Morning Coffee: HSBC bankers have been given a nice easy schedule. UBS reveals the nightmare of AI enabled clients
Three meetings a day? Luxury! Any sell-side analyst or capital markets roadshow banker might be permitted to raise an eyebrow at the news that HSBC employees have been reminded at a company town hall meeting that it’s policy to ensure that you have at least three meetings per day to justify the travel costs. Back in the old days at UBS under Andrea Orcel , bankers were expected to log 300 meetings every year. Who goes travelling for only one or two client meetings?
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Well, the answer of course is “bankers with a specific deal to sell”, and thinking about things from the point of view of revenues rather than costs quickly brings in to focus the reason why bankers hate this sort of policy. Not all meetings are created equal; one meeting with a client CEO to discuss a specific mandate could be worth several dozen speculative pitches.
Clients aren’t always kind enough to locate themselves conveniently for the bankers. When you’re covering New York or Zurich, there’s always someone else to meet for a quick catch-up to boost your efficiency statistics. But there are clients in Duluth and Bologna too, and if you start to refuse to meet at their head office because you can’t work out a travel schedule to fit in another two meetings that day, you’ll gradually lose their business.
This kind of metric is known in the consultancy trade as “chicken efficiency”, after a legendary case study of a fast food chain. The owners decided to monitor the amount of raw chicken that had to be thrown away at the end of the evening, and to base the managers’ assessment on their chicken efficiency. Pretty soon, it became impossible to get any food in one of these restaurants after 5pm,
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