Citi trading VP decides Bain & Co. is a better bet than hanging on in banking

A vice president (VP) at Citigroup in London has decided to throw it all in and become a consultant at Bain & Co. instead. 

Vidur Khanna spent nearly seven years building a career in leveraged credit trading at Citi, according to his LinkedIn profile. As of this month, he's pivoted and joined Bain & Co.'s London office as a consultant instead. 

While it's not entirely unusual for junior investment bankers to become consultants, it is quite unusual for mid-ranking traders to become consultants. Traders are typically paid more than bankers, making the pay pain from switching out of banking and into consulting even more excruciating. Traders also have a less consulting-friendly skillset than bankers, unless of course they're becoming consultants who are working with banks on how to improve their trading functions.

It's not entirely clear what Khanna, who's spent his entire career at Citi, will be up to at Bain. However, he's not the only person at the consulting firm with a leveraged credit or markets background. Tareq Barto, a manager at the firm in London, previously spent six years working in leveraged finance. Aurelia Legrez joined as a consultant in 2017 after six years in equity sales at Goldman Sachs.

Notably, both Khanna and Legrez arrived at Bain as consultants. Normally, it takes at least three years to reach this level as people work their way up from associate consultant to senior associate consultant and only then become consultants. 

Accounts filed last year by Bain & Co. Inc United Kingdom for the year ending December 2017 suggested that Bain & Co. pays its average UK employee around £101k a year. 

Khanna was promoted to ED at Citi in January 2017, so it would likely have been a few more years until he made managing director. 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by 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.)