CIB Townhall with the new Head/co-head

Did anyone attend the townhall yesterday ? The new x JPM co-head kept talking about how CIB has a lot of potential but did not mention any concrete plans on how they plan to grow the business.

More importantly, the entire talk was on growing investment banking with no talk about how the markets group is going to grow. Even if the asset cap is lifted I am assuming Charlie and his x-jpm crew don’t have the confidence on building out the markets franchise which mainly consists of sales and trading outside of investment banking.

Almost all the leaders in the markets franchise are close to retirement and there is no “young” blood leading groups either, which tells me these leaders are just letting things run as is until they checkout.

The reason why I am posting in this forum is because I just joined the markets group in a support function (controls) and I feel that there are too many “support” functions doing similar roles and trading management does not have plans to grow at all.

This results in a lot of infighting as the pie to share is small (some examples are over hiring within the controls group when in fact the markets group is peanuts compared to larger banks). In addition, there has been no strategic senior management hires within the markets group as well

With that said, I am concerned that if CIB wants to cut costs they will target these support functions as the traders are happy with the basics and don’t really have any pressure from management to grow the markets division, given the old guard holding throne as stated above. So the next option is to cut controls/support functions once the asset cap is lifted.

Would love to get some thoughts/opinions from folks who are within this space within support functions for front office.

This bothers me almost daily with the constant layoffs happening. It really su-ks.

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"We’ll see if these enlightened banking gurus from JPM figure out a way to crack this nut,"

Ask me, I know how to bust a nut.

You are reading too much into it.

There are similar dynamics across every LOB of bloated and redundant control groups… this is largely due to RCSA but was already an issue prior to that because of constant re-shuffling of risk and control functions across the enterprise every 1-2 years and constant leadership turnover among those groups.

The empty rhetoric about focusing on growing CIB is something that we have heard from upper management on and off ever since Wells purchased Wachovia, and it has amounted to minimal results every time. So that certainly predates the Scharf era. We’ll see if these enlightened banking gurus from JPM figure out a way to crack this nut, I highly doubt it.

So yes all of this is very frustrating, but my point is that it not unique to the current situation in CIB. There’s nothing new under the sun.

Yeah, I’ve been here for 20 years. I’ve never seen anything like it's where people are getting paid Six figures and doing nothing, so that’s where I’m at.

I wonder if it's a show your hand situation with the asset cap. Why hire the co head guy if you know you can't really grow yet.

I hope they cut all parasites in CIB Control. They are overpaid secretaries with zero accountability pretending to move paper in the name of issue management. Why do we need them. If their reporting lines and costs were directly hitting CIB pnl 95 percent of these parasite would be already fired.

Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

CIB Townhall with the new Head/co-head

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