Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs associates' weird weekends. Deutsche Bank curtails perk

If you're an analyst or associate at Goldman Sachs these days, you get Friday nights off. Some Goldman juniors are said (by others) to spend their weekends in states of mild debauchery.  Others catch up on sleeping. Others spend their time....making dog food.

Goldman associate David Nolan and analyst David Glynn fell into the latter category. Inspired by a flatulent family dog whose digestive problems disappeared when fed home-cooked food, they began spending their weekend away from Goldman preparing dog food, and not just for "Rudy".

"We were leaving work on a Friday, cooking dog food Friday night, packing it Saturday, and delivering to the dogs of friends and family,” Nolan told Business Insider. "It was a basic homemade recipe — one protein, one carb — and Rudy's problems seemed to drop away..." They started working with paying customers and,  “more people kept coming.”

The resulting dog food business, Butternut Box, was so successful, that Nolan and Glynn eventually left Goldman and made a go of it with funding from two of their former GS bosses. Nowadays they don't have to work weekends, have 12 employees working in a 3,500 foot factory producing the food during the week, and have raised £1m in seed funding to expand further.  As banker side-gigs go, Nolan and Glynn's was one of the more unusual ones, but they're not alone: Michael Rose, a former analyst at Morgan Stanley went to work for Berlin-based "Pets Deli" in March 2017.

Separately, Deutsche Bank may be rewarding its employees with additional holiday, but it's simultaneously curtailinganother perk: Amazon deliveries to its London office.

While Jamie Dimon and Jeff Bezos get along well personally, J.P. Morgan does not accept personal deliveries at its office, and now Deutsche Bank is adopting that same policy, calling Amazon Prime a “scourge.” That is part of a broader plan to lessen the stream of vehicles arriving at its London offices, according to Financial News.

The good news is that the deliveries won't be stopped altogether. All personal deliveries will in future be taken to a location offsite and then will only come to the office once or twice a day for people to collect.

Meanwhile:

Even as it prepares to open a new London office, Deutsche Bank is making preparations for Brexit. CEO John Cryan said that it was about to rebook the institutional clients in securities trading, which were previously looked after in London, in their computer systems to Frankfurt. (Handelsblatt).

McKinsey named Kevin Sneader its new global managing partner. (FT

Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Life Aberdeen both revealed an acute gender imbalance between male and female employees’ pay. (Bloomberg)

Female fund manager bonuses in the U.K. are approximately 70% below men’s. (FT)

Hospitality in the City used to mean boozy outings to sporting events, but MiFID II requires that hospitality beyond a “de minimis value” has to benefit ordinary customers, so skittish high-rollers are turning down invitations, including those from a U.S. investment bank that couldn’t give away tickets to a recent NBA basketball game in London. (The Times)

Four traders charged in the U.K. for rigging interest-rate benchmarks at Deutsche Bank AG will escape prosecution after German officials refused requests to send them to London to face trial. (Bloomberg)

What causes wealthy Wall Street men and women to run, elbow and lunge for candy bars – and then pack them into boxes to be shipped home? (Bloomberg)

Former Credit Suisse investment banker Imran Khan, the chief strategy officer of Snap, got $100m worth of restricted shares last year and a $145m stock grant in 2015. (Business Insider)

The case of an investment banker who suffered severe brain damage following a heart attack will be heard by the U.K.’s supreme court in a test of whether judges need to authorize the withdrawal of life support treatment. (The Guardian)

Google is planning to double its 800-person workforce at a new three-building campus in Boulder, Colorado, featuring pinball machines, pool tables, a library with easy chairs, a climbing wall and a pizza oven in the cafeteria. (Bloomberg)

Here’s what it takes to be an official member of the top 1%. (Bloomberg)

Have a confidential story, tip or comment you’d like to share? Contact: dbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by actual human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t).

Photo credit: benoitb/Getty