UBS Employees Become Members Of NYC “Sexual Elite” Networking Club

Posted on March 12, 2015March 12, 2015 by admin

Brokerdealer.com blog update courtesy of DealBreaker’s Bess Levin and for many clients, this story could be a deal breaker. UBS, a Swiss global financial services company with its headquarters in Basel and Zürich, Switzerland, UBS is operating in more than 50 countries with about 60,000 employees around the world, as of 2014. Some of these 60,000 employees have decided to attend a “sex club” in New York City. Below is an extraction from DealBreaker

Have you spent a good deal of time gazing upon your coworkers and thinking, “Working alongside each other is nice. Watching them scarf down Seamless has its perks. Burning the midnight oil to get these pitchbooks done is more fun than you’d think. But what I’d really like to do is attend a sex party with these people. But not just any old sex party put together in a slapdash manner and attended by people who give bondage gear a bad name. I’m talking a highly organized sex party produced by pros who know what they’re doing. Maybe someone with a British accent, who only has a couple degrees of separation from the Queen of England, and can lend an air of class to the event and know how to make a decent cup of Earl Grey. Someone whose roster of clients include the crème de la crème of f*cking. Someone who is not just a sex party planner but a serious businesswoman who did 7-figures in revenue last year by providing “A-list actors, British aristocrats, Formula One owners, moneyed married couples” and banking heirs with a smorgasbord of sexual delicacies”? Then today’s your lucky day.

Leggy models in Christian Louboutin heels and Wolford stockings glide from room to candlelit room. A dapper man in a custom suit eyes them while sipping Champagne by the mansion’s fireplace. A DJ plays in a corner. Oysters are slurped at the bar. And then, in a matter of minutes, pants are off, bras are unhooked and a tangled web of nude revelers go at it on a bed plopped smack in the middle of the 12,000-square-foot home. It’s just another night at Killing Kittens — the roving members-only sex club that professes to be “the world’s network for the sexual elite.” On Saturday night, the kinky London-based club makes its New York debut. For $100 per woman and $250 per couple, the adventurous can spend hours sleeping with strangers in a swanky Flatiron loft rented for the evening. Cocktail attire and masks are required (though, needless to say, both will get shed rather quickly)…

“When [my ex-boyfriend and I] hosted a party at our house [in London], we had a bed and there were these two gorgeous silver foxes and this black girl whose legs went to Tokyo, and she was just demanding everything from them . . . it’s complete carnage,” she says. “It’s like a buffet.” […As of Tuesday, Sayle says 60 people have signed up for the NYC event, including a group of British female bankers who work at UBS’s Midtown office and a bevy of models. “They all have the same mentality,” a raspy-voiced Sayle says of her members.” They’re all overachievers.

For the entire article from DealBreaker, click here.

BrokerDealer Compensation: Re-Visiting Retention Contracts; Advisor Advisory

Posted on March 10, 2015March 10, 2015 by admin

BrokerDealer.com blog update profiling the topic of compensation agreements between brokerdealers and respective financial advisors operating under BD umbrellas is courtesy of extract from 10 Mar article in BankInvestmentConsultant.com

With many long-term retention contracts expiring, wirehouses are under pressure to once again ensure the retention of their top producers. Kenton Shirk, associate director at Cerulli Associates, discusses how management is leveraging deferred comp to stem defections.

What are the latest triggers resulting in advisor moves?

A change dictated by B-D leadership may cause advisors to switch firms, especially if advisors feel their net financial benefits have decreased or their employer is rigidly dictating undesirable new policies. Industry recruiters have told Cerulli that continuous changes to comp structures also have left some advisors feeling they need to work harder to earn the same amount of money. Competitors can use this point of frustration to their advantage when recruiting advisors.

Describe the pros and cons when firms overreach, in terms of comp.

B-Ds need to weigh the strategic benefits of a new comp strategy with the potential impact on advisor satisfaction.

An example is Merrill Lynch’s introduction of relationship pricing in its Merrill One platform in which a client’s fee considers the total financial relationship with both Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. Over the long term, it makes investor relationships stickier since they might be disinclined to follow an advisor to a competing firm since it means giving up discounts across their wealth management and banking accounts.

Yet in the short term, established advisors could potentially feel their parent firm is requiring pricing discounts they might not otherwise offer, creating a sense of frustration.

Will cutting the comp on smaller clients be significant enough to impact retention?

Continue reading →

Investors’ Anticipation Grows As They Wait For Tadawul To Become Public

Posted on March 6, 2015 by admin

Brokerdealer.com blog update profiles the much anticipated wait for the Tadawul market to foriegn investors. The Tadawul market is the Saudi stock market that has always been closed off to foreign investors. Much speculation has led many investors to believe that Tadawul should open by April. The update is from Institutional Investors, and here is a snippet from their article:

Anticipation is growing that a long awaited opening of Tadawul, the Saudi stock market, to foreign investors will come as early as next month. Analysts believe the move will provide fresh momentum for the $500 billion market, which has risen by nearly 30 percent since mid-December. “This will be the event of the year in emerging markets,” says John Sfakianakis, a veteran economist and investment strategist in Riyadh who opened an office there in September for the London-based emerging markets specialist Ashmore Group.

Oil was trading at more than $100 a barrel in July when the government first announced its intention to open the market at some point in 2015. Since then the Tadawul has been on a roller coaster ride, hitting a peak of 11,149 in early September, then plunging more than 34 percent over the next three months as oil prices collapsed before staging a recovery. The partial rebound of oil prices since January has helped. So has the government’s ability to draw on its $750 billion in reserves, which has helped keep the economy flush.

Growth has slowed but remains positive. The International Monetary Fund projects that the economy will expand by 2.8 percent this year, down from 3.6 percent in 2014. Nonoil sectors, which account for virtually the entire stock market, should expand by 5 percent, says Bassel Khatoun, Franklin Templeton’s head of equities for the Middle East and North Africa, based in Dubai.

To read the full article from Institutional Investors on the Saudi Arabian stock market’s opening, click here.

A Handmade IPO for Bankers, BrokerDealers and Maybe Investors

Posted on March 5, 2015 by admin

BrokerDealer.com blog IPO update and profile of Etsy.com pending initial public offering is courtesy of extract from 5 March story by Bloomberg View’s Matt Levine, “The Etsy IPO and the Triangle Document.” Brokerdealers and bankers alike have been anticipating Etsy’s IPO launch as it could be a big test for companies that have growing businesses and devoted followings and are considering launching their own IPOs. Etsy is a peer-to-peer e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items and supplies, as well as unique factory-manufactured items. Now from Bloomberg View’s Matt Levine…

How twee.

You occasionally read about banks’ pitches to take hot companies public, and they are often cringe-worthy: Bankers wore band t-shirts to pitch Pandora, and UBS dressed “around 75 of its employees in Lululemon gear and had them descend upon Central Park for a ‘flash mob’ yoga session” to pitch Lululemon for some reason. What do you think Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Allen & Company did to win the Etsy initial public offering? Did they hand-write the pitchbooks in fountain pen? Crochet them? Or just produce them normally in PowerPoint on their computers, but they were wooden computers? Did everyone else know about this?

The company was founded by Rob Kalin, a carpenter making handmade wooden computers with nowhere to sell them.

So obviously the Internet beckoned. Anyway, Etsy filed its preliminary prospectus yesterday, without a lot of capitalization numbers; Bloomberg reports that it’s seeking to sell about $300 million of stock, while DealBook estimates its pre-money valuation at about $322 million, so, that’s kind of weird. Use of proceeds is “general corporate purposes,” as one does, plus putting $300,000 — 10 basis points of the deal? — into the company’s Etsy.org nonprofit. But unlike a bunch of the internetty companies that I make fun of for going public for no particular reason other than cashing out insiders, Etsy is growing, had a $15.2 million net loss last year, and could probably use the money. (It’s also cashing out some insiders obviously.) The filing also emphasizes “authenticity” and includes this graphic explaining why Etsy works:

To continue reading Matt Levine’s article from Bloomberg View, please click here

Royal Bank of Scotland to Cut Significant Percent of Employees

Posted on March 4, 2015 by admin

Brokerdealer.com blog update is courtesy of The Economic Times.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) with over 700 branches with most mainly in the UK and Ireland have announced massive job cuts to their investment banking division.

Britain’s state-rescued Royal Bank of Scotland will axe up to 14,000 jobs by 2019 in a retreat from investment banking, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

The daily business newspaper, which cited people familiar with the matter, said the lender could shed as much as 80 percent of its investment banking division, which employs a total of 18,000 people.

A spokeswoman for RBS, which is about 80-percent state-owned, declined to comment on the press report.

The Edinburgh-based bank had already announced last week that it would end investment banking in the Middle East and Africa and “significantly” reduce its presence in Asia and the United States after posting its seventh successive annual loss.
Losses after tax totalled £3.47 billion ($5.40 billion, 4.74 billion euros) last year after a £4.0-billion writedown on Citizens bank, part of its US operations.

The performance was however much better than in 2013 when RBS had posted an annual net loss of almost £9.0 billion. Stripping out the writedown and other items, RBS recorded an operating profit of £3.5 billion for 2014.