Prime Brokerage Stories: Getting the Drawer

This is the sixth in a series called “Prime Brokerage Stories,” real life experiences from a close family member who worked in this area of the Street for 30 years. For an introduction to PB so it all makes sense, see here: //www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/what-is-prime-brokerage

Last time I talked about one “problem employee,” and this week I’ll tell you about another one. One day I retrieved a phone message that plainly said in a loud voice,

“Get this guy Oscar the Grouch off my accounts!!!”

It was left by “Mr. B,” the IB front office manager (which remember for our purposes, stands for “introducing broker,” not “investment banking”).

Who is Oscar the Grouch, you may ask?

I found out that Oscar was a guy who worked in my department. I spoke with Mr. B (who had calmed down a bit), and said I would find out what was going on and work with Oscar on his customer service skills.

“He is pissing off my clients, and I can’t have that!” Mr. B ordered.

Long story short, I failed to change the situation. We moved accounts around, we tried to work with him closely but it just would not work. Oscar was good, knew his stuff and was valuable--OK, maybe a little rough around the edges. He was a veteran and had served as a tank commander in the military. Fortunately I was able to get him transferred to a different section. Not quite the optimal result, but management is about making the best decision possible.

Now, for all of Mr. B’s desire for customer service perfection, he had another, more humorous side. After dealing with several reporting issues for a certain XYZ IB, Mr. B. called for a meeting with me, another one of his chief lieutenants, and the CEO of XYZ IB.

I was warned that the CEO loved to hear himself talk and that the call could go on for quite a while.

“Is he going to get the drawer?” asked the lieutenant, lightheartedly.

“’Get the drawer?’ What does that mean?” I wondered.

In any event the CEO asked for a progress report, which we were quite ready for, and Mr. B was satisfied that we’d done what he asked. But, just as we had been warned, the CEO just kept talking, going on and on and on…

Mr. B takes the big speaker phone, opens his top left drawer, puts the phone in it and closes the drawer, and we have a nice chat about baseball, the weather and whatever. After a minute or so he opens the drawer and the guy is still talking! Unbelievable. I was laughing all day.

The next guy to ‘get the drawer’ had to do with a process called “forced liquidation,” which was a noxious thing we had to do to a client account when they didn’t or wouldn’t pay. It was a federal regulation, so we had to do it, but boy it was messy.

Back then, writing checks was the most common method of paying for your trades. People would put them in the mail, and if we ‘liquidated’ or ’closed out’ a trade, we sometimes found that the check was received in time but due to some reason or other not deposited and we would have to reinstate the original trade, losing money in the process. Of course, if the client would have lost money on the trade it was OK to leave the liquidation in place, no questions asked.

The point is, IB’s hated liquidations, and when clients could not understand them we often got into some pretty heated exchanges.

I was asked to participate in a phone call with a CEO (different from the above) who was the textbook definition of livid. He needed to vent and wanted as many people on a conference call as possible so he could rip us a new asshole for liquidating one of his lousy, bizarre accounts. We gathered around the supervisor’s cubicle, and the CEO was on the phone screaming so loud the whole floor could hear it.

“I am going to tell you guys, don’t liquidate my accounts! Don’t you EVER, ever, ever, ever …………………”

Several minutes later, he’s still going at it:

“ever, ever, ever, ever………..”

We lost count of the number of times he said “ever.” Once this guy got into it, he just kept on going.

What he needed was ‘the drawer’.

So he got it.

PB Story 1: “Big Mack and the Phantom Pricing” //www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/prime-brokerage-stories-big-mack-and-the-p…
PB Story 2: “Thank You, Nick Leeson” //www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/prime-brokerage-stories-thank-you-nick-lee…
PB Story 3: "Mentally Fired" //www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/prime-brokerage-stories-mentally-fired
PB Story 4: "Expect No Favors" //www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/prime-brokerage-stories-expect-no-favors
PB Story 5: "Letting Go f the Past" //www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/prime-brokerage-stories-letting-go-of-the-…