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Bank of America’s junior bankers are the latest young cohort on Wall Street to receive new guidance on accepting hush-hush private equity jobs while employed by the bank.
The Brian Moynihan-led bank will ask its analysts to disclose whether they have offers for future-dated jobs, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The policy was first reported by Bloomberg.
It follows similar rules rolled out by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Morgan Stanley in recent weeks, with one big exception: BofA juniors who accept these future-dated job offers will not be terminated but rather reassigned to another area within the bank.
A Bank of America spokesperson declined to comment.
By contrast, JPMorgan has told juniors that their “employment with the firm will end” if they take offers. Other banks weren’t as specific about what would happen if the bankers attest that they indeed have future jobs lined up, which the banks have criticized as a potential conflict of interest. Citi’s memo said that anyone with a future-dated job would be assessed on “a case-by-case basis,” and Morgan Stanely juniors were told they could face disciplinary action.
BofA’s approach comes as banks struggle to balance their staffing needs with the career ambitions of young bankers who want to jump to the buy side after their investment banking analyst stints end, usually after two years.
The PE industry’s habit of filling future analyst classes with junior investment bankers two years in advance has become a major thorn in the side of many investment banks. In the last few years, the recruiting timeline has been pushed up to the point that college grads were secretly interviewing for future-dated PE jobs before they had even officially started their current banking jobs.
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Many banks have buyout firms as clients, which could lead to conflicts of interest for the bankers working on deals with future employers.
“I think that’s unethical. I don’t like it, and I may eliminate it regardless of what the private-equity guys say,” Dimon told college students at Georgetown University last year, adding: “You are already working for somewhere else, and you are dealing with highly confidential information for JPMorgan.”
This year, JPMorgan’s stance seemed to cause a fall of the dominoes. In June, CEO Jamie Dimon blasted the practice. Days later, buyout shops Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, and later TPG announced they’d hold off on recruiting for 2027 analysts until next year — an unprecedented step.
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