Goldman Sachs is on its way to taking the top spot among advisers on Japanese takeovers for the first time in five years, supplanting Nomura, according to Bloomberg. Japanese companies hired Goldman to oversee $54.1 billion of acquisitions so far this year compared with Nomura’s $47.2 billion, followed by Deutsche Bank with $47 billion. In 2010, Nomura lead the pack with $47.6 billion in deals, followed by J.P. Morgan with $27... Read more

Between 2009 and 2010, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ campus recruiting goals in the United States increased 35 to 45 percent, and PwC is continuing to hire at the same accelerated rate for its current fiscal year, says the accounting firm’s U.S. recruiting leader. During the period from July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2011, the Big Four accountancy hired roughly 12,000 people including full-timers and interns. This included 7,000 hired via campus recruiting and... Read more

J.P. Morgan is still the bank to work for, even though salaries per employee are down 3 percent this year. The bank released its third quarter earnings today of $1.02 per share, beating analysts' estimates by 11 cents. In its announcement, JPMorgan Chase & Co. said its third-quarter profit fell 4 percent to $4.26 billion, or $1.02 a share, from $4.42 billion, or $1.01 a share, in the year-ago period.... Read more

J.P. Morgan’s investment bank cut employee compensation by 3 percent to an average of $289,611 per worker for the first nine months of the year, even as the division generated 10 percent more revenue over the year-ago period, according to The Wall Street Journal. The investment banking staff counted 26,615 people at the end of the third quarter – 1,101 fewer than at the end of the second quarter. Companywide the... Read more

Cantor Fitzgerald managing directors Jason Boyer, Brett McGonegal, Bradford Ainslie and Uwe Parpart resigned in May and joined Reorient Financial Markets, which is backed by China Chengtong Holdings Group, one of three asset managers under China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. [Bloomberg] Bank of America will pay former wealth-management division head Sallie L. Krawcheck $6 million after her dismissal last month. [Investment News] Frank Roccisano has been named complex... Read more

Bank of America’s hiring spree continues. With a plan to eventually hire 1,000 small business bankers nationwide, Bank of America announced today that it has hired more than 90 small business bankers in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area. "We’ve hired approximately 550 small business bankers to date," said T.J. Crawford, a spokesman for Bank of America. "These individuals have experience meeting with and talking to small business... Read more

With the big banks and bulge brackets still cutting back, many financial professionals are looking for a safe haven in the midst of the industry storm. While some have been loathing to make the leap outside of the space, especially to third party outsourcing firms, there couldn’t be a better time to apply financial and operational skills to a different industry. Business Process Outsourcing, or BPO, is once again growing... Read more

The anti-Wall Street protests have spilled onto some of the nation’s top colleges where students are challenging their schools’ on-campus recruiting programs, according to The New York Times. Op-eds in school newspapers at Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford and Yale criticize big banks’ access to these schools’ top students and call for academia to encourage leading students to pursue less lucrative but more creative endeavors. “There’s something sad about so many... Read more

When it comes to possible job elimination because of the Volcker Rule, Wall Street's loss could be London's gain, according to Douglas Landy, a solicitor at Allen & Overy in New York, who looked at yesterday's draft copy of the Volcker Rule and implied London might be a beneficiary. Writing in the New York Times, Landy points out that the draft Rule still allows proprietary trading as long as it’s “done... Read more

It wasn't so long ago that the actuarial profession was bemoaning losing bright, numerical graduates to more dynamic roles in the banking sector. Now, with demand for actuaries still exceeding supply while banks aggressively pare back headcount, you could do worse than switching across to this comparatively stable vocation. The route to becoming an actuary is an arduous one – training typically comprises five years of heavily quantitative exams – but... Read more

How do you get your resume seen in a market where hardly any banks are hiring and every job is attracting innumerable applications? The answer, according to banks’ in-house recruiters, is simple: look for the keywords pertaining to skills and experience in the job description and repeat those words in your resume. Although heads of recruitment at leading banks insist the resumes submitted through their Web sites really are read by human... Read more

Expectations remain relatively high on Wall Street, especially among hedge fund employees, that this year's bonus will either outperform or match what they received last year. A new survey of financial markets professionals by eFinancialCareers has found that more than six in 10 (62 percent) expect their bonus this year will be higher or the same in comparison to the bonus they earned in 2010. The current level of expectation, while... Read more

Wall Street could experience an additional 10,000 job losses by the end of 2012, according to The New York Times. This would bring the sector’s layoffs to 32,000 since 2008, owing in part to the sovereign debt crisis and bank failures in Europe. New York State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said, “It now seems likely that profits will fall sharply, job losses will continue and bonuses will be smaller than last year.... Read more

Are the wealth management and private banking sectors “the” places to be right now? In some ways, yes, but don’t expect a complete bed of roses, says one independent advice giver. Reuters reports this week that “sky-high” pay and bonuses for investment bank counterparts may once have turned private bankers green with envy, but the drive to slash payroll and rein in risk has made investment bankers expendable as many banks... Read more

Employers announced plans to shed 115,730 workers from their payrolls in September, making it the worst month for job cuts in over two years, with finance largely to blame, a new report shows. Banks and other financial services firms announced 54,013 planned layoffs between the first of January and the end of September, says global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. A breakdown Challenger, Gray shared with eFinancialCareers shows that financial services... Read more

In London, financial services jobs are down 19 percent, but fewer people are looking for work as the number of job vacancies at London’s financial services companies fell in September to the lowest this year, according to Bloomberg. Citing a survey by recruitment consulting firm Morgan McKinley, Bloomberg reports job openings in the London’s main financial district plummeted 19 percent to 3,843 for the month from 4,725 in the same period... Read more

Financial services firms in Ireland are facing a SHORTAGE of accountants It's not often in the current climate that there's a shortage of a particular skill-set in Ireland, but financial services firms are struggling to recruit sufficient numbers of accountants. In some ways you could say they only have themselves to blame – hundreds of newly qualified accountants were made redundant from Big Four firms in Ireland in 2009. [Ireland] Worrying signs... Read more

In its new report on compensation practices, the Federal Reserve is charging major U.S. banks are falling behind in their efforts to link incentive pay to the risks they’ve taken on. But one New York-based recruiter suggests the Fed may be doing a bit of grandstanding. “England’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) has been particularly aggressive and proactive in terms of compensation,” says Richard Lipstein of Boyden Executive Search in New... Read more

With every man and his dog offering some sort of mobile or tablet application, it's safe to say that – outside of the retail space – the financial sector has lagged behind. This is changing, and some investment banks are even taking on techies to develop them. The iPad is increasingly the gadget of choice for those working in finance, and now more investment banks are offering apps for their customers.... Read more

France and Germany still don’t agree on how to bolster the faltering European banking system, ahead of an important EU leaders summit taking place next week, Reuters reports. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet this Sunday to try to find a compromise. “Under strong U.S. and market pressure, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy will try to bridge sharp differences on how to use... Read more