Morning Coffee: Tech bankers share a nickname at JPMorgan. Recruiters and hedge fund managers chase each other in the desert

A little while back, there was a craze for portmanteau names for famous Hollywood couples – like “Brangelina” (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and “Bennifer” (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez).  At some investment banks, co-heads of various divisions tried to coin similar names for themselves, to indicate to the staff how inseparable they were.  By and large, this trend in banking came to an end when everyone realised that Hollywood couples tend to split up.  But John China and Andrew Kresse at JPMorgan have brought it back.

💥Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.💥

They are the co-heads of JPM’s “Innovation Economy Team”, which aims to bank start-up companies. Since one of them is based on the East Cost and the other on the West, they have more than the normal need to present a united front.  And so it is that out of their initials, they created the composite identity, “JACK”. 

This isn’t just a cutesy email sign-off; it seems that Kresse and China encourage others to write to them in this way rather than addressing things to “Dear John and Andrew”. They might not exactly finish one another’s sentences, but it seems that out of the two choices for a pair of co-heads, they have gone with “joined at the hip” rather than “constantly scheming against one another”.

This might have been a reaction to an unusually difficult political situation that they found themselves in.  JPM’s Innovation Economy team has been going since 2016, but it really stepped up in the aftermath of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.  In 2023, JP Morgan took over First Republic and (separately) hired John China to run the team.  Andrew Kresse, a former CEO of Chase Business Banking and JPM veteran, was made co-head last year.

You can count the ways that sort of personnel move can go wrong – lifer versus lateral, California versus East Coast, guy who’s been doing the job gets a new partner.  But the two men apparently had an existing working relationship from building client advisory boards overseas – according to Kresse, “I knew John was a good guy before we were co-heads, which is always the best thing”.

For his part, China says that the key to making co-head structures work is “always presume innocence … maybe someone gets left off an email or a team isn't looped in quickly enough, and we assume positive intent … people often think co-leadership means competition or confusion, but it's really about collaboration”.  That sounds like the voice of experience – and not necessarily always positive experiences – but it’s helped him build a relationship that works.  The two co-heads apparently even swap  parenting tips and sports banter.

We have, of course, been here before at JPMorgan. Troy Rohrbraugh and Jenn Piepszak claimed to be equally inseparable as heads of the investment bank two years ago. They were even finishing each other's sentences. Now that Rohrbraugh is CEO in waiting and Piepszak is COO, no more is said about this. JACK may prove a short-lived phenomenon too. 

Elsewhere, Dubai has always been a hot market for hedge fund professionals, both figuratively and literally. However, recruiters are now saying that it’s reaching an entirely new temperature.  Since the great geopolitical shakeout never seems to have happened, the name of the game in talent acquisition is now not so much in trying to persuade people to go out to the Gulf from London or New York – it is just as efficient to try to poach employees who already live there.

As Max Hepplestone, a partner at recruitment firm H-Squared, notes, it’s an inevitable stage in the development of any market.  “You can’t pack that many hedge funds into one place without them raiding each other’s desks”, he says.  When people in the same industry live and socialise together, they want to work with each other, and there are now more than 100 hedge funds in Dubai, double the number from two years ago.

This ought to be good news for salaries – Hepplestone says that “every new platform that sets up needs the same few senior people that everyone else already”. But it might make the employers, particularly in the big multi-strategy firms, think more carefully about their expansion.  Saving on tax is nice, but not if it means jumping straight into a talent war zone.

Meanwhile …

The quiet period has ended for the underwriters of the SpaceX IPO, which means that equity analysts employed by the syndicate members can unleash the blinding light of pure optimism on the market. (FT Alphaville)

Rather than Wall Street internships, students at elite universities are spending the summer trying to pitch AI startups or join “hacker houses” in San Francisco. (WSJ)

According to some clients, HSBC is making a course correction in its lending to private credit – like Barclays, it is reported to be pulling back from the riskier end of the market to concentrate on funds investing in higher-quality loans.  The company says that it still has an offering at every stage, though, so it doesn’t look like redundancies are on the table yet in what was previously one of the tightest labour markets. (FT)

Just as Jane Fraser made it her business to become a “Trump-whisperer”, Christian Sewing has had reason to invest time and effort into building good political relationships. And it’s worked; both the Chancellor and the leader of the Social Democrats are calling him up for advice on policy, takeovers and even the next president of the ECB. (Bloomberg)

Citi is hiring people to work in Manchester and Leeds; this is apparently part of the normal geographical expansion of its business bank, rather than an attempt to gain the favour of a new prime minister. (Telegraph)

Seemingly temporarily forgetting that they are a unionised workplace, a Ford plant fired someone after falsely accusing him of stealing a cookie from the canteen.  They have offered him $33,000 back pay and his job back, but he’s not returning until he gets an apology. (NY Post)

Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn. 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.