These are the people being hired by Goldman Sachs’ hottest division
If you want to work for Goldman Sachs now, asset management is the place to be. For years, Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) was the neglected stepchild of the firm – small, leaking assets, frequent turnover at the top and unprofitable compared to its bank-owned fund management rivals.
Now, after something of a landmark year which saw an 11% jump in revenue last year and $111bn in new assets, people are starting to talk about GSAM in the same glowing terms as they mention other asset management firms – it’s a place find more secure employment that could, in the long term, pay more than investment banking.
Timothy O’Neill and Eric Lane, the unit’s co-heads, suggest that revenues will continue to increase by 10% annually for the foreseeable future. And GSAM is hiring – 28 people have joined its London operation in the first three months of this year, according to filings on the Financial Conduct Authority register, a 14% increase since October last year.
GSAM is attracting both internal transfers and experience fund management professionals from other firms. Who are these people? Here’s our selection of recent hires.
Jason Smith, formerly head of Funds & Advisory at Barclays
Smith is one of the most senior recruits at GSAM this year, having moved from leading the portfolio management team in Barclays’ Funds & Advisory unit within its institutional fund management group and running its global macro fund. He joined Goldman in January as a portfolio manager. He was previously chief investment officer at Towers Perrin, where he was hired in 2009 to establish its new asset management division, Towers Perrin Capital Markets.
Oliver Bunn, research
Bunn joined GSAM in a research function, again from Barclays, earlier this year. He took on a quantitative role at the UK bank, having worked in systematic index strategy research for the past two years. He has a PhD in economics from Yale University.
Jonathan Orr, client portfolio manager
Orr is an example of an interesting internal move from Goldman’s investment bank across to its buy-side operations. For the past ten years, Orr has been working in Goldman’s middle office as a risk manager within its prime services division in New York. In January, he both moved to London and switched into a role as a fixed income client portfolio manager – in other words, he switched from the sell-side to the buy-side and from the middle office to the front office within the same company.
Mark Hozer, trader
Another example of switching into the front office internally, Hozer worked in the back office of Goldman for three years as a trade management officer and prior to this worked at Morgan Stanley in derivatives client processing. As of this year, however, he’s working as a trader at Goldman Sachs Investment Partners.
Iain Johnston, sales
Johnston is evidence that Goldman is not just hiring investment staff for GSAM currently. He joined from Aviva Investors earlier this year, where he had spent over 10 years.
Analysts: Alexander Beet, Anika Bhagani, Jakub Ladysz, Oliver Norton, Rodrigo Alier, Zygimantas Sirka
The class of 2014 at GSAM have just been given the greenlight by the FCA. What does it take to get a graduate job at Goldman Sachs’ asset management division? You will have almost certainly interned at GSAM the summer previously – only Alier had not and appears to be the only candidate recruited with no prior buy-side experience.
As is the case in investment banking these days, one internship is never enough – the vast majority of new recruits had interned with at least one other asset manager (usually bank-owned) before spending the summer at Goldman and eventually receiving a job offer.
Favoured universities – London School of Economics, Warwick and Trinity College.
