To all CS interns
Look, no one knows what is going to happen. Chances are, not even UBS. They haven’t had time to do proper DD, let alone come up with a clearly defined business plan for the combined entity.
Essentially the Swiss government has twisted UBS’ arm to get them to save their face and avoid their financial sector collapsing. It will take weeks, even months, until UBS comes up with a clear path and has visibility on headcount.
Until then all you can do is either sit tight and wait, or look for a backup plan. Be advised that with how quiet M&A has been the past few quarters, the job market is quite stalled.
Its a shitty situation so all I can do is wish you best of luck to all of you. You were smart enough to get a CS offer and I’m sure your careers will be fine. No one is going to hold it against you wether you rerecruit or you have to start again from 0 in the future bc of CS’ mistakes.
This industry, as harsh as it is, will always be in need of smart, hard working individuals. As long as you keep pushing, you’ll find something whether at UBS/CSFB, or elsewhere
You should ABSOLUTELY be looking for a backup plan but you may very well get to keep your CS gig.
Working at an MM is a fate worse than eternal damnation
Correct me if I’m wrong but employers will most likely see this like what happened with COVID. Let me explain:
Once COVID hit, tons of college students lost their internships. It sucked, everyone went through it BUT it was never used against students. If they had a gap in employment on their resume, then simply saying “I lost my internship due to COVID” was perfectly acceptable.
Wouldn’t this be the same thing to incoming FT or Interns if they lose their seats?? I mean it’s not their fault at all so if you had mentioned that when recruiting again, y’all should be fine. Yes, you have to put in work to find a new seat but I wouldn’t feel hindered about losing your job. It’s not your fault at all.
Best of luck to you all
In the event they do honor summer analyst roles, I strongly advise that you guys still formulate a plan to recruit for different roles / firms for full-time.
I know the market unfortunately sucks but it’s because of that I doubt the full time offer rate would be good in the event they combine the summer programs
Leaving CS soon after almost 2 years to finally start my PE gig. CS was a great experience, I loved my group and very sad to see how things have unfolded. However, and this might be more relevant to current employees than incoming students, I would like to say this: "stop complaining about how the senior folks didn't give you a straight answer or outright lied to you." What choice did they have? If the CEO doesn't say everything's gonna be fine, there's going to be a run on the bank. If the head of department doesn't say your jobs and bonuses are secure, people will stop coming into offices. You should understand these dynamics and not take everything at face value when making judgements, and if you did not, you only have yourself and your naivety to blame. C'mon. You even saw the CEO getting fired only 2 weeks after he publically said the bank is fine. Yet you still thought everything's good? If you were at all surprised how things turned out, and are now frustrated to not have made any contingency plans, at least I hope this will be a valuable life lesson for you.
Reached out to HR and it’s bad.
Care to elaborate?
I'm at the Ares conference and spoke to a senior Managing Partner who left CS a year ago and he says everyone he knows at CS has NO FUCKING IDEA what's going on. This includes literally everyone in CS Financial Sponsors.
There is not some secret that MDs know that you aren't privy to. It's going to be brutal but nobody knows how much.
Agree with not risking our job on a sinking ship!
Around 10-15% of total employee base for UBS and CS is in US. May be 10 coverage groups for CS with ~50 bankers on average per group. ~500 coverage bankers is less then 1% of UBS's global workforce (which has ~150 coverage bankers in US?) - which they can absorb easily. They have also indicated UBS's favorable stance towards US advisory. If we consider the natural attrition over the past year at CS given all the uncertainty, UBS will likely not have to do any mass layoffs. Obviously, nothing is 100% certain.
There's really no point cancelling internship offers for a bank, when the merger is not even close to completion. The cost-savings from not hiring interns for 9 weeks is less than marginal. That said, looking back at what happend at Merrill Lynch when it got bought out by BofA during GFC, none of the ML interns got return offers. It was a long time ago, but I still remember seeing hundreds of interns just leaving Merrill building with a complete shock on their faces at 250 Vesey St. I was at another bank at that time and things were pretty bad, but we did give return offers to most of our summer class. Not exactly the same situation, but I'd expect return offer rates to be pretty dismal for "CS" interns this year and even the ones who get should be worried about being cancelled or fired before even their first bonus. For full-time employees, massive layoffs will most likely begin right before bonus season. (BofA ended up cutting more than 90% of ML people or 35,000 employees at the time.)