If you want to work at HSBC and have spent hours courting and being courted by the bank at recruitment events, gone through the recruitment process and attended a few induction events, only to be unexpectedly rejected, you will not be happy. You will be even less happy if HSBC accidentally sends you an email saying they are sorry you voluntarily withdrew your application.
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This appears to have happened to some students in the UK. The Financial Times reports that HSBC Bank got cold feet about hiring them because UK visa rules changed and now state that visa applicants must earn £38,000 ($48,000) to be eligible. Some of HSBC’s new graduates did not meet the income threshold, so the bank withdrew their offers.
The affected students, who are now unemployed after their graduate application deadlines passed, told the FT they had received automated emails from the bank saying it was “unfortunately to see [them] leave” after they “decided to leave the selection process.” “At this point they are trolling us,” one student noted. A source at HSBC said the bank was “looking into the issue with the automated message.”
HSBC is not the only one to have withdrawn offers. Big Four firm Deloitte has done so too. “With no replacement jobs and no time to apply for other roles because I was in the final exam period, I was let down by Deloitte without any warning or prior knowledge of this change. This is a hugely unfair decision,” said one. Fortunately, students pursuing front office investment banking jobs in London earn salaries of just under £80,000 and are therefore immune.
Separately, a senior compliance expert who left the bank in January claims she was hired to mislead a regulator after it was revealed yesterday that Citigroup could have saved $127 million by hiring just one compliance expert to oversee its algorithmic transactions.
Citi says the lawsuit filed by Kathleen Martin, the bank’s former chief data administration officer and managing director, is “without merit” and that it will “vigorously defend itself.” Martin says her boss, Citi COO Anand Selvakesari, asked her to falsely tell the board and regulators that Citi had met its data management goals.
Martin joined Citi in 2021 from JPMorgan to clean up its data processes. Prior to that, she spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley.
In the meantime…
Brevan Howard has closed two funds run by Alfredo Saitta and Louis Basger. They were too small and expensive to run. (Bloomberg)
Two Sigma has appointed its senior data scientist Ali-Milan Nekmouche to lead its machine learning and AI team. (Bloomberg)
Alex de Souza, who heads Citigroup’s UK industrial dealmaking team, is joining Jefferies as co-head of investment banking for the UK and Ireland. Luke Spells, a managing director at Citigroup who had led coverage of UK mid-cap companies, is also leaving the bank. (Financial News)
When Citi’s Fatfinger trader entered his erroneous trade, he was faced with a wall of 711 alerts. He quickly ignored the ones he could, and the order was placed at 8:56 a.m. (Bloomberg)
Goldman Sachs received 315,126 applications for its 2024 internship program and was only able to fill 2,700 spots. (Business Insider)
Gokul Laroia, Morgan Stanley’s Asia chief, believes Tokyo is catching up with Hong Kong and Singapore. (Bloomberg)
Blue Owl Capital has hired Chris Eby, head of wealth management investment banking at Goldman Sachs. (Bloomberg)
BNP Paribas is limiting its fossil fuel financing. The list of sectors that will now be restricted will be expanded to include aviation, shipping and commercial real estate. (Bloomberg)
Simon Herrmann, head of Morgan Stanley APAC, is taking a break but will continue to support the team with certain clients. (Bloomberg)
Ben Clymer quit his job as a project manager at UBS to start a luxury watch website called Hodinkee. It started out great, but it’s been a while since he made a profit. (WSJ)
“When I took my first week of vacation after more than a year at Goldman, my manager lectured me for not answering emails or updating financial models during my free time. I told him that I had been hiking with my mother, far from civilization, and had barely any cell reception. ‘Next time, choose a vacation spot with better reception,’ he told me.” (Business Insider)
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