eFinancialCareers

In a move lauded as a step in the right direction to end excessive executive salaries and risk taking, Suncorp has become the first Australian bank to stipulate that its CEO must buy shares in the company. (The Age) ANZ and Standard Chartered have both entered exclusive talks to acquire separate parts of the Asian retail and commercial assets being sold by Royal Bank of Scotland. (Financial Times) The federal government may... Read more

Bank of America-Merrill Lynch is making positive noises about hiring in Australia as it battles to repair its battered reputation in the local employment market. Merrill has begun a recruitment drive in Asia Pacific because sentiment surrounding the bank has “turned a corner”, according Jayanti Bajpai, co-head of APAC global corporate and investment banking. Bajpai told the Financial Times that his firm will focus on key Asia-Pac markets, including Australia, and build... Read more

A few days ago we asked you to submit your resumes to be reviewed by eFinancialCareers readers. Today we present our first CV for your critique. Just use the comments box below to offer your insights into how employable he is in the current market. "In my career planning to date, I have focussed on gaining a broad range of sales and management experience. I aim to consolidate this background... Read more

Livid about your layoff? Jittery about your job? Or are you just keen to offer employment advice to others in the Australian banking sector? eFinancialCareers is looking for financial professionals to write anonymous columns - providing honest, opinionated perspectives on employment, job hunting and careers. You could be a junior unemployed candidate wanting to bounce back into banking and tell your story along the way. Or perhaps you are a senior manager... Read more

An injection of new products from Aviva Australia might help NAB to increase the quality and quantity of its wealth management workforce. The $925m purchase of Aviva’s wealth division gives NAB increased scale and breadth as it battles for talent with its Big Four rivals, including its key wealth-management rival, Westpac/St.George. Rather than leading to layoffs, this takeover could create more candidate confidence in NAB’s ability to offer worthwhile careers within... Read more

The Westpac/St George merger threatens thousands of back-office jobs in the new financial year, says the Finance Sector Union of Australia. Leon Carter, the FSU’s national secretary, is concerned for the future of about 4,000 to 5,000 employees in duplicated support roles within the combined firm. “We say to Westpac: ‘you continue to be incredibly profitable, so you can afford to keep everyone employed and shouldn’t be reaping even more profits at... Read more

Australian financial institutions are increasingly opting to employ fixed-term staff as a way of filling project-based roles without paying expensive hourly rates to agency temps. And in a tight hiring market, candidates are snapping up these jobs, which put them on the payroll as salaried employees for between about three and 12 months. “Fixed-term contracts have always been around, but now they are more common and are being used for a... Read more

Knowledge of Asian markets and/or a strong client network in the region could help to future-proof your career. Signals in the employment market suggest that Australians with Asian experience are starting to become more sought after at both funds managers and investment banks. Australian buy-side firms — including AMP Capital Investors, Platinum Asset Management and Maple-Brown Abbott — have added Asian equity funds to their portfolios to meet a growing... Read more

Despite the global financial crisis, working for a bank is still a sought-after career for IT professionals. Essential project and integration work are propping up the hiring market, but if you don’t have banking-sector experience, you probably won’t get a job. The Big Four banks spend heavily in technology and this investment creates IT jobs which are generally more interesting and better paid than those in most other sectors. “Compared to some... Read more

Financial institutions in Australia are beefing up their debt restructuring advisory capabilities, but headcount in this sector is still small and firms prefer to redeploy internally if possible. A variety of different organisations are expanding. Rothchild is a strong player, as are foreign i-banks like UBS and Goldman Sachs. Other firms active in Australia include boutique advisor Grant Samuels and global giants KPMG and Ernst & Young. The need for debt restructuring... Read more

Australia’s retail banks are facing a growing bad debt burden, but this shouldn’t cause mass redundancies or recruitment freezes. The next six months will probably bring us more of the same: selective high-end hiring for niche jobs, replacement of business-critical positions, and some small-scale layoffs, particularly in the back office. The Big Four’s debt problems won’t make the employment market in Sydney and Melbourne as bad as New York and London. Earlier... Read more

Hedge funds aren’t in the mood to hire as investors continue to give the alternative sector the cold shoulder. Many investors, both institutional and high-net-worth, remain cautious and don’t want to give their money to hedgies, especially with the short-selling ban still in place. "There are a number of factors which are affecting hedge funds at the moment and the difficulty in finding new investors is one of them. The employment... Read more

There are signs of growth in Australian capital markets, but this isn’t leading to new vacancies as cash-strapped i-banks look to redeploy rather than recruit. The top-10 investment banks in Australia earned $521.1m in Q1 this year, a 16.6% increase from Q1 2008, according to Thomson Reuters figures. And during the past year ECM and DCM work has replaced M&A advice as their main income source. Debt market revenue in January to... Read more

It pays to be old and wise in Australia’s funds management industry. As times get tougher, inexperienced staff are the most in danger of being cut and the least likely to be rehired elsewhere. AMP and Perpetual were among the big funds to trim headcount last year, with the later recently announcing that redundancy payments for its 40 sacked staff contributed a large chunk of its $12m restructuring costs. This year looks... Read more

A few days ago we asked you to submit your resumes to be reviewed by eFinancialCareers readers. Today we present our first CV for your critique. Just use the comments box below to offer your insights into how employable he is in the current market. "In my career planning to date, I have focussed on gaining a broad range of sales and management experience. I aim to consolidate this background... Read more

Top brass at Babcock & Brown are reportedly still holding out for large bonuses even as their bank remains on life-support. The potential payments to senior executives have angered the firm’s rank-and-file and are proving to be a major stumbling block for the 25 banks involved in approving a rescue package for B&B. The bailout proposal has already linked executive remuneration to progressively meeting debt repayment targets. But, according to the... Read more

BT Financial chief executive Rob Coombe thinks more consolidation is on the cards in the fin planning sector as customers and staff seek sanctuary in large organisations. As part of a wider shake-up of the wealth management industry, Coombe predicts that over the next one to three years, boutique financial planners will suffer as a result of the financial crisis. He tells The Australian: "During periods of uncertainty, people will gravitate... Read more

Two recent reports reveal that job advertisement rates in Australia are plummeting, with financial services vacancies taking a huge hit. We speak to Olivier Group and ANZ – the firms behind the surveys – to see what’s in store for finance sector employment. Online ads for financial services jobs have fallen almost 60% over the past year (including a 20.8% fall in January), according to the Olivier Job Index. Index author... Read more