Credit Suisse confirms the hiring and firing trend for 2020

If you want to get hired by an investment bank in 2020, you probably need to be working in a client-facing position. And if you happen to get fired, you will probably be working in the sort of job that's duplicated across various functions of an investment bank and could be done once, centrally.

This was the theme of Deutsche Bank's investor 'deep dive' yesterday, and it's the theme of Credit Suisse's investor day today. Like Deutsche, Credit Suisse wants to add client-facing people who can bring in revenues, while cutting fat elsewhere.

In a presentation today, David Chin, head of Credit Suisse's global markes division, said Credit Suisse is 'strengthening coverage and sales across product and geographies,' and David Miller, head of the investment banking and capital markets (IBCM) division, said Credit Suisse wants to 'reinvigorate the large cap coverage effort.' CEO Tidjane Thiam said the bank plans to make, 'incremental hires' in M&A and equity capital markets (ECM) next year to 'support growth. '  

The additional recruitment in IBCM comes despite a loss of CHF102m in the division in the first nine months of this year. Credit Suisse is doubling down. 

The Swiss bank is still seeking to cut costs elsewhere, however. And just as at Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, the middle and back office are presenting themselves as the most fulsome places for using the axe. 2020 will be all about, 'rationalizing divisionally aligned teams running parallel processes on commonly shared platforms, 'centralizing function aligned teams and platform support,' and, 'simplifying and streamlining risk assessment processes,' say today's presentations.

Technology jobs may be included in the rationalization move. In today's presentations, Credit Suisse said its technology division has become more efficient thanks to a 42% increase in the use of Agile methologies. 28% of service desk incidents at the bank are now dealt with by Amelia, the bank's AI-powered chatbot instead of human beings and over half of infrastructure ticket incidents are now automated. 

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