Morning Coffee: The new route to the top at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. When you earn 6 figures and can't afford your children

Lest there were ever any doubt about the centrality of technology jobs and technological innovation to banks, both Goldman Sachs and the corporate and investment bank (CIB) of J.P. Morgan now have technology-focused people near or at the helm. In the case of Goldman Sachs, Marty Chavez is now CFO and busily building his 'data lake' to make Goldman the Google of Wall Street. In the case of J.P. Morgan, Daniel Pinto, CEO of the CIB is shedding some of his responsibilities (managing EMEA) so that he can focus more completely on global strategy and technological innovation.

We already know that J.P. Morgan spends $9.5bn a year on technology and is trying to cut down its need for junior technologists by (ominously) automating the coding process. We know too that J.P. Morgan has hired a head of machine learning from Microsoft and is using artificial intelligence to analyze legal documents and to identify potential investment banking clients. And we know that one of Pinto's favourites is a man called David Hudson whose job is to come up with Google-style "moonshots" that will use technology to change the way the bank functions. Another Pinto favourite might well be David Fellah, the member of J.P. Morgan’s  European equity quant research team, who developed LOXM, J.P. Morgan's new self-teaching trading algorithm, which can execute large and complex equities trades.

Either way, as men with a mandate to change the rules with technological innovation rise to the top, mere humans who are great at the process of their role are likely to go ignored. The banking leaders of the future will be those who can think big and thing technologically. Not those who work hard and bring in big revenues with today's clients.

Separately, don't be too philoprogenitive if you plan to live in London on an income of £140k ($185k). The ever-fecund British home secretary Boris Johnson has five children and reportedly claims that his cabinet minister's salary of this amount is not enough to support them.

Meanwhile:

Banks are paying $500m each to make Brexit-related alterations to their European businesses (and they aren't going to want to change them back again). (Bloomberg) 

France is positioning itself to take jobs from London after Brexit: it wants to know how it could simplify regulations (even though it won't be able to do so unilaterally within the EU. (Reuters) 

HSBC likes to choose its CEOs in-house and its next one is likely to be its head of retail banking and wealth management. (Financial Times) 

Barclays' stock is down 13% year to date while European banks in the Stoxx 600 index are up 11%. Barclays has performed worse even than Deutsche Bank. (Wall Street Journal)

Credit Suisse hired Max Mesny from Morgan Stanley to be co-head of its financial institutions group. (Financial News) 

Goldman Sachs might start a bitcoin trading operation, but the whole thing is at an early stage and may not proceed. (Wall Street Journal) 

"I have a pass card that has photos of me as both Pippa and Phil on it....A surprising number of random people reach out to me. Sometimes it might be as many as seven in a month. Even in Canary Wharf, I still have people coming up to me if I’m out in a bar — men dressed in suits, people that look very much like Phil, very corporate, normal… They will wait until I go up to the bar on my own and they will then approach me and say, 'I’d really like to be like you." (Financial News)  

When you leave finance to design corsets: 'She handed in her notice and dyed her hair pink, something she would never have dared do in her previous job as senior vice-president, business development, at Eurex.' (Financial Times) 

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Photo credit: Catch Me if You Can by Marines is licensed under CC BY 2.0.