consultancy Ankura, said about the ranking practice.

The same morning the new class of managing directors was announced, Citi held a virtual town hall for employees. During the Q&A session, human resources addressed an employee's written question that noted the forced distribution system could be unfair to small, high-performing teams. Sara Wechter, Citi's head of human resources, replied that there was no forced bell curve.

A senior Citi executive familiar with the process told BI that Citi's curve is not forced as it uses brackets rather than fixed percentages.

"We have guidelines associated with ratings, which is different from a forced curve," he said.

That reasoning is of little comfort to employees BI spoke to who assign those ratings.

"They are playing with words," said a managing director in the wealth division. "We were mandated to strictly follow the prescribed curve."

This season's annual reviews, which began last week, play a key role in bonus allocations and promotions, including to managing director.

They come at a tense time for Citi's workforce. As part of CEO Jane Fraser's mission to turn around the bank, Citi has laid off 7,000 employees and divested from several businesses. The overhaul isn't over, with the bank planning to cut 20,000 jobs from its workforce of more than 200,000 employees by 2026. Amid these changes, the managing director said there's more anxiety about the review process and uncertainty about bonuses.

Here's how Citi's forced curve works

Grading on a forced curve is not unique to Citi. The practice, otherwise known as stack ranking, was popularized in the 1980s when General Electric's former CEO Jack Welch used it to cut bottom performers. However, this "rank and yank" tactic has fallen out of fashion with many major companies such as Microsoft and Amazon. Most banks engage in some form of stack ranking but the details differ, such as how strictly they adhere to a curve or the grading criteria they use. Morgan Stanley uses a five-point scale. Goldman Sachs has changed its system several times and, beginning in 2020, it's used a three-level system.

"Good companies try to distinguish between the higher and lower performers and do that in terms of how people get raises, what their total compensation would be," said Anthony Nyberg, a professor of management at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina.

Citi employees receive two main ratings with each one graded on a curve, two ex-managing directors said. The two criteria are the "what," which measures an employee's results, such as revenue metrics, and the "how," which evaluates their approach and leadership abilities. This means employees get a combination score such as 1-2.

While it is not a hard and fast rule, Citi employees are usually expected to earn top ratings for two to three consecutive years to receive a promotion, so the review process puts aspiring directors and managing directors under enormous pressure, three of the managing directors told BI.

Direct managers submit their ratings for review before having a so-called "calibration" meeting with their fellow managers, the top manager of their business unit, and an HR representative, the two former executives said. At these meetings, direct managers review an employee's scores and make a case for why the employee deserves a coveted 1 or 2.

After these calibration meetings, the top manager makes the final call on rankings. The outcome often disappoints managers and their reports, who may have never worked directly with the decision-maker, the managing directors said.

The senior executive said that small teams of three or four employees can secure exemptions to the curve. As for large teams with high performers, he said there might be exceptions on a year-to-year basis but he wasn't aware of any ever happening.

MDs said the process pits employees against each other

The evaluation process was described as contentious and stressful by the current and former managing directors, all of whom were responsible for rating employees. The calibration meetings were especially heated, with managers butting heads over which employees received the limited high ratings.

Given the number of top rankings is fixed, managers were typically unwilling to budge on the 1s and 2s they were allotted, even if another manager argued they had more high performers. "No one was like, 'You can take mine,'" said one of the ex-managing directors, who left Citi this year. "We fought."

The managers took issue with other aspects of the grading process. By implementing a curve on the team level, employees were sometimes compared to others with vastly disparate roles or responsibilities. Two of the ex-managing directors described some of the grading criteria as nebulous. For instance, they said, for employees with non-revenue-generating roles, the "what" score is effectively up to the manager's discretion.

Frehse told BI that the biggest flaw with stacked ranking is that performance reviews are inherently subjective.

"Stack ranking is inaccurate from the start," he said. "You're either only looking at the quantitative side, forgetting about the other side, or you're looking at both. And we know that the qualitative side is flawed and subjective."

Frehse said that leaves room for employees to believe favoritism is at work. Three of the managing directors told BI that they believed internal politics played a role in how employees were ranked and which managers received top ratings for their direct reports.

"When you use such a system, it tells you you can't trust different managers to be good managers," said one of the former managing directors.

The senior executive said that the many calibration meetings he attended were productive.

"It's just a way to get together, get out of the silos, and make sure that there's fairness and perspective that goes beyond your own team," he said.

While he maintained that he had not seen hostile calibration meetings, he said that some conversations could get heated.

"This is a very human thing when you have finite anything, and obviously we have finite compensation," he said. "Of course, people are aware of that, but I don't think it's a flaw in the design. I think that's just part of being human."

At its best, stacked ranking should reduce anxiety among employees, Nyberg said.

"People get very upset when things appear to be arbitrary, and the ranking system should actually reduce some of that as long as people can believe that you're doing those rankings in some sort of objective way," he said.

However, it's hard for employees to trust the system if they lose trust in their employers, which often happens after layoffs, Nyberg said.

"It's that contract between the organization and the employees starts to feel really violated that way, and then that permeates everything about it," he said, "then you wouldn't believe anything they say."

• Investment tactics often require big buy-ins and high fees.
• New tech is lowering the price of entry in fields like direct indexing and private markets.
• This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.

Investing like a billionaire comes with a high price tag. But thanks to technology, the barriers to these elite opportunities are starting to crumble.

Consider direct indexing, a strategy favored by the rich to lower taxes by selling underperforming stocks and using the losses to offset other gains. These personalized portfolios used to be out of reach of the merely affluent, requiring steep account minimums. Over the past five years, direct indexing has exploded as technological advancements have made it worthwhile for wealth managers to offer the services to Main Street customers. The account minimum for Fidelity's FidFolios, for example, is only $5,000.

"Direct indexing has become accessible at a different level of wealth than it has been in the past," said Ranjit Kapila, the copresident and chief operating officer of Parametric. "That wouldn't have been available or possible without the technology trends we've had to be able to do this level of computation at scale in a cost-efficient manner."

Parametric, the pioneer of direct indexing, is also moving downstream. By adopting fractional-share investing, Parametric lowered the minimum for its core product to $100,000 from $250,000. The firm plans to offer a direct-indexing product with fewer customization features for $25,000 in 2025.

Private markets face steeper hurdles. This opaque field was traditionally reserved for deep-pocketed investors like pension funds and ultrarich individuals. But now investors have more access to financial results for funds and privately held companies as data providers race to meet their needs. Machine learning and AI have made it easier for these firms to extract and analyze data.

BlackRock views this data as the great equalizer and has grand ambitions of indexing these opaque private markets. The asset-management giant agreed this summer to acquire the data powerhouse Preqin for $3.2 billion.

"We anticipate indexes and data will be important to future drivers of the democratization of all alternatives," BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said on a conference call. "And this acquisition is the unlock."

Leon Sinclair, Preqin's executive vice president, argued that with the number of public companies dwindling, it's imperative for mass-affluent investors to get better access to private markets.

"Clearly there's more, deeper, better sources of funding for private companies that could stay private for longer," Sinclair said. "I think it's fair that the mass affluent can — in the right way — be brought along on that journey to get exposure to that part of the mosaic earlier."

Investing in automation for a competitive edge

Kapila described these technological developments as part of a trend in wealth management to capture customers before they make it big.

"There's a desire by financial advisors to try and engage investors earlier in their wealth-accumulation cycle," Kapila said.

Parametric, acquired by Morgan Stanley in 2021, operates in a competitive arena. Thanks to a wave of similar acquisitions, Parametric faces well-capitalized rivals such as BlackRock's Aperio and Franklin Templeton's Canvas. Industry stalwarts like Fidelity and upstarts like Envestnet also want a piece of the action.

Kapila said the need to compete on scale and fees required Parametric's technology to be as efficient as possible.

"It'll be harder," he said. "We have to do many, many more accounts to really drive growth in assets, etc. But those challenges are exciting to me as a technologist."

To meet that need, Kapila is pushing Parametric to develop more automated products, such as Radius, which launched this year. Radius constructs equity and fixed-income portfolios and runs simulations to identify the best selections for portfolio managers. He plans to launch more cloud-native tools, which are easier to scale and manage, for other asset classes in 2025 and 2026. Parametric is also piloting generative-AI tools to onboard accounts more efficiently.

Clients' expectations are also rising. There's demand for Parametric's tax benefits but with actively managed strategies rather than indexes, he said, spurring partnerships with asset managers.

Parametric recently launched an offering that allows customers to pick equities off strategies from the financial-advisory and asset-management firm Lazard.

To stay ahead of the curve, Preqin is developing more sophisticated products. Last year, the UK firm launched an Actionability Signal that uses machine learning to identify private companies likely to be open for investment.

"The sole focus on public information for certain tasks around valuation and risk management are not really going to be the way that people do this," Sinclair said. "We're moving much more to a world where real proprietary private information at the asset level, which is transactionally oriented, is available to people."

In June, his division launched a data tool that analyzes $4.8 trillion worth of deals across 6,500 funds. This database can be used in a slew of ways, from backing up valuations in negotiations to identifying which financial factors, such as revenue growth or debt paydown, contributed the most value to a successful deal.

With the rise of generative AI, Sinclair expects that users will be able to interpret data with more ease using natural language commands.

"I think you'll see that be more prominent across the industry where people expect to interact with large data sets in really natural common ways," he said. "We think all that will probably start to be visible over the coming years."

Tech is the first step to narrowing education gaps

On average, retail investors allocate just 5% of their portfolios to alternative investments. If BlackRock successfully indexes private markets, it could go a long way toward boosting that percentage.

However, Sinclair said more work is required to help mass affluent investors feel comfortable investing in private markets. As someone who grew up working class and was only introduced to finance in college, he knows there is an education gap to overcome.

"To get Joe Bloggs very excited and comfortable with committing capital, they need to be able to understand what the different basis of those returns are," Sinclair said.

He added: "I think it's in the industry's interest to enable those new sources of capital, to bridge the gap in understanding, to bridge the gap in analytics, to bridge the gap in frequency of reporting, to make that an easier journey for people to go on."

• Rahm Emanuel reignited one of the longest-running debates about Obama's legacy.
• Emanuel said more Wall Street bankers should have faced justice.
• Now Biden's US ambassador to Japan, Emanuel is considering a possible run to lead the Democratic Party.

Former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said on Tuesday that it was a mistake that more top Wall Street executives didn't pay a price for their role in the 2008 financial crisis.

"Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention," Emanuel wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some had called for at the time."

Emanuel, Biden's US ambassador to Japan, is eyeing the potential of returning to politics by running to become the next chair of the Democratic National Committee. In his column, Emanuel said the Democratic Party has been "blind to the rising sea of disillusionment."

"When Donald Trump declared, 'I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,' he was channeling a nation's fury," Emanuel wrote. "The online cheerleading for the killer of a health-care insurance CEO in New York City is just more evidence of this seething, populist anger."

In a subtle rebuke of Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, Emanuel said the nation is not looking for rosy optimism in a time of great instability.

"Campaigns of joy in an era of rage don't win elections," he wrote.

Emanuel's comments reignite one of the longest-running debates of the Obama era: why more top-level executives were not prosecuted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Kareem Serageldin, a former top official at Credit Suisse, was the only top banker to receive a sentence connected with The Great Recession. Progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, have said the lack of prosecutions is a "clear indictment of our broken criminal justice system."

Former Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the DOJ didn't have the needed evidence.

"I think you have to understand, if we could have made those cases, we certainly would have," Holder told NBC late-night host Seth Meyers in 2016. "These are the kind of things that are career-defining. People come to the Justice Department to make these kind of cases. But given the statutes we had to work with and the burdens of proof we had to meet, we were simply unable to do that."

A former mayor of Chicago, Emanuel is a polarizing figure for some in the Democratic Party. He ditched a 2018 reelection campaign for a third term amid signs that his unblemished electoral streak might be squelched. Obama's choice of Emanuel as his first chief of staff surprised some observers who saw the Illinois native as an embodiment of political insiders for a president who ran to shake up the nation's capital. He is widely regarded as a key force behind the passage of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, Obama's singular domestic achievement.

Emanuel's younger brother, Ari, is a Hollywood titan and CEO of Endeavor, which owns World Wrestling Entertainment and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

The race to lead the Democratic Party during Trump's second administration is particularly crowded. Until Emanuel formally enters the field, the three major candidates are former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, and Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, are also in the running.

The next Democratic leader will have a high-profile role, given that Republicans will have complete control over Congress.

• A federal court struck down a rule requiring Nasdaq-listed companies to disclose board diversity.
• Legal experts say the ruling won't likely impact Goldman Sachs' board diversity mandate.
• Since 2020, the investment bank has only helped take public clients with diverse boards.

Wall Street's board diversity initiatives are not dead — yet.

On Wednesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Nasdaq's efforts to push companies that want to list their stock on its exchange to diversify their boards or explain themselves. Nasdaq has said it will not appeal the decision. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which approved the Nasdaq rule in 2021, has said it is reviewing the decision.

Companies could continue to feel pressure to diversify their boards, however, from other stakeholders including shareholders and even Wall Street banks.

In 2020, David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, a top underwriter of initial public offerings, announced that the bank would start requiring the clients it helps take public to have at least one diverse board member. In 2021, the bank upped the requirement to two diverse board members, including at least one woman. It has also tasked one of its rising stars with a new role helping corporate clients find diverse board members.

Goldman declined to comment on its board diversity initiative, but legal experts say that the Fifth Circuit ruling should not impact the investment bank. That's because Wednesday's ruling, agreed to by 9 of the circuit's 17 judges, centered on the Securities and Exchange Commission's right to approve the Nasdaq's diversity rules.

The judges said the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 gives the SEC the authority to prevent fraud and promote competition — not enforce diversity disclosures.

Ann Lipton, a professor at Tulane University's law school, however, said that the ruling could still have a chilling effect on banks whose policies are often informed by federal standards.

"If those standards appear to be shifting, investment banks may alter their policies to conform," she said in an emailed statement.

Wall Street has historically been made up of mostly white men and remains so to this day. Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020, more bank CEOs have begun personally setting goals to increase diversity at their companies, including at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Some Wall Street's diversity initiatives, however, have been walked back in recent months in light of an influential court ruling that significantly changed the way college campuses can use affirmative action in their admissions process. Bloomberg reported in March on investment-bank recruitment programs originally geared toward minorities that have been quietly opened to everyone.

In January, Goldman told Fortune that it had taken public 300 businesses that adhere to its diversity standards. Last year, the Goldman executive tasked with helping clients identify diverse board members told BI that she had helped facilitate 99 placements since her role was created on the heels of the bank's new diversity mandate.

"Demand was there and supply was there, there was just a market mechanism problem," Ilana Wolfe told BI at the time. "I'm most proud of being able to be that link."

• Firms want more private market products to offer clients and are willing to buy instead of build.
• Private credit firms with $30 billion to $70 billion in assets will be the firms to watch.
• While deals make sense on paper, firms might have to deal with potential culture clashes.

The trend in asset management is pretty clear — private markets are the new black.

"If you're not in private markets or private credit, you'll need to move in that direction, or you'll get left behind," PwC financial services deal leader Greg McGahan told Business Insider.

Asset managers who have traditionally relied on ETFs and mutual funds to make money are itching to expand into alternative assets to diversify their offerings and boost fee revenue, a new PwC report said. That demand and expectations that interest rates will continue to drop and incoming light-touch regulators mean asset managers are ready to dust off their dealmaking playbooks.

Private credit firms specifically are in demand, as shown by the blockbuster BlackRock deal announced last week. The asset management giant agreed to buy the private credit firm HPS Investment Partners for $12 billion.

And it's not just the traditional money managers. Private equity firms are also using acquisitions to strengthen their private credit capabilities and market presence. PwC sees increasing competition in private credit contributing to the consolidation of alternative asset managers.

McGahan said private credit firms with between $30 billion and $70 billion in assets under management will be the ones to watch. They will either need to make a deal to grow bigger or be snapped up themselves.

"Those types of shops potentially could be absorbed into other shops that are looking to grow their portfolios," he said. "It's either acquire or be acquired."

Deals in alternatives will also be driven by aging founders in the private markets space who are trying to figure out succession planning and capitalizing on the ability to monetize their investments.

For his part, McGahan is seeing his deals practice's work ticking up and "getting up to full capacity. We'll be at supersaturation levels pretty shortly. So, I think you're seeing that pent-up demand now manifest itself."

Questions of culture

While the marriage of firms operating in one investing discipline with another makes sense for diversification reasons, the actual integration of the two could be trickier.

Culture and compensation are very different between traditional firms and alternatives. A portfolio manager at a publicly traded mutual fund might receive cash compensation and equity stakes. If you're a private equity manager, you're paid with carried interest, or a percentage of profits generated from the firm's investments.

"Could you have within a large traditional manager basically an alternative platform where the PMs are earning multiples of the existing PMs on the traditional side? That's going to be a cultural challenge,' McGahan said. He added there are also operational differences and gave the example of a private credit firm using treasury functions daily versus a private equity firm that uses a couple times a month.

The question of cultural fit is top of mind at BlackRock when the asset manager makes acquisitions, according to the firm's CFO Martin Small. BlackRock has made several high-profile acquisitions this year, snapping up Global Infrastructure Partners in January in addition to HPS.

Small, who was part of many meetings with HPS's executive team to test the waters, said the cofounders shared important values with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and firm president Rob Kapito.

"We all speak the same language," Small said at the Goldman Sachs Financial Conference in New York. "They're founders. Larry Fink and Rob Kapito are founders. We're client-centered firms. We believe in scale, we believe in global."

Integrating two firms successfully requires lots of important — if technical— work behind the scenes, Small added.

"People, platform, process — think about all the pedestrian things of the employee experience. You've got to be on the same email system, you've got to make sure people's laptops work, you've got to make their key cards work at the door, " he said. "All of that's done so we can just get to business on realizing the synergies and delivering for clients.

• BlackRock is on a string of multibillion-dollar acquisitions to bolster its private-markets prowess.
• In late November, the asset management titan bought private-credit firm HPS for $12 billion.
• CFO Martin Small explained how the acquisition fits the firm's three requirements.

BlackRock is spending top dollar in its quest to dominate private-markets investing, recently agreeing to buy private-credit firm HPS Investment Partners for $12 billion. It's been a busy year with the asset management giant also buying data powerhouse Preqin and private-equity firm Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) for $3.2 billion and $12.5 billion, respectively, earlier this year.

"Inorganic has always been a fundamental part of the BlackRock strategy," said Martin Small, the firm's chief financial officer, in an interview at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference on Tuesday.

BlackRock isn't afraid to take big swings.

"We've never shied away from taking big bets," CEO Larry Fink said in an analyst call about the GIP acquisition last week.

BlackRock, which oversees $11.5 trillion, is not new to transforming itself through deals. In 2009, it pushed into passive investing when it bought Barclays' asset-management business. The acquistion gave it iShares and helped it become the public markets juggernaut it is today.

The firm has important criteria for its major acquisitions. At the New York City event, Small laid out the top three factors and how HPS met them.

Cultural fit

Small, an 18-year BlackRock veteran who is also the global head of corporate strategy, named cultural fit as his top priority.

"We have to acquire the kind of people that are aligned to a 'One BlackRock' culture and mission," he said, referring to the firm's ethos of working collaboratively.

Small was part of many meetings with HPS's executive team to test the waters. He said the cofounders shared important values with Fink and BlackRock President Rob Kapito.

"We all speak the same language," he said. "They're founders. Larry Fink and Rob Kapito are founders. We're client-centered firms. We believe in scale, we believe in global."

The three cofounders of HPS — Scott Kanick, Mike Patterson, and Scot French — will lead a new private financing solutions unit at BlackRock and join the firm's global executive committee.

Enrich and extend BlackRock's platform

BlackRock only makes acquisitions that are additive in more ways than one.

"We've been in all the businesses that we've acquired, whether it's private credit or infrastructure or SMA or options or whatever. We've done technology and data in the last year," Small said. "It's not just about new capabilities. It's about new capabilities that make the ones you have better."

Combining BlackRock's existing private credit business with that of HPS will produce a diversified business with a broader reach.

"HPS has been very active in kind of the upper-middle market in terms of direct lending, but also the junior capital solutions," Small said. "Our team has historically been active more in the middle market, kind of $75 million EBITDA borrower base. So there's an enrichment."

"I also think that'll strengthen origination, our ability to do more transactions, meet borrowers where they are," he added.

Topline results

"You've got to be a credible operator on a consolidated basis of these businesses," Small said of acquisition targets.

Given BlackRock's prowess, it takes a sizable acquisition to move the needle. HPS's $148 billion in client assets fits the bill.

"We'll now have a $220 billion preform a private credit business at BlackRock so we'll be very scaled in that regard," he said.

• Citigroup appointed a new class of managing directors last week.
• Five new MDs share their best career advice and reflect on their rise at Citi.
• They also touched on how the bank's sweeping transformation has affected their jobs.

Last week, Citigroup announced a new class of managing directors, some of whom have been with the bank since it had a red umbrella logo — a byproduct of its merger with insurance giant Travelers in the late 1990s.

Anyone who has worked at Citi for a long time has seen plenty of changes. The global bank did away with the umbrella logo in 2007, just before a series of job cuts and other reorganization efforts took hold at the height of the financial crisis. In recent years, Citi has also exited many of its consumer banking operations, among other changes, as part of a transformation effort led by CEO Jane Fraser.

Since taking the top job in 2021, Fraser has vowed to modernize and simplify the bank, including by removing layers of bureaucracy and strengthening Citi's risk controls and technology systems. She has announced plans to cut 20,000 jobs over the next five years.

Managing directors, the bank's highest rank below the C-suite, are the people who will be tasked with helping bring Fraser's vision for the bank's future to life and navigating complex headwinds that arise along the way.

Business Insider interviewed five members of the 2024 MD class who have been at the bank for the majority of their careers. They spoke via email about a range of topics, from their first day at Citi to the changes they've seen at the bank over the decades, and how Fraser's transformation efforts have impacted their jobs. They also shared their advice to the next generation of talent in the industry.

Here are their words of wisdom, edited for length and clarity:

Bridget Griffin

• Chief Administrative Officer for Global Risk Review, New York
• Joined Citi in 2007

Describe your current role.

I am the chief administrative officer (CAO) of global risk review, responsible for leading the pillars of business management, regulatory & audit engagement, board reporting, controls & issue management, governance, and infrastructure & strategic projects.

What would you say is the biggest change at the bank/your field since you joined?

What stands out most is how much the bank — and the way we work — has evolved over time. When I joined, the iconic red umbrella stood out front and wood-paneled offices reflected a more traditional era. Today, modern, open workspaces reflect how much has changed. Through all of the change, it's the people who make it work – coming together, adapting and finding a way forward. That sense of community is what has kept me at the bank all these years.

What is one nugget of wisdom you'd give to the next generation of talent?

Stay confident in what you bring to the table, but humble enough to recognize areas where you can grow — and curious enough to turn them into opportunities. Early in my career, I pursued an internal transfer to Hong Kong with Citi to deepen my understanding of Asia, a region I realized I knew little about. That decision not only broadened my perspective but also led to incredible experiences that shaped both my career and personal growth.

What is the biggest impact the bank's transformation has had on your approach to your job?

The transformation has empowered me to question complexity and advocate for simplicity. I feel more confident challenging processes or decisions that seem overly complicated, focusing instead on practical solutions. This perspective has helped me contribute to a culture that values clarity and purposeful action.

Supriya Ramamurthy

• Head of Balcon and Rate Sales, US Personal Banking, New York
• Joined Citi in 2002

Describe your current role.

I am part of the USPB organization and work in the branded cards and lending team. I manage the on-card lending products.

Describe your very first day.

I joined Citi as a Management Associate in Sydney, Australia. It had been a super competitive, intense eight-round interview process before I finally made it to that first day. So, I was certainly excited but frankly also very relieved!

What is one nugget of wisdom you'd give to the next generation of talent?

Invest time and energy in establishing and building relationships within the firm and outside. Regardless of how fast the earth spins on its axis and how much AI and new inventions change our lives, ultimately it is people who will make all the difference.

What is the biggest impact the bank's transformation has had on your approach to your job?

I think the firm's overall transformation mantra has trickled down to every level in the organization and has led to a renewed commitment and focus on efficiencies and simplification. If I look at my own business, for example, over the past 18 months my team, my cross functional partners and I have been very focused on modernizing our legacy operating models.

John Hogue

• Head of Design and User Experience for Citi Wealth, Singapore
• Joined Citi in 1992

Describe your current role.

I recently took on a new role leading design & UX for Citi's services business. Our team is responsible for defining, creating, and implementing a simple and seamless user experience strategy for our large corporate clients.

What would you say is the biggest change at the bank/your field since you joined?

It's been said many times before that the 'C' in Citi stands for change, and that has been true throughout my career. One thing that has remained constant is a culture that promotes collaboration, innovation, and technology to improve the client experience.

What is one nugget of wisdom you'd give to the next generation of talent?

I've been fortunate to have a non-linear career at Citi, and I think it goes back to my feelings of being curious and wanting to learn how everything works. I always recommend to our new associates to know where you want to go, but have the courage to explore, experiment, and embrace unexpected opportunities in your Citi journey.

What is the biggest impact the bank's transformation has had on your approach to your job?

I see the impacts of our transformation as not one big thing, but an accumulation of improvements that you look back on and think, "We really have made a lot of progress." The organization is much leaner, which means that alignment and decision-making happen much faster.

Juan Francisco Orrego Echeverri

• Director, Operations, Know Your Customer Operations, Costa Rica
• Joined Citi in 1998

Describe your current role.

I am based in Costa Rica and lead our global services, markets & banking KYC operations team, responsible for serving over 50,000 client entities spanning 20 industries within these business lines to safeguard against money laundering risk.

Describe your very first day at Citi.

Wow, that was 26 years ago! I remember feeling a mix of excitement and anticipation. Joining such a large organization, I was filled with questions about what the future might hold — whether it would be a place where I could grow, develop, learn, and truly build a career.

What would you say is the biggest change at the bank/your field since then?

One of the most significant changes I have experienced was the decision to exit consumer banking in multiple geographies. It was a bold and highly strategic move with tremendous impact. Ultimately, it was made to ensure the best returns for our stakeholders, deliver greater value to our clients and create new opportunities for us as employees to grow.

What is one nugget of wisdom you'd give to the next generation of talent?

There are two pieces of advice I once received that I now share with anyone seeking advice or guidance. First: "To grow you need two basic things: Being fluent in English and having mobility." I had to embrace both — something I didn't know before — and I can now consider myself fluent in English (I am native Spanish speaker). I also had the chance to move to a different country. Both experiences undoubtedly contributed significantly to my development and growth at Citi.

Second, a simple yet powerful message: "People like you, people trust you." These two insights have been incredibly impactful in shaping my decisions and supporting my career growth at Citi.

Yoanna Darwin

• Asia South Treasury and Trade Solutions for Corporate, Commercial & Public Sector, Indonesia
• Joined Citi in 2001

Describe your current role.

I'm the country head of treasury & trade solutions (TTS); corporate, commercial & public sector sales for Indonesia, a business unit in Citi that offers integrated payment, liquidity management, trade, and working capital solutions to institutional clients across the globe.

Describe your very first day at Citi.

I arrived for my first official day at Citi as management associate back on July 17, 2001. I did not know what my day would look like. What will I be doing in the office? What is the working culture? Do I look professional enough? So many things crossed my mind at that time. And I remember feeling relief when I ended my first day just fine.

What is one nugget of wisdom you'd give to the next generation of talent?

There is no instant way to move up your career ladder. You have to earn it. Make a habit to create goals for each stage of your life. Put yourself in the driver's seat and drive in your own way towards the goals. Make a stop here and there, if you need to, so that you can look back, appreciate every step of the process, and find ways to improve and be better.

• Blackstone opened an office in Miami during the pandemic, mostly as a hub for its tech workers.
• The firm is now focusing on building its Miami finance bench with local talent and 'homegrown teams.'
• A Miami-based Blackstone employee told BI what it's like to work for the PE giant in South Florida.

When Julio Garcia was a business student at the University of Miami in 2017, Blackstone was not on his radar of prospective employers.

It wasn't for a lack of interest, Garcia says — rather, a lack of opportunity.

A born-and-raised Miami native, Garcia was certain that he wanted to start and build his career in his hometown. At that point, Miami had not yet become the hub for financial titans that it is today, with companies like Blackstone, Citadel, and Point72 having opened offices or moved headquarters there.

Garcia's bet on Miami would eventually pay off in a big way. Blackstone, which manages over $1 trillion in assets, making it the largest alternative asset manager in the world, opened an office in Miami in 2021. At first, it was primarily a hub for tech employees who support the firm's primary businesses, like private equity and real estate — a group known internally as "finance." More recently, however, Blackstone has made a push to add more finance employees to its Miami location, like Garcia, who does accounting for the portfolio-management team.

Blackstone's Miami office is now home to about 70 finance professionals, including 15 from Garcia's team. And he now represents the type of talent Blackstone says it's hoping to attract for its Magic City office: local rather than transplanted.

"We're excited to keep building our finance function in Miami and to continue meeting the great, local talent here," said Chris Striano, COO of Global Finance at Blackstone. "Now more than ever, our focus is on cultivating homegrown teams, offering them opportunities for long-term development at the firm."

In an interview with Business Insider, Garcia talked about his journey to Blackstone, the firm's efforts to bolster its hiring of local talent, and his experience as a young professional building a finance career in South Florida. He also walked us through a normal day living and working for Blackstone in Miami.

Blackstone's bet on Miami

Blackstone's Miami office is just north of the city's downtown, about a 10-minute drive from the Brickell financial district. The modern glass building — five floors of which belong to Blackstone — is just a few blocks east of the Biscayne Bay and bridges to Miami Beach. It houses Miami's Brightline train station and about 260 Blackstone employees across nine business units, including more than 100 in tech.

In building Blackstone's Miami finance bench, Garcia said the approach is not so much about transplanting employees but rather finding local talent committed to Miami.

"It wasn't just, 'Hey, let's just bring people that we already know just because they want to be in Miami,'" said Garcia. "There is also an aspect of we hope that you want to be here. We want you to be in Miami and be part of Blackstone here in Miami."

This has empowered Garcia and other colleagues to tap into their Miami-based professional network when it comes time to recruit.

"We feel like there's a strong backing from the top down," Garcia said, adding: "Top leadership has come and been able to talk to us and say, 'We believe in this and it's going to be one of our biggest achievements for the firm.'"

Miami is more than just great weather and scenic views, Garcia said. It also has a lot of hardworking and high-achieving people.

You can be in Miami and be "just as productive and just as connected," he said.

Building a finance career outside New York

Garcia was born and raised in Miami, a "true Miami native through and through," as he describes himself. His parents immigrated to the US from Cuba, and he was a first-generation college student at the University of Miami. He always saw himself living in Miami long-term, even as many of his UM friends in the industry flocked to other cities.

"Having strong roots, having family nearby for me was really important," said Garcia

Garcia sits on the global fund finance team within Blackstone's multi-asset investing division, also known as BXMA, which invests in both public and private market assets. The division currently has about $83 billion in investor capital.

With a master's in accounting, his first job was at KPMG's Miami office, where he focused on audits for asset management clients. Interested in the buy side, he then worked at Miami-based private equity firm HIG Capital.

One of Garcia's mentors from KPMG, Tyler Burke, was the first finance employee Blackstone hired in Miami. Garcia was soon the second, joining in August 2021.

Think of his role as a fund accounting expert.

"As we get information from our operations and they're doing the trades themselves, we're making sure the accounting, the books, and everything actually is what it's supposed to represent from the business side and ultimately going back to investors and all that."

He works daily with deal and operations teams across the company.

"We're in conversations with New York and a lot of the deal people up there as well," Garcia said. "It's all about how we make the real-life world make sense and transaction-wise look right in our books and records and make sure it's all flowing seamlessly in our processes."

Garcia said he's proud of how the city has changed and the career opportunities it now provides to people who want to call it home.

"We've seen so much of an influx of people and companies," said Garcia. "It gave me that satisfaction of knowing, hey, I get to be proud of my city and being here, and still work for such an amazing institution like Blackstone."

A day in Garcia's life

Early morning routine

Garcia says he starts out early — 5:00 a.m. — to walk his dog and write in a gratitude journal, which helps to put him "in the right mindset."

He also goes to the gym to work out. "I usually do my gym routine in the morning. It makes it easier to just get it out of the way, and once I come home from work, I can relax a bit more," he said.

Arrive and settle in at the office

Garcia goes to the office every day, usually arriving between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. He drives from his apartment near Brickell, about 10 minutes. Blackstone has a valet service at the office, so he is able to drop off his car without worrying about parking.

He likes to start out with an iced coffee. "Usually Miami is pretty hot, so I feel like I need some cooling down," he said.

On Tuesday mornings, the office usually offers pastries or bites from local restaurants or bakeries, he said. Croquetas, deep-fried ham poppers, and pastelitos, puff pastries filled with fruit or cheese, are common fare.

"It connects us more to the Latin culture and the things that I grew up being around every day," said Garcia. "Every single week it's a space for people to just go hang out for a few minutes before we get started."

Getting down to work

After reading his emails, Garcia usually starts each work day with a catch-up team meeting. It's about 10 to 15 minutes for the team to go over that day's "key deliverables," he said.

After that, he said, "there might be a couple of meetings or things that come up with the business — trade activity, deal flow — that might be happening on our funds."

"I would say the biggest thing, at least on a daily basis, that I'll do is review what we call our flash reconciliations, or the snapshot of our portfolio," said Garcia.

It's basically a report of overall fund and individual investment performance. They're prepared by offshore teams through a reconciliation process, who then pass them on for review and approval onshore. These snapshots are communicated up the business chain daily, he said.

"Everywhere internally, up to our portfolio managers, the people making the deals, they rely on that every morning, it relates to having an understanding of where the fund is at, and they'll probably make some activity or different decisions based on that."

Lunch near the office & afternoon work

Garcia's favorite lunch spot is Naked Farmer, which serves seasonal, locally sourced food, like the Backyard BBQ chicken bowl for about $15.

"Usually a couple of us from our team go grab lunch, whether we eat off-site or bring it back," he said. When eating in the office, they have the option to dine in what's known as "the hub" — a lounge area centrally located with seating and coffee stations.

Sometimes the company hosts "lunch and learns" led by portfolio managers or other high-level execs, he added.

"After that, we kind of just continue the rest of the day, maybe more emails, maybe different meetings," he said.

The work might include reviewing reports such as fund expense logs or net asset value (NAV) packages or doing research on any technical accounting or finance matters impacting assigned funds. He might also help coach or train junior staff.

Wrap up the day

Garcia usually ends his day at 5:30 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. He often heads straight home to spend time with his fiancee (they're getting married in Puerto Rico this month).

His evening routine of late has been "change, relax, and then we walk the Key Biscayne bridge," said Garcia. "Really good views and fresh air."

One of his favorite spots for drinks and hanging out is Medium Cool in South Beach, a swanky cocktail lounge with live music in the Gale Hotel.

To get a Cuban food fix, he has long frequented the famous Cafe Versailles restaurant in the city's Little Havana neighborhood.

"For a lot of people it's like a staple — you have to try it when you're in Miami," he said. "For me, Versailles is something I saw growing up. My whole family's down here and I would go with my grandmother and we would go late nights."

• Citigroup announced 344 new managing directors on Thursday, its largest class under CEO Jane Fraser.
• It boosted the number of new MDs in technology, a unit core to Fraser's transformation efforts.
• Here's the list of names the bank tapped to help steer the firm through its next phase.

Citigroup on Thursday named 344 employees to the bank's highest rank outside the C-suite, the most since Jane Fraser became CEO in 2021. The promotions were driven in part by its investments in technology amid a larger transformation effort.

Managing director promotions are an annual tradition across Wall Street and help to showcase the next generation of industry leaders. Citi's MD promotions come as Fraser continues a yearslong effort to modernize and simplify the bank, including by thinning out its management ranks. Earlier this year, the banks said it would cut 20,000 jobs, roughly 10% of headcount, over the next five years.

Citi's overhaul — known as the "Transformation" — includes efforts to upgrade the bank's risk controls and tech following a series of missteps that landed the firm in hot water with regulators, including an accidental payment of nearly $900 million to creditors of the beauty brand Revlon in 2020.

This year's MD class includes more leaders from its markets and technology groups, as well as the chief operating office, a Citi spokesperson told BI. The number of promotions in the services and banking units remained flat, the spokesperson said, adding that there was a slight decrease in US personal banking and legacy franchises, or businesses that the company is in the process of winding down.

Markets saw the largest number of promotions at 69, followed by 48 in its banking group (encompassing investment, commercial, and corporate banking), and 42 in wealth. Technology has 27 new MDs.

Citi officials, including Fraser and Viswas Raghavan, Citi's new head of banking who joined in February from JPMorgan, praised the new class for their "relentless" pursuit of performance in a Thursday memo, a copy of which was obtained by Business Insider.

"Our new MDs have been instrumental in ensuring we continue making progress on our Transformation and with our regulators," said the memo authored by members of Citi's executive management team. "They continue to build our credibility with key stakeholders and are relentless about driving stronger business performance."

The MDs were also honored Thursday morning with "roll call" gatherings within their respective business units — an annual tradition within some divisions that was expanded across the bank last year.

Here's the full list of new managing directors at Citigroup and some key demographic stats:

Banking (48 names)

• Aditya Agarwal
• Salomon Amkie
• Vicente Alejandro Arevalo Barrabes
• Lorenzo Beacco
• Chad Bergert
• Mike Berry
• Seok Hoon Chia
• KC Clark
• Blazej Dankowski
• Lucy Devlin
• Colm Donnelly
• Osama Naji El-Ali
• Casper Elnegaard
• Ben Exner
• Gustavo Fontes
• Andre Funari
• Mario Garcia
• Ricardo Garza
• Cecile Guilleminot
• Ferdinand Haindl
• Melissa Haw
• German Heberling
• Elia Hermida
• William Herrmann
• Eric Himmelberger
• Crystal Jin
• Gabe Juarez
• Abhishek Kaila
• Dai Kitatani
• Abhinav Lamba
• Billy Liu
• Param M
• Ula Malczewska
• Siena Malik
• Simon Marrison
• Gino Mbetse
• Andrew Miller-Jones
• Kevin O'Sullivan
• David Oji
• Mihail Polyakov
• Prateek Rastogi
• Partha Rathore
• Linlin Sun
• Alex Syhanath
• Atsushi Tauchi
• Saffet Tinaztepe
• Yeung Tsai
• Sunny Wang

Citibank, N.A. (2 names)

• Rajan Brotia
• Barry J White

Client (18 names)

• Fatima Boolani
• Ian Booth
• Laura Chia Yi Chen
• Andrew Gardiner
• Neary Guenin
• Shishir Prasad
• Kenny Pun
• Tyler Radke
• Jennifer Sariano
• Jamie Searle
• Chirag Shah
• Viral Shah
• Jack Shang
• Noorie Singh
• Albert Sutton
• Judy Yip
• Xiangrong Yu
• Cedric Zunino

Chief Operating Office (20 names)

• Abhishek Agarwal
• Rob Brodie
• Sean Burnham
• Geoffrey Capes
• Erika Federico
• Kimberlie Hardial-Choo
• Stuart Hill
• Kyle Hughes
• Ketan Khokhani
• Swati Kulkarni
• James McGuigan
• Adrian Murphy
• Juan Francisco Orrego
• Tim Palmer
• Chris Skarzinski
• Carolina Spalding
• Pamela St John
• Subha V
• Chris Winter
• Adam Wood

Enterprise Services and Public Affairs (3 names)

Graham Buck

• Anmol Chowdhry
• Davida Heller

• Finance (17 names)
• Bilal Akhtar
• Peter Battin
• Yun-ni Chen
• Peter Demoise
• Marcos Diaz
• Kimberly Egert
• Michael Fillius
• Janak Ghosh
• Kevin Hong
• Matt Jonason
• Dimba Kier
• Bertrand Louvard
• Cynthia Ng
• Sandeep Pati
• Rebecca Reeb
• Teresa Salvato
• Yun Wang

Global Legal Affairs & Compliance (22 names)

• Alberto Arenas, CSIS
• Kimberly Barnes, ICRM
• Michael Caravella, Legal
• Shirley Carter, Legal
• Sam Cory, ICRM
• Mark Eliades, Legal
• April Fredlund, Legal
• Steven Krause, ICRM
• Dora Kreymborg, Legal
• Angie Lockley, CSIS
• Dana Lukens, Legal
• Matthew MacIntyre, CSIS
• Piotr Matuszewski, ICRM
• Rosie McAnlis, Legal
• Geardine McCann, Legal
• Ciarán Murphy, ICRM
• Paul Patton, Legal
• Deborah Resch, Legal
• Jose Riera, CSIS
• Mark Steuer, ICRM
• Laura Toustau, ICRM
• Rosalie Yee, Legal

Human Resources (3 names)

• Shari Funk
• Shay Gonen
• Laura Zablah

Internal Audit (9 names)

• Neha Bhardwaj
• Callie Boyd
• Josh Goldsmith
• Gordon Hua
• Sophia Jingo
• Patrick Kielty
• Neil Kothare
• James Kouame
• Cindy Santoro

International (4 names)

• Fahad Aldeweesh
• Maria Paula Carvajal
• Jonathan Nix
• Kubilay Ozturk

• Legacy Franchises (6 names)
• Bill Burns
• Enrique Granillo
• Jesus Jauregui
• Gonzalo Palafox
• Erick Ramirez
• Jean Rocha Rodrigues

• Markets (69 names)
• Laurence Assip
• Robert Beatson
• Paul Berry
• Matthew Boyer
• Suninder Singh Chauhan
• Amish Chotai
• David Collis
• Ashish Kumar Daga
• Marc Damoiseaux
• Connor Dwyer
• Chuck Edmunds
• Richard Fairhall
• Carlos Ferrari
• Michael Fershtman
• Imelda Frayre
• Andre Grossi
• Roshni Gudka
• Aditya Gupta
• Natalia Gutierrez de la Peza
• Kentaro Hayashi
• Peter Nicholas Hext
• Sandy Hou
• Rocky Huang
• Rob Hughes
• Funmi Ibidunni
• Howard Ilderton
• Johan Kabla
• Neha Kapur
• Yana Keresteliev
• Subir Kumar
• Christopher Kuo
• Eirini Lerikou
• Ronan Liston
• Jorge Lonegro
• Steffen Lunde
• Roberto Massacci
• Maura McFadden
• Egor Miroshnikov
• Jim Monahan
• Chen Ni
• Fonzarelli Ong
• Warren Parker
• Vijay Parthasarathy
• Mihaela Penes
• Galvin Phua
• Jason Pillai
• Luke Pollock
• Jonathan Radke
• Rohit Rajgaria
• Richard Rosin
• Camila Rossetti
• David Rufino
• Colin Ryan
• Manish Saraf
• Angele Seriki
• Bollie Shiflett
• Marie Sho
• Esben Shoen
• Siris Singh
• Iqbal Sohal
• Kumar Subramanian
• Andrew Sufka
• Aruna Tatavarty
• Davy Tsang
• Miro Vucetic
• Rishi Watts
• Marcus Weickel
• Henry Wong
• Jeff Wu

Office of the CEO (1 name)

• Sigrid Nubla

Risk (16 names)

• Mikael Amar
• Gabby Banwait
• Om Barlinge
• Anindya Basu
• Bridget Griffin
• Nayantara Gupta
• Matthew Haigh
• Chuck Hou
• Ibo Longjam
• Shivi Punia
• Liza Ramsammy
• Navrup Rana
• Ravi Surana
• Logan Tamres
• Rodrigo Vargas
• Thomas Wood

Services (32 names)

• Saurabh Arora
• Kfeir Barkai
• Leandra Catton
• Amit Choudhary
• Chris Cook
• Yoanna Darwin
• Jane Dulson
• Carol Ferretti
• James Flugstad
• Elena Gomez
• Mandeep Heer
• Jonathan Jordan
• Ronan Kealy
• Lenny Leone
• Simon McConnell
• Ross McEwan
• Mary Messer
• Olivia Morgan
• Sergei Oganov
• Patrick O'Neill
• Nikhil Patankar
• Sonal Patel
• Leandro Quintal
• Rob Ranson
• Andy Ren
• Kirstin Renner
• Sean Ruby
• Yvonne Swainston
• Tomas Videla
• Heidi Willox
• Elias Xilas
• Melissa Ongleo Yambao

Technology (27 names)

• Catherine Ablott
• Mohamed Alsaloom
• Shante Avery
• Kashif Awan
• Nidhruv Bahree
• Mark Ballard
• Andre Batista
• Kathryn Beard
• Rachel Carpenter
• Noby George Cheruvathoor
• Gonzalo Cordova
• Nigel Deverteuil
• Ryan Evans
• Jeffrey Hazel
• Adam Hess
• John Shannon Hogue
• Hong Jiang
• Dave Jones
• Hitesh Kshatriya
• Greg Lurie
• Rajesh M K
• Deepak Nabera
• Steven Readett
• Jon Rosen
• Michael Todisco
• Nishanth Vontela
• Rajesh Wadhwa

U.S. Personal Banking (5 names)

• Jeff Chwast
• Timothy R Dougherty
• Tracy Goldman
• Sri K Lakamsani
• Supriya Ramamurthy

Wealth (42 names)

• Yogi Abhyankar
• Emile Abinader
• Rob Anderson
• Zeshan Azam
• Nicola Baker
• Christopher Barron
• Stewart Boag
• Olga Bogdanova
• Greg Byrne
• Winnie Choi
• Mendy Chung
• Juan Francisco Clemenza
• Sheethal Dalpathraj
• David C Darshan
• Beth Emswiler
• Matthew Ferrari-Wells
• Jenny Fung
• Carlos Garcia-Crespo
• Brad Goldberg
• Hollie Griego
• Danny Jones
• Eric Kraus
• Mark Chung Hei Lee
• Lena Siew Geok Lim
• Jason Liu
• Andrew Louw
• Alinne Majarian Fash
• Vlod Makar
• Alex Marks
• Kishore Indroo Motwani
• Luis Negrete
• Diego Parlaghy
• Claudia Penido
• Juan Guillermo Ramirez
• Gaston Rodriguez
• Jason Rosen
• Einat Sadka
• Masa Sekulic
• Kathy Stith
• Narayan Swamy
• Diego Szuldman
• Frederic Viaud

Here are some key stats about the group:

• 29% are women.
• 24% joined through Citi through an early-career program.
• 56% are multilingual and 30% have worked in two or more countries.
• The new MDs have a median of 20 years of experience in financial services.
• They are from 29 countries and comprise 35 nationalities.
• North America represents the largest number of new MDs, 174 or 50.6%. The United Kingdom is second with 68, or 19.8%, followed by Japan, Asian North & Australia at 35 (10.2%), Asia South: 28 (8.1%), Latin America: 19 (5.5%), Europe: 15 (4.4%), Middle East & Africa: 5 (1.5%).

• Among the 174 promotes who are based in the US, 44.8% are racially or ethnically diverse. While some identify with more than one racial or ethnic group, here's a breakdown:

  • 25.9% Asian (45)
  • 6.3% Black (11)
  • 12.6% Hispanic/Latino (22)

• Bank of New York Mellon is a 240-year-old financial firm with $2.1 trillion in AUM.
• It also touches roughly 20% of investible assets around the globe through its various businesses.
• Here are the names of the 30 employees it just promoted to the top title of managing director.

Bank of New York Mellon Corp. on Wednesday promoted 30 employees to managing director, the bank's highest title below the C-suite. That's down from 44 managing director promotions last year as CEO Robin Vince seeks to transform the bank, including by setting a higher bar for rising in the ranks.

BNY is neither an investment bank nor a consumer bank, but it's one of the oldest and most important financial institutions on Wall Street. Founded by Alexander Hamilton 240 years ago, BNY is a custodian and administrator of $52.1 trillion for financial firms through its asset servicing business, clearance and collateral management, and other businesses. It also manages $333 billion in individual client assets through its wealth business and $2.1 trillion in assets through its investment and wealth management business segment.

Through its various commercial lines, including custody and treasury services, it touches roughly 20% of investible assets worldwide.

This year, 25% of the new class are from non-US locations, including locations the bank has targeted for growth, like Manchester, United Kingdom, Wroclaw, Poland, Dublin, Ireland, and India (both Chennai and Pune), according to a spokesperson.

Here are the list of names of BNY's newest MDs.

• Asset Servicing: Adam Watson, Fiona McNally, Ranjani Iyer
• BNY Wealth: Chad Johnsrud, Adam Innerst
• Chief Commercial Office: Christian Lewis, Paula Avraamides
• Clearance and Collateral Management: Parin Shah
• Credit Services: Shaf Hasan
• Engineering: Bhupendra Pudrohit, Christina Mackrell, Siva Hoskeri, Vikram Lalit
• Enterprise Transformation Office: Lauren Kozora
• Executive Office: Sarah Atkinson
• Finance: Jason Thomas, Jessica Casillo, Kimberly Perman, Sudipta Adhaya
• Growth Ventures: David Moss
• Markets: Ted Leveroni, Jeff McCormick
• Operations: Gerard O'Keefe, Janet Menezes, Katherine Mruczek, Nellie Ding, Sean Turner
• Risk and Compliance: Nicholas Fuller, Ryan Leader
• Treasury Services: Jeffrey Sander

• Margot Robbie described slapping Leonardo DiCaprio in her audition for "The Wolf of Wall Street."
• Robbie said she thought she'd gone too far, and worried someone would call the police.
• She said: "I was thinking, 'I'm going to get arrested, I'm pretty sure that's assault or battery.'"

Margot Robbie said she slapped Leonardo DiCaprio in her audition for "The Wolf of Wall Street," and worried she'd be arrested.

Robbie played Naomi Lapaglia, the fictionalized wife of Jordan Belfort, the financial criminal portrayed by DiCaprio.

But she took a risk in her audition, which left an impression on her costar and director Martin Scorsese, she recalled when appearing on the November 26 episode of the "Talking Pictures" podcast.

She said she was contemplating whether to kiss DiCaprio or slap him — and chose the slap.

She said: "I thought, 'I could kiss Leonardo DiCaprio right now, and that would be awesome. I can't wait to tell all of my friends this.' And then I thought nah. And just walloped him in the face. It was dead silent for what felt like an eternity but was probably three seconds."

"They just burst out laughing. Leo and Marty were laughing so hard. They said, 'That was great," she said.

"I was thinking, 'I'm going to get arrested, I'm pretty sure that's assault or battery. Not only will you never work again, actually you will go to jail for this, you idiot.' And also why did you have to hit him so hard? You should have done it lighter.'"

The actor's move paid off because not only did it win her the role, but it drove her career forward and pushed her into the spotlight.

She later landed roles in other blockbusters like "The Suicide Squad," "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" and "Barbie."

During the podcast, Robbie also touched on her decision to go nude for a scene with DiCaprio, which also got the audience's attention at the time. She said that Scorsese offered to make her more comfortable by having her in a robe instead, but she decided against it.

She said of her character: "That's not what she would do in that scene. The whole point is that she's going to come out completely naked—that's the card she's playing right now."

• Business Insider selected 25 young professionals, 35 and under, as its rising stars of Wall Street.
• We asked these up-and-comers what TV show, book, or movie best represents the finance industry.
• They shared some parallels and even pointed to works about nonfinancial subjects.

There's no shortage of colorful characters depicting Wall Street. There's the serial-killer investment banker, the corporate raider who declares that "greed is good," and the crooked, if charismatic, stockbroker, to name a few.

Two of those are fictional movie characters, and one was based on a real person, but they've all shaped the public's perception of what working on Wall Street could be like.

If you ask successful people at some of the biggest banks, asset managers, trading firms, or hedge funds whether they see their reality accurately perceived on the screen or in books, they'll tell you that working on Wall Street is a little less colorful than it's often painted to be.

"I don't know that there's a great movie or book depicting life on Wall Street," Mark Zhu, 34, a managing director at Blackstone, told Business Insider. "The day-to-day is a lot more boring than you think. It's a lot of calls and a lot of emails. There's not as much flamboyance or out-there behavior. It's almost not movie-worthy. Why would you pay money to watch somebody just sit in front of a computer doing Zooms?"

So maybe they think all that partying on HBO's show about twentysomething investment bankers, "Industry," is a little overdone, but there are still some elements the entertainment industry gets right occasionally.

We asked up-and-comers on Wall Street about the shows, movies, or books that best represent their daily lives. While no one representation was perfect, the young professionals talked about some of the parallels they saw. Some even shared some nonfinancial references that give a window into their world.

Here are the shows, movies, or books that give a flavor of what it's like to work on Wall Street.

Shows: "Industry"

The hit TV show "Industry" — full of sex, drugs, and spreadsheets — just wrapped up its third season.

"My friends in the last few years have nonstop bothered me about 'Industry,'" Justin Elliott, 29, a vice president of institutional rate sales at Bank of America, said.

"They see a crazy show about the industry and say, 'My God, I can't believe that happens in your world every day.' From what I've seen, there's definitely some thrills from getting a trade done that might mirror the show a bit, but it's a very exaggerated depiction of life on Wall Street."

"I don't know that any of them do a great job, but I am quite a fan of 'Industry,'" Erica Wilson, a vice president at the private credit firm Blue Owl, said. "I am still behind on the third season, but I think that show is fun."

"Succession"

Though the blockbuster show "Succession" isn't specifically about the banking industry, Daniela Cardona, a 29-year-old investment banker at RBC Capital Markets, watched it in its entirety and found some similarities in high-stress moments.

"In the last season, when they're trying to merge the two companies, there's one scene that always makes me giggle. I don't think this is fully accurate, but I do think it's funny — they're in a conference room, and Kendall says, 'Just make it up!' and they're all with their laptops sitting in the middle, and the consultants are looking at him like, what do you mean, make it up?" Cardona said.

"There have been instances where it sometimes feels that way — where you're in a time crunch and it's 3 o'clock in the morning."

"Scrubs"

Ben Carper, a 34-year-old managing director at Jefferies, pointed to the medical comedy sitcom "Scrubs" as a better representation than anything that features board rooms and trading floors.

He said the show had a "similar high-pressure environment where there are some opportunities for amusement and humor, but generally a pretty vigorous focus on doing a job well done."

Movies: "Margin Call"

The 2011 drama "Margin Call" follows the 24 hours after an analyst at an investment bank discovers it has taken on more debt than it can handle — illustrating the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis.

"I think it picks up the cadence of working at a big bank the best," said Austin Anton, 32, a principal at Apollo Global Management.

"The Wolf of Wall Street"

"The Wolf of Wall Street" follows the story of Jordan Belfort, who actually only worked at a Wall Street firm for a few months before the 1987 stock-market crash. He goes on to run his own brokerage, which ultimately scams several people, but the movie highlights the debauchery, opulence, and excess that ensued during his run.

"This almost sounds weird, but I'm going to say 'The Wolf of Wall Street,'" Matt Gilbert, a managing director at Thoma Bravo said. "The absurdity of that movie, to some extent, I do think, kind of incorporates some aspect of our job."

While finance is the backbone of the economy and certainly has global implications, what bankers and investors do on a day-to-day basis isn't saving lives, the 35-year-old added.

"I think the fact that you could have a comedy wrapped around the finance world is important, and it always makes me take a step back and think through, sure, I want to win every deal," he said. "Our fiduciary duty at Thoma Bravo is to produce the best returns for LPs, but this job is supposed to be fun. I'm supposed to work with great people. We're supposed to laugh together. I think if people take this job too seriously, that's when burnout and other things happen."

"The Big Short"

"The Big Short," the movie based on the financial journalist Michael Lewis' book, chronicles how Wall Street helped fuel the US housing crisis in 2008 and the investors who profited from it.

"It's not our day-to-day, but I think it is an OK representation of what happened at the time," said Chi Chen, 34, a portfolio manager at BlackRock. " Maybe it is not all factual, but it is a good one that is representative."

"The Internship"

Patrick Lenihan, a portfolio manager at JPMorgan Asset Management, said "The Internship," which features two old-school salesmen trying to restart their careers through an internship at Google, reminds him of the importance of having and supporting a diverse team.

"I feel like that team with Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, the rest of them, and how they come together at first, you see there's just a variety of different people that you're like, 'Oh, this is going to fail,'" he said. "But I think a large part of my success is going back to that teamwork, getting the right people in, and ensuring that diversity of opinions."

Books: "Market Wizards"

BlackRock's Chen, who focuses on fixed income, said that to really gain insight into the investing industry, it's best to read the "Market Wizards" book series, which features interviews with top traders.

"A lot of those investing stories for that book series are more from two, three decades ago, when market volatility was much higher. But we have seen a comeback of market volatility since 2020," she said. "So I have always enjoyed that whole series of books."

"Free Food for Millionaires"

Elliott, the Bank of America VP, recommends Min Jin Lee's novel "Free Food for Millionaires."

"It's about a Korean woman navigating life who ends up on Wall Street in an admin capacity. But really, it's a story about belonging and identity — about trying to make it in a world and industry you didn't initially know much about," he said.

"To me, it's a lot more humanistic. It gives me a bit more of a personal perspective when I think about my journey on Wall Street. When I think about the people — and understanding people is so much of this job — I go back to 'Free Food for Millionaires.'"

"The Man Who Solved the Market"

There's no fictional piece of media Bridgewater's Blake Cecil has found to reflect life in finance; he said shows and movies "feel quite distant" from his day-to-day.

A biography of the late hedge-fund billionaire Jim Simons, "The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution," reflects how the deputy chief investment officer and his colleagues approached challenges.

"It resonated with my experience of working with people who are using algorithms to solve problems that often hadn't been asked before," Cecil said.

"The Inner Game of Tennis"

Harrison DiGia, a vice president at General Atlantic, had another book recommendation: "The Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallwey.

"This book is all about the mental game and trusting your intuition and yourself. You use practice and your preparation before a competition so that when the time is right, or you have a big opportunity, you're ready, and your mental game is as strong as it can be," DiGia, 31, said.

"When I think about investing, a lot of it is setting yourself up to get that big opportunity and making sure you're prepared and can have a clear mind when that pressure situation comes. I'm a huge tennis fan, so I think about this when I'm on the tennis court, but I think about it in a professional setting as well."

"Unreasonable Hospitality"

In the book "Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect" by Will Guidara, the co-owner and general manager of Eleven Madison Park describes how he manages his business, his customer-service style, and the things he'd do at Eleven Madison Park to go above and beyond.

Craig Kolwicz, an investment banker at Moelis, said the "unreasonable hospitality" described in the book (such as having an employee run out to get a hot dog for a customer who you overheard saying they hadn't had one in New York yet) isn't dissimilar to the type of service that could differentiate an investment banker.

"It depicts a restaurant that's an extremely expensive restaurant where there's an extremely discerning clientele base. They could go to all these other really fancy, really nice three-Michelin-star restaurants in New York or in the world," the 35-year-old managing director said.

"How do you differentiate yourself? There's a lot of investment bankers out there and there's a lot of really smart clients and folks that we work with all the time — and how do we get them to stay with us? How do we get them to hire us on the next deal? It's some of the stuff that we do," he said. For example, he'd recently flown to Los Angeles for an 11:30 a.m. pitch meeting and flown back.

"It's like hospitality, but it's kind of an unreasonable client customer service to do something like that," Kolwicz said.

• Trump nominated Scott Bessent, a billionaire investor, for Treasury secretary.
• Bessent spent years working for George Soros before founding a hedge fund.
• He's signaled support for many of Trump's proposals, including deregulation and tariffs.

President-elect Donald Trump nominated Scott Bessent, a Wall Street veteran and campaign ally, for Treasury secretary, one of the biggest Cabinet prizes.

Trump made the announcement Friday evening in a Truth Social post after multiple news organizations reported the plans. Trump's spokesperson did not immediately return Business Insider's request for comment.

"Scott is widely respected as one of the World's foremost International Investors and Geopolitical and Economic Strategists," Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding, "we will ensure that no Americans will be left behind in the next and Greatest Economic Boom, and Scott will lead that effort for me, and the Great People of the United States of America."

Bessent, 62, founded and runs the macro hedge fund Key Square Group and emerged as a key economic advisor to Trump on the campaign trail.

Bessent was a top choice for Trump early in the cabinet selection process. He widened his search, however, adding Kevin Warsh and billionaire investor Marc Rowan to the mix after growing frustrated by the "knife fight" jockeying between Bessent and Howard Lutnick over the position, The New York Times reported.

Elon Musk chimed in during that time, throwing his support behind Lutnick for Treasury secretary.

"My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change," Musk wrote.

But Trump nominated Lutnick for commerce secretary on Tuesday. Axios reported Monday that Warsh was eyeing Fed chair in the future.

Bessent's journey to the top tier of the GOP financial world hasn't been entirely linear, though — it includes years working for the liberal philanthropist George Soros and hosting a fundraiser for Al Gore, a former Democratic vice president.

The billionaire investor spent his childhood in South Carolina. His father went bankrupt investing in real estate, which Bessent later said led him to get his first summer job when he was 9 years old, The Wall Street Journal reported. Bessent attended Yale and broke onto the investing scene after working for Soros' first partner, James Rogers. He joined Soros Fund Management in 1991.

By 2011, Bessent was Soros' chief investment officer, and he was instrumental in the fund's hugely successful bets against the British pound and Japanese yen. In 2015, Bessent broke off to start Key Square. He hasn't talked to Soros in years, The Wall Street Journal said.

In 2011, Bessent married his husband, John Freeman, a former New York City prosecutor. They primarily live in Charleston, South Carolina, with their two children. They spend their spare time preserving historic mansions and used to own an 1880s-era house in Southampton, New York.

Despite his nomination that would put him at the center of Trumpworld, Bessent has a somewhat checkered political history. He disagreed with much of the work Soros did through his nonprofit and has primarily donated to Republican candidates, though he's helped Democrats on occasion. In 2000, Bessent held a fundraiser at his home for Gore's presidential bid.

By 2016, Bessent was inching toward Trump, telling people they weren't taking Trump seriously enough as a candidate. After Trump won, Bessent donated $1 million to his inaugural committee. Though Bessent has known Trump's family for decades, the 2024 election brought him closer to the former and future president — Trump has called Bessent "one of the most brilliant men on Wall Street" and "a nice-looking guy." Rather than slam Bessent for his previous connections to Soros, a favorite right-wing punching bag, Trump appears impressed by how successful he was at Soros' firm.

Bessent donated $3 million to Trump-aligned PACs and Republican committees this election cycle. His support extended beyond his pocketbook, as he frequently conferred with campaign officials on economic plans. Known for his interest in niche economic data, Bessent helped draft speeches and write policy proposals for Trump's economic ideas. By the end of the race, Bessent was fully woven into Trump's orbit; he attended the last two rallies and watched from Mar-a-Lago as election results rolled in.

As treasury secretary, Bessent would face a mixed economic landscape. While unemployment is low and the economy is growing at a healthy clip, Americans remain frustrated by high prices and what they see as runaway inflation. Dubbed a "Trump whisperer" by Forbes, Bessent has signaled support for some of Trump's key proposals.

Among Bessent's top priorities is shrinking the country's significant debt, primarily through increasing growth and, in turn, boosting tax revenues. He has also supported Trump's tariffs proposal, telling CNBC that they should be "layered in gradually" to spread out any inflationary impact. At one point, Bessent floated the idea of a shadow Federal Reserve chair — under his theory, Trump would nominate a replacement to lead the central bank before Jerome Powell's term ends in 2026. After facing blowback, Bessent walked back the idea.

Bessent has advised Trump on a "3-3-3 policy," which the Journal described as "cutting the budget deficit to 3% of gross domestic product by 2028, spurring GDP growth of 3% through deregulation, and producing an additional 3 million barrels of oil or its equivalent a day."

On November 10, the Journal published an opinion piece by Bessent that praised Trump's economic vision. The markets, he wrote, were evidently giddy about the former president's return to the White House. Beyond lavishing praise on Trump, he said that the US should slash bank regulations, overhaul the Inflation Reduction Act, and reinvigorate American energy investment.

"Mr. Trump has turned around the economy before, and he is ready to do so again," Bessent said.

• Coding languages are a foundational element of any tech job, but not all are made equal.
• Python and SQL are among the most popular languages; C++ and Tableau are more specialized.
• Business Insider spoke with recruiters and tech workers to identify the top eight languages to know.

Big Tech firms like Apple and Amazon have signaled a move away from the complicated coding language C++, but there's still a place for engineers who know the coding language on Wall Street.

Apple created Swift to replace its use of C++, the company's primary coding language for its devices. Amazon recently awarded a Stony Brook University professor an approximate $100,000 research grant to continue his work to automate converting existing C++ code to Rust, a coding language created in 2006. Even the White House has joined the conversation around C++, urging software developers to move away from the language due to cybersecurity concerns in a February report earlier this year.

But the financial space is still "one of the heavy users of C++ that's really doing cutting-edge stuff," one industry executive told Business Insider. High-frequency trading firms and exchanges rely on C++, a notoriously complicated language that can offer more control over the underlying hardware. It's also prevalent in the video game industry.

Citadel Securities, for one, recently hired a C++ expert from Microsoft to lead training initiatives on the language. Looking at current open technology positions, trading firms Virtu Financial and Hudson River Trading are among the firms also seeking out C++ experience.

It's also good to know in quantitative finance, one of the few bright spots in the current technology hiring slump, Matt Stabile, a tech recruiter who works with buy-side firms including Two Sigma and Susquehanna International Group, told BI.

In today's machine-to-machine world, having some experience with programming languages is a must. Coding languages, like Python and Java, are how humans can communicate with computers by providing a set of instructions for a system to execute. As it turns out, not all programming languages are made equal and some are more relevant to certain corners of Wall Street than others.

Business Insider spoke with recruiters, Wall Street tech execs, and industry insiders and analyzed job postings to learn about in-demand skill sets.

Here are the programming languages to know:

Python

Areas of interest: Applicable across finance firms, job titles, and levels

Firms using it: Banks, hedge funds, and investment firms

As the fundamental language for engineering work across Wall Street, Python has long been at the top of the skills list for buy- and sell-side firms alike. It has been a favorite at Capital One and Man Group.

From visualization to statistical analyses to modeling and machine-learning applications, Python has multiple use cases. It also lends itself to those who don't have deep coding backgrounds because it is flexible and applies to a wide range of users, Ori Ben-Akiva, director of portfolio management at Man Numeric, a quantitative-focused division of the publicly traded hedge fund Man Group, previously told BI.

When it comes to data science and machine learning roles, "Python is king of the road," said Stabile, who runs his own recruiting shop called Stabile Search.

SQL

Areas of interest: Anyone who works with databases, data

Firms using it: Almost every financial firm

As data becomes more centralized in financial firms' strategies — from marketing to identifying new deal opportunities and analyzing risk — it's helpful to know SQL, which is one of the most common and basic ways to query or pull information from a database.

SQL is a relational database language, meaning it's designed to be able to tie different data tables together. For any tasks that have to do with analytics, you'll likely find SQL, Deepali Vyas, global head of fintech, payments, and crypto at Korn Ferry, told BI.

C++

Areas of interest: Low-latency applications

Firms using it: High-frequency trading players and exchanges

For applications and systems where speed (or a fast response time) is the name of the game, experience as a C++ developer is going to come in handy. That's especially true at high-frequency trading firms and exchanges, where companies edge each other out by being microseconds faster than the competition.

The coding language has a reputation for being trickier to master than others, and its ability to interact more closely with technical hardware can lead to nasty coding bugs, but it also generally affords the user more control and speed.

Tableau and Power BI

Areas of interest: Data visualization, front-office analysts

Firms using it: Wealth managers, banks

When Wall Street tech execs talk about data, it's often broken up into organizing it and finding insights within it.

Korn Ferry's Vyas said the latter benefits from tools like Tableau and Power BI, which visualize and contextualize data. These types of graphics are especially useful if you work in wealth management or advisory, where dashboards and data tables are regularly used.

Java

Areas of interest: Big banks with more legacy technology

Firms using it: Banks and some buy-side firms

Like Python, Java is widely used on Wall Street. The coding language secured an early foothold in the world of banking because it was believed to have security features that restricted data access, while also offering portability, or the ability to be transferred between machines.

As a result, many big banks are tethered to Java, but other firms like Two Sigma have also relied on the coding language.

Rust and Go

Areas of interest: App development

Firms using it: Fintechs, banks

Technically, many of the coding languages on this list — like Python, for example — are open source, or available for developers to use without a proprietary license.

But several open-source languages have become more in-demand in recent years, including Go and Rust. When the banking fintech Stash built much of its core banking offering from the ground up in 2022, tech leaders at the company highlighted the use of Go — which they said was picked up quickly by engineers and cut the implementation time for "substantial" new pieces of code to roughly 3.5 days.

Fintechs aren't the only financial firms embracing Go and other open source tools. At Blackrock, much of the firm's cloud work was built upon open-source software. Wells Fargo in recent years has embraced Rust and Go as languages the bank is becoming more comfortable.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in 2022 and has been updated with new information.

Former BI reporter Carter Johnson also contributed to the previous reporting.

• JPMorgan tech exec Teresa Heitsenrether talked about the bank's ongoing adoption of generative AI.
• The bank has rolled out its "LLM suite" to 200,000 employees.
• Speaking at the Evident AI Symposium, Heitsenrether explained how it's been taken up and by who.

Before a business review with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Teresa Heitsenrether runs her presentation through one of the bank's generative AI tools to help her pinpoint the message she wants to convey to the top boss.

"I say, what is the message coming out of this? Make it more concise. Make it clear. And it certainly has helped with that," Heitsenrether, who is responsible for executing the bank's generative AI strategy, told a conference in New York on Thursday.

Dimon himself is a "tremendous user," she said, and is waiting for the ability to use the bank's tools on his phone.

"He's been desperate to get it on his phone and so that's a big deliverable before the end of the year, " Heitsenrether added.

JPMorgan, America's largest bank, has now rolled out the LLM Suite, a generative AI assistant, to 200,000 of its employees.

The tools are the first step in adopting AI technology across the firm. Heitsenrether, JPMorgan's chief data and analytics officer, speaking at the Evident AI Symposium, said that the next generation would go beyond helping employees write an email or summarize a document and link the tools with their everyday workflow to help people do their jobs.

"Basically go from the five minutes of efficiency to the five hours of efficiency," she added, saying it will take time to reach that goal.

'The flywheel effect'

The response to the LLM rollout has been "enthusiastic" and has created "healthy competition" between teams, she said. The wealth and asset management arm was the first division to use generative AI, piloting a generative AI "copilot" for its private bank this summer.

"When the investment bank found out they said 'Well, wait a minute, we want to be on there too,'" she said. "It does create a flywheel effect."

JPMorgan offers courses and in-person training for employees to use the firm's generative AI tools, such as how to prompt a chatbot properly, but the bank is also leaning on superusers, or the 10% to 20% of employees who are "really keen" to help with adoption.

"We embed people within different groups to be the local source of expertise to be able to help people that they work with understand how to adopt it," Heitsenrether explained.

The most common superusers seem to be those who clearly see the benefits of generative AI, such as a lawyer who saves hours by getting a synopsis of contracts or regulations instead of reading them all.

Despite Wall Street's interest in generative AI, getting workers to actually adopt the technology has been a key hurdle for finance firms, Accenture Consultant Keri Smith previously told BI. As a result, training and reskilling efforts have come under the spotlight, she said.

Heitsenrether said that they're trying to engage with the "pockets of resistance" now because it will be harder to convert them once the technology becomes intertwined with workflows.

She also said that the sooner people engage with AI, the less skeptical they are, and they see how it can augment, not replace, their jobs.

"Having it in your hands I think demystifies it quite a lot," Heitsenrether said. She used the example of a developer using it to more quickly write a test case. She said if they see the benefits, they realize "this is not something that's going to be done without me, but it's just a way to make my work that much more effective."

What's next: AI assistants

By this time next year, Heitsenrether told the audience that she hopes she'll be talking about "enabling employees with their own assistant" that's specific to them and their jobs.

Some of the legwork needed to develop those more autonomous forms of AI is currently being done in pilots, Sumitra Ganesh, a member of JPMorgan's AI research team, said during another panel.

Even still, the early use cases for AI workers will likely be constrained because these systems still need a human in the loop to ensure the reliability needed in such a regulated industry.

"We don't have a lot of trust right now in these systems," she said. Having an expert in the loop who can verify AI outputs is "kind of babysitting these agents at this point, but hopefully, it's like training wheels — at some point we will be confident enough to let them go," Ganesh said.

• Donald Trump has tapped Wall Street CEO Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary.
• Lutnick has spent over three decades running Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank in New York.
• See his career highlights and who could take over at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, has been named the next US secretary of commerce for Donald Trump.

As the head of the Commerce Department, Lutnick would have sway over the economy through tariffs and trade. If confirmed by the Senate, he would be integral to Trump's plan to raise tariffs on goods from China, a central promise of the president-elect's bid for a second White House term.

The Wall Street veteran has spent his career at financial-services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where he has been president and CEO since 1991. In recent years, the billionaire banker has become a key advisor to and fundraiser for the 47th president. He is cochair of the Trump transition team.

Here's a look at Lutnick's rise from "middle-class Long Island" to Wall Street boss and what his new role could mean for the investment bank he heads.

Who is Howard Lutnick?

Lutnick was named president and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald in 1991 — at age 29 — and, by 1996, had been appointed chairman.

In an interview on a podcast hosted by the investor Anthony Pompliano, he said that he had a "classic middle-class Long Island" childhood, with his mother working as an art teacher and his father as a history professor. His mother passed away from breast cancer when Lutnick was in the 11th grade, and his father died from cancer shortly after he started college.

He was 18 and found himself caring for his younger brother, who was 15 at the time. He also had a 20-year-old sister. He recalled being unable to cook for his siblings, so they ate boxed macaroni and cheese night after night, he shared on the podcast.

Lutnick said in the podcast that he landed his first job at Cantor Fitzgerald with the help of a family connection. He took a semester off of his studies at Haverford College to start working but eventually earned his degree in economics.

What is Cantor Fitzgerald?

Cantor Fitzgerald offers a range of services, from investment banking to sales and trading to equity research.

The firm's website said it has raised more than $45 billion for clients through 700 deals since 2016 and that it has more than 1,150 active institutional and corporate clients. The New York City-based firm counts more than 245 professionals on its sales and trading team and cites its "core expertise" as healthcare and technology.

The firm's asset-management arm had some $13.2 billion in assets as of the end of 2023 with investments in real estate, private markets, infrastructure, equities, and fixed income, to name a few.

Cantor's biggest deals

According to data from the deal-tracking firm Dealogic, three of the largest and most recent transactions Cantor Fitzgerald has advised on include:

• Johnson & Johnson's $1.9 billion acquisition of Ambrx Biopharma, completed in January 2024
• Primavera Capital's $866 million acquisition of Fosun Fashion Group, completed in March 2022
• Inflection Point Acquisition Corp's $850 million acquisition of Intuitive Machines, completed in September 2022

Out of their top 20 deals by transaction size since 2022, the most represented sectors were tech, healthcare, and utilities and energy. Six of those deals were in technology, five in healthcare, three in utilities and energy, two in retail, two in mining, and one each in aerospace and transportation.

Who's next in line to lead the firm?

It's unclear what Cantor Fitzgerald's future looks like without Lutnick. A spokesperson for the firm did not immediately return a request for comment.

Bloomberg reported that Lutnick's top deputies have been in their respective roles for at least six years, including Stephen Merkel, an executive vice chairman and general counsel, who joined in 1993.

Other top executives, according to the firm's website, include Global chief operating officer Mark Kaplan; Global head of investment banking Sage Kelly; Global head of equities Pascal Bandelier; Global head of fixed income Christian Wall, and Chief Financial Officer Danny Salinas.

His relationship with Trump

Lutnick, a longtime supporter of Trump, became a visible member of the ex-president's inner circle in the 2024 election cycle.

In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., said: "Howard's not a regular Wall Street guy — he's a real MAGA guy. Have you heard him talk about tariffs? Have you heard him talk about shredding the deep state bureaucracy? He's one of us," Trump Jr. said.

Leading up to the election, he was an active organizer and fundraiser for Trump, including appearing at Trump's rally in Madison Square Garden.

The impact of the 9/11 attacks on Lutnick's life

Cantor Fitzgerald was headquartered at 1 World Trade Center when terrorists flew planes into it and a neighboring lower Manhattan building in 2001. Two-thirds of Cantor's employees, or 658 people, died in the attacks, including Lutnick's brother.

Lutnick was named the Financial Times' Person of the Year after the attacks in 2001.

His new role

As commerce secretary, Lutnick will be in charge of carrying out Trump's aggressive tariff proposals, which have called for taxes in imports of between 10% and 60%. He will also be in charge of the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis, which reports on gross domestic product.

Leading up to his appointment as commerce secretary, media reports suggested Lutnick was vying for a role as Treasury Secretary.

The New York Times reported this week that the behind-the-scenes jockeying between the two for the role had devolved into a "knife fight," according to a source familiar with their schism.