Editor's Take: if RBS is hiring, things must be looking up in i-banking
Who would have thought it this time last year: two of the GFC's main casualties (RBS and Merrill Lynch) are now openly touting their expansion plans in Australia.
After suffering a string of global retrenchments, the nearly-nationalised British bank could now be on the verge of building up its Australian operations.
RBS has made its first high-profile hire for many months, taking on Michael Seide as an executive director in the power and utilities M&A team.
The firm was even able to poach Seide away from god's own bank, Goldman Sachs - a sure sign that the RBS employer brand is finally bouncing back.
If RBS is taking its first tentative steps towards recruitment redemption, then Merrill Lynch has altogether more ambitious plans. Its Aussie boss Craig Drummond wants to snap the stranglehold that UBS, Goldman Sachs and Macquarie currently enjoy in domestic investment banking.
Merrill has already begun to grow, spending $27m on nine UBS bankers to strengthen its property team (a sector that was previously the poor relation of healthcare and resources).
Becoming a top-three Aussie i-bank will obviously require some more hiring, but the firm seems prepared to cough up the cash. Drummond says having access to Bank of America's balance sheet gives Merrill a "competitive advantage" over some of its rivals.
These recruitment rumblings from RBS and Merrill show that even credit-crunched foreign firms have been given the go-ahead to take Australia seriously again, and will be looking for local candidates in 2010. Moreover, they can at last talk up their hiring without the PR embarrassment of simultaneously making large-scale layoffs.
What does this all mean for the unemployed candidate on the street? Probably not very much. Of all the financial services companies in Australia, the investment banks are the ones most likely to poach people who already have jobs.
But if you're currently a senior pro at Macquarie or the foreign firms, you can look forward to riding the recruitment merry-go-round in 2010. It should be moving faster than it has been for a while.
