Morning Coffee: The niche banking job that lost its appeal but might be coming back again. How to forecast the effect of AI on your job

It’s been a strange few years for ESG specialists in investment banking.  As recently as 2021 it was one of the hottest recruitment segments, with $500k roles going unfilled.  Any banker who had driven past a wind turbine on the way to the airport, or walked past a casino while a Pride event was taking place was reinventing him or herself as an ESG expert, to the extent that the regulators had to put out formal warnings against “ competencewashing ”.

Get Morning Coffee  ☕  in your inbox. Sign up here.

And then the backlash started.  It began with a few scandals , which had the effect of taking some of the ethical sheen off the sector.  A lot of bankers were happy to giggle at this, since ESG specialists had gained something of a reputation for being holier-than-thou and judgey.  Then people began to realise that being identified with progressive causes can make you enemies as well as friends; Citi’s once-dominant muni bond franchise was partly a casualty of the State of Texas’ decision not to have anything to do with banks that wouldn’t serve the gun industry.  Today there are even “ anti-ESG ” investors, using standard activist techniques to attack management teams perceived as having gone too woke.  After the recent Presidential election, it might be thought that only a very brave banker, or one who wasn’t reading the newspapers, would think about taking their career in the ESG direction.

But on the other hand … some people are still making good money out of ESG.  Like Ramzi Issa , formerly of UBS and Credit Suisse, who has just set up a private credit fund dedicated to “debt for nature swaps”.  Or the Deutsche Bank and SocGen teams working on “significant risk transfer” securitisations, where the ESG label has