Morning Coffee: Bank of America’s small banking MD class conceals this change. BlackRock might have a new awkward squad of employees
On the face of it, the list of promotions to managing director (MD) which Bank of America has just announced looks like it might have raised a few eyebrows. The overall MD class of ’24 has 387 members, up 16% on last year. Within that, Jim DeMare’s global markets operation accounts for 65 new promotions, same as 2023. But what’s happened to the bankers?
Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.
The Global Corporate and Investment Banking business unit accounted for only 49 new MDs this year, down from 75 last year. In the «global investment banking team» alone, only 22 were promoted, down from 32 last year. There's only one new investment banking MD in Hong Kong and one in Singapore. It’s true that BoA has been running a little bit behind its competition for the first nine months, but this looks like quite a savage punishment.
Or does it? In fact, the difference really reflects that fact that while markets business is quite homogeneous, “Global Corporate and Investment Banking” contains multitudes. The most important driver of the year-over-year change is that an internal reclassification moved the Global Transaction Services business line out of Matthew Koder’s reporting line and into a Payments division that’s reported separately.
Overall, there are 22 new Managing Directors in the Global Investment Banking team this year, plus another 15 in Global Capital Markets. Last year it was 32 in investment banking plus 13 in capital markets. So the like for like change in the overall promotion of investment banking MDs at BofA is more like 45 going to 37. This is still a substantial drop, but a smaller one than the headline numbers suggest.
Should the dwindling investment bank MDs come as a surprise? Not
Read more on efinancialcareers.com
