Macquarie plans 74 New York layoffs next week

New York hasn't escaped Macquarie's plan to pull back from the cash equities business. A WARN notice filed with the New York department of Labor says the Australian bank plans to make 74 redundancies at its office on West 55th Street, starting on November 12th and continuing until Thanksgiving.

Macquarie declined to comment on the coming cuts, which are understood to be related to the bank's decision to pull back from cash equities research and sales, announced last week. Bloomberg reported at the time that Macquarie would be cutting 100 people in London and New York, but the subsequently issued WARN figures suggests that numbers globally could be substantially higher than this. The South African equities business is also understood to be in line for cuts. 

Macquarie spent several years building out its cash equities business after hiring Daniel Kaye as head of cash execution and sales from Credit Suisse in 2017. Among others, it made two senior equity research hires in New York in 2017 and five senior U.S. cash equities hires in October 2018. 

Macquarie's Toronto equities business was closed in April 2019. At the time, the bank said it remained committed to the business elsewhere. Revenues in Macquarie's global equities business increased by an impressive 33% year-on-year in the half year to September 2019, but this clearly wasn't enough to persuade senior management to stick with it in light of what the bank described as, “structural changes in the broader market.”

In future, Macquarie will maintain an equities sales presence in London and New York, while focusing instead on equities in the Asia Pacific region. It's also signing an agreement to to distribute research for Kepler Cheuvreux, on the understanding that the French bank will distribute Macquarie's research where appropriate. 

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.)

Photo by Malte Schmidt on Unsplash