Goldman Sachs; UBS; Deutsche: top banks counting on graduates

The big players are working hard to attract the new generation of elite industry talent.

UBS’s Sarah Horton and Nathalie Frauenfelder in the firm’s Sydney office. Picture: Hollie Adams

Australia’s main investment banks are finalising their summer intern programs and some of the biggest firms are changing their recruitment practices to attract new talent into the industry.

Most of banks have already recruited graduates to begin in February, to be the next injection of bankers into the sector.

The competition to hire the best of the next generation is intense, with the rivalry fierce among the top players.

Top-tier banks Goldman Sachs and UBS hire about 25 graduate bankers each year and Deutsche Bank takes about 10.

Under a new program put in place this year, Goldman Sachs has encouraged graduate applications from candidates who have one to two years’ experience in other professions.

It is the first time the Australian operation of the global investment bank has ordered a specific scheme to recruit outside of the traditional finance, commerce and law graduates.

Goldman Sachs Australia’s head of mergers and acquisitions Nick Sims says the bank has not set a specific target of how many of those candidates will be hired this year, but it is keen to broaden the experience of its younger workforce.

“We are trying to make this a continuous program that we do every year,” Sims tells The Weekend Australian.

“We are looking for people who might have applied before and missed out, or have worked in another profession and decided it wasn’t for them.

“We think those kind of people will bring experience from another workplace to us and that is very valuable.”

Swiss bank UBS has expedited its recruitment process and pressed on with a cadetship program where first-year university students work full time in the bank while maintaining their studies.

The bank allows flexible working hours for the cadets to fit in with their studies and there are now 45 students working across the bank.

This year UBS also began a new internship program that offers some of the young workers a four-week stint working in Hong Kong or Singapore.

UBS Australia’s co-head of equities Chris Williams says the cadet program is designed to help the bank build its future workforce and help the industry attract staff in a competitive environment.

“It’s not common but for us it’s a program that really began as an experiment and it started in the support areas of the business,” Williams says.

“But we have expanded that out across equities and research.

“To be honest, the cadet program was a response to the fact that the graduate program had not been as successful in equities and research as it had been in the banking business.”

Williams says the structure of investment banking teams — which encompasses traditional business such as mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets — is more suited to graduates compared with equity

“We’ve found (in research) that cadets provided the ambition, energy and enthusiasm with the skills that can be easily trained and developed in our business,” he says.

“The fundamental issue that the whole industry is trying to solve is that there’s a decade where the industry has been pressured by regulation, stakeholder expectation, financial market conditions, and the industry has done a poor job in attracting talent.

“The industry has had poor reputation, there’s been regul­atory intervention, you’ve had cultural change … that is not exactly the best pitch to prospective employees who are looking through the rear-view mirror in terms of what they want for their careers.

“The industry has not recruited enough talent for the past 10 years.”

Sarah Horton joined UBS three years ago and Nathalie Frauenfelder nearly two years ago after finishing university, and the pair now work at the bank’s Sydney office.

Horton is working in oil and gas banking while her colleague is specialising in private equity and the telco and media sector.

“It’s fierce competition, especially now,” Horton says. “I think the way you get a taste for banking is that you go to careers days, speak to people, talk to the different investment banks and get an idea of what they do and what the culture is like.

“I went to the career days and found there wasn’t a job like investment banking where you could learn so much from day one.”

Frauenfelder studied accounting and finance at the University of NSW and had been an intern at Macquarie Group.

“The learning curve in banking is incredibly deep but I like a challenge so the industry fits me well,” Frauenfelder says.