Does Deutsche Bank have a ‘soft hiring freeze’ at its London office? London-based financial services recruiters say they’ve been informed that it has. Deutsche Bank tells us that it hasn’t. And yet a quick look the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Register reveals that Deutsche has hired next to no one into its London business since January 2014.
While other banks have hired staff externally in the past three months, Deutsche’s new FCA Registered staff are mostly internal transfers from overseas offices. The Register suggests that external front office hires in London this year have been restricted to Sally Fitzpatrick, a corporate access professional from SocGen, Ashley Wilson, a new global head of synthetics in the prime services division from Barclays, and Jana Hecker, a former executive director in IBD from Goldman Sachs. Supplementary to this, Deutsche has hired Kevin Purgrass from Citi as head of compliance in its transaction bank.
For a bank with thousands of staff on London Wall, that’s not much hiring. Last November, we reported that Deutsche had a full hiring freeze globally. Since then, the bank has indicated that it wants to hire fixed income bankers in the US. This week, however, it lost Michele Foresti, its former head of European credit and rates trading, who is joining Bank of America as head of FICC trading for EMEA.
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