Morning Coffee: JPMorgan's fastest rising competitor isn't Citi. The former Evercore banker who’s the new coolest man on the ski slopes

By their own high standards (and those of the analysts that follow them), JPMorgan’s results announced yesterday were a little bit disappointing.  Sales and trading revenues were very strong, but banking fees weren’t, missing guidance that the company had provided only a short while ago. 

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Debt capital markets appears to have been the problem, where according to Dealogic, JPMorgan seems to have shed some market share. Although JPM retained its position at the top of the league table, with bookrunner position on $572bn of deals, this was actually a smaller amount than in 2024, despite the total volume increasing by nearly 8%.

Since the second placed player in the DCM league table was Citi, it might be natural to assume that what we’re seeing here is the “Vis Raghavan effect”.  Citi’s head of investment banking spent a lot of 2025 hiring former colleagues from JPMorgan, and after a while a bank which keeps losing bankers is going to start losing deals. But on a closer look, this doesn’t seem so likely.

Citi hired Rob Cascarino from JPMorgan in August to be co-head of European DCM, but there don’t seem to have been many other hires in this area.  If you look back at Raghavan’s hiring in 2025, it seems to have been more skewed toward the equity capital markets, M&A and coverage teams. 

And Citi don’t actually seem to have been the ones taking market share this year, in any case. They held their position, growing revenue almost exactly in line with the market.  That might have been considered quite a good result, given the amount of turnover on their DCM team, including the loss of three or four MDs half way through the year.

So if Citi hasn’t gained market share and hasn’t been hiring much from JPM, we can conclude that this isn’t the source of the problem.  What was? 

According to the Dealogic table, the big market share gainer was Morgan Stanley, which grew its deal volume by 17.5% nearly twice as fast as the market.  That doesn’t necessarily translate directly into revenue – league table credit is given to bookrunners, but other underwriting positions also pay money, and not every deal is equal in terms of fees paid.  But when combined with Morgan Stanley’s traditional strength in the Technology sector, it gives us a clue what’s been going on.

In the fourth quarter, a lot of debt deals for datacenters closed; enough to make a difference to the global revenue figures and the league tables.  If Morgan Stanley won a lot of those deals, and JPMorgan was shut out, then that might go some of the way to explaining why one bank surprised on the upside and the other on the downside.  People matter a lot for market share, but sometimes the most important thing is just to have the right sectoral positioning at the right time.

Elsewhere, leaving a blue chip boutique like Evercore in order to start up your own boutique might be considered a career risk.  Leaving the investment banking industry entirely to concentrate on “geopolitical risk advisory” adds a bit more.  But to concentrate your offering on a country that’s something of a global pariah, subject to sanctions and experiencing hyperinflation … that’s truly courageous. Until it pays off.

So Charles Myers, of Signum Global Advisors, has had the kind of defining career experience that not many bankers get – he’s taken calls from clients that were so desperate to talk to him about developments in Venezuela that they couldn’t wait until he reached the end of the chair lift in Aspen.  After slaloming back down (and perhaps knocking back a restorative gluhwein), he has started to organise a trip to the country to look for investment opportunities “post-Maduro”, with fifty clients already expressing an interest in paying to come along, although he plans to cap the numbers at half that.

This seems to be the nature of global risk advisory – most of the time, it’s a relatively calm analytical job, pumping out punditry for a smallish client base that’s prepared to pay a retainer to be kept in the loop.  Then once in a while, some of the potential geopolitical risk turns into actual geopolitical news, and people can’t get enough of you.  It is, as the proverb goes, an ill wind that doesn’t blow a banker somewhere good.

Meanwhile …

JPMorgan wants someone to replace Kaustubh Kulkarni, the head of its Indian operations who left last year to go to Citi.  And with the Indian IPO market continuing to heat up, it’s prepared to pay top dollar to get the best.  Apparently local CEO of Goldman Sachs has been approached but has ruled himself out. (Bloomberg)

If any of your London colleagues seem sluggish or distracted, it might be because a change to the prescribing rules have made it quite a lot more difficult for some people with ADHD to get prescriptions. (FT)

BlackRock is starting a small round of job cuts, with around 250 investment and distribution professionals (1% of the global workforce) likely to be made redundant early this year. (Financial News)

“Internal tensions over desk availability and parking spaces” may be coming to an end at JPMorgan; without increasing its real estate footprint too much, the bank is planning some “de-densification and catching up on space renovations around the world” to “provide employees a reasonable in-office experience” to match the flagship head office. (Business Insider)

SocGen’s joint venture with Bernstein will be cutting a third of its French headcount. (Bloomberg)

They say that the best way to rob a bank is to own one, but the second best way might be to take advantage of the Christmas break to drill through a wall in a small German town and empty 3,250 safe-deposit boxes.  The thieves have left behind “cash, documents, watches and silver bars” and presumably got away with a lot more – currently estimated at tens of millions of euros (FT)

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