Morning Coffee: The Goldman Sachs analyst who worked at a supermarket to meet real people. Banks are heading for a crisis that only boomers will recognise

efinancialcareers.com:

It’s pretty unusual to find a junior investment banker in a supermarket at the weekend.  This is partly because it’s unusual to find a junior investment banker anywhere outside the office at the weekend, but also because if they do have some free time, they’ll usually spend it doing something more glamorous.  Mohammed Zina is apparently built different. When he joined Goldman Sachs in 2014, he kept his weekend job at Sainsbury’s.

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This wasn’t some kind of “ Michael Grimes picked up some rides for Uber ” marketing stunt either.  Zina wasn’t pitching capital markets or advisory business; he just wanted to keep it real and “missed working with ordinary people”.  His weekday job was in the “EMEA Conflict Resolution Group”, which sounds more exciting than it is – rather than trying to mediate and peacemake internal turf wars and personality clashes, it monitors and manages conflicts of interest and reputational risks.

In the course of that tricky but necessary job, a situation apparently developed in which Mohammed Zina found himself accused of insider dealing charges.  The trial is still going on – closing statements were yesterday – so we shouldn’t talk too much about that except to note that last week the judge ruled that his brother, Suhail Zina, had no case to answer and should be acquitted.

What’s interesting, though, is that the Zina brothers were very much at one end of a spectrum when it comes to the relationship between successful bankers and lawyers, and the communities they grew up in.  Typically, when someone has come from a humble background and reached a highly-paid job in finance, they will go one of two ways: either they will never stop talking about