Lazard bankers find a fine method of reducing their workload
It’s a tough time to be a banker. Your working hours are as insane as ever. AI is slowly making you redundant. What do you do? You cut as many corners as you can.
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The bankers at Lazard can offer some advice. Today was Lazard's Q2 results day, and the bank used a pair of nifty tools to make their presentations for investors this quarter: the “copy” tool is one. The other is the slightly lesser known “paste” tool.
Other than the key pieces of information, Lazard’s Q1 and Q2 presentations are remarkably similar. In fact, in large parts, they are literally identical. Aside from date changes signifying the end of the quarters, there is only one difference in the first five pages of the presentation: the bank noted that it went from 3,253 employees to “3,200+” employees. All else is identical, bar the dates.
Excusing the change in dates and key figures, 25 out of 34 slides (discarding the appendix) in the presentation are functionally identical between Q1 and Q2. And 15 of 34 slides are, quite literally, identical. Copy and paste. 44% of Lazard’s presentation was dragged, dropped, and forgotten from three months ago.
The biggest change in text comes on slide 17, where Lazard’s asset management arm is no longer described as prioritizing being “sustainable”, but rather “engaged”. Even the list of deals Lazard worked on, obstinately in the quarter, had two out of five unchanged between Q1 and Q2.
For these presentational skills and more, Lazard’s bankers were paid exceptionally well – although less than last year. The firm’s compensation bill grew quarter on quarter (Q1 vs Q2), but it was down in the first half of 2025 compared to the first half of 2024.
Assuming Lazard had the same numbers of employees at the end of Q2 as it did at the end of Q1, then its people were paid an average of $292k per head for their work in the first half of the year. Not bad for some copy and paste jockies.
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