41 year-old Deutsche banker quits. HSBC MD complains of dreadful pay

Jason Gurandiano, head of financial technology banking at Deutsche Bank in the U.S. has suddenly left the German bank midway through a deal for which he was the lead banker. PE Hub reports that Gurandiano, who’d worked for Deutsche for more than 10 years, left in July despite being in the middle of private equity company J.C. Flowers’ sale of Ascensus, a retirement plan provider.

The sale has been underway since June, with Deutsche as the only advisor. The bank had been seeking bids of $1bn.

PE Hub reports that Gurandiano left Deutsche, ‘very abruptly’ and that his exit was the result of ‘internal politics’. It’s not expected to delay the sale of Ascensus, however, which will now be dealt with by other members of his team. Maybe senior investment bankers are dispensable after all.

Separately, an ex-HSBC banker is helping to reinforce the bank’s reputation for being (comparatively) ungenerous. Bloomberg reports that Habib Kaya Biber, the former co-head of the bank’s industrials unit, was paid £275k ($428k) in salary and £186k ($290k) in bonus for 2012 despite generating $10m in fees for the bank. Biber is claiming that peers at rival banks earned $2.5m (£1.6m) for generating similar revenues. He is suing HSBC for racial discrimination after allegedly being disparaged for being a Muslim. HSBC claims Biber was simply a poor performer.

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Quote of the Day:

“The idea of splitting up Google’s wildly profitable search and ad business from its other pursuits – like driverless cars and human immortality – is akin to injecting steroids into Google’s P/E ratio. It is A) The kind of thing that Silicon Valley doesn’t really do, and B) The kind of thing that Ruth Porat can think up in her sleep,” why Ruth Porat is taking over at Google.