Goldman Sachs analyst quits to become director of crowdfunding platform

If you're a junior in banking who's getting out of banking after bonuses have been paid, you used to head for a private equity fund or a hedge fund. Not any more. Today's banking escapees have a broader array of options available to them.

Take Lina White, a former member of the alternative investments team at Goldman Sachs. An economics graduate of University College London, White joined Goldman's exclusive alternative investments division in July 2015. Less than three years later, she's left, but not for private equity.

White has just become the UK director at OurCrowd, an equity crowdfunding platform founded by "serial entrepreneur" Jonathan Medved which is building out its operation in London.

Writing on OurCrowd's website, White says her time at Goldman, where she was responsible for the sourcing, creating, marketing and providing ongoing investor relations for the firm's alternative investments, prepared her for the new role. She'll work alongside Andy Kaye, a former managing director at William Blair in London, who's leading the establishment of the London office. Nonetheless, going from analyst at Goldman to director at an established equity crowdfunding platform (OurCrowd has 180 employees globally) looks like a no-brainer.

White isn't the only junior who joined a trainee scheme in 2015 and is now moving on. Caiyu Lan, a developer on Citi's technology analyst program, is also quitting. He's off to become a data scientist at Liquid Capital Group, an independent algorithmic trading platform that employed 76 people when it last filed accounts (in 2016) and paid them an average of £96k each.