Jamie Dimon-led JPMorgan is threatening to fire junior bankers who accept a job offer within the first 18 months of joining the firm as the battle for Wall Street’s top talent heats up.
A leaked letter to newly recruited JPMorgan analysts, posted on the Instagram account Litquidity, warns the junior bankers that if they already have a lucrative gig lined up elsewhere, they will be booted out of the bank.
“If you accept a position with another company before joining us or within your first 18 months, you will be provided notice and your employment with the firm will end,” according to a memo dated June 4 and signed by JP Morgan’s global banking co-heads Filippo Gori and Doug Petno.
“To succeed in the investment banking analyst programme, your full attention and participation are essential,” the missive from the two senior executives continued.
A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment.
The two men also write that “missing any part of the training programme” could also lead to termination and that “avoiding potential conflicts of interest is crucial to maintaining the trust and confidence our clients place in us.”
Gori and Petno, seen as a possible successor to Dimon as CEO, added that they would cut the time it takes to reach associate level by six months to 2.5 years in a bid to retain the best and brightest.
Their letter stops short of mentioning the private equity industry by name, but it has been a long-established tactic deployed by those firms to poach junior bankers after their training.
JPMorgan CEO Dimon, 69, has been a repeated critic of how buyout shops lure newly minted financiers with eye-popping pay packets that even America’s banking titans cannot compete with.
“I know a lot of you work at JPMorgan, you take a job at a private equity shop before you even start with us,” Dimon told a crowd of undergraduate business school students, branding it “unethical.”
“It puts us in a bad position, and it puts us in a conflicted position,” he said at a talk at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy in September.
“You are already working for somewhere else, and you’re dealing with highly confidential information from JPMorgan, and I just don’t like it.”
But some young financiers argued that the new policy would be tough to police, with a senior source inside the bank admitting to The Post that it would be entirely “trust-based.”
“JPMorgan is stupid for thinking this is enforceable or sustainable,” one hedge fund analyst wrote on Wall Street Oasis, a website popular with American bankers. “Private firms are stupid for thinking recruiting analysts before they even hit the desk is sustainable.”
Associates at private equity firms can make up to $300,000 a year with bonuses that start at at least that amount, according to research compiled by the same website.
Figures compiled by Glassdoor, a recruitment and human resources portal, show that salaries for an associate banker at JPMorgan range from $197,000 to $289,000, excluding any performance-related payouts.
JPMorgan is not the only Wall Street titan that is having to fend off private equity firms looking to poach its bankers.
Goldman Sachs recently faced down an attempt to lure one of its top executives away from 200 West St.
The David Solomon-led bank handed chief operating officer John Waldron an $80 million “golden handcuffs” package earlier this year, as well as a seat on the board.
Waldron had been approached by Marc Rowan’s Apollo Global Management for a megabucks role.
The bonus, which will fully vest in five years, was seen as a move to keep the 55-year-old with Goldman, where he is seen as Solomon’s heir apparent as CEO.
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