Gen-Z bankers won't grind: "Banking is no longer a premium job"

As banks excite themselves with the prospect of resurgent deals, mid-ranking and senior bankers are returning to their favourite gripe: the new generation of young bankers and its alleged unwillingness to work as hard as their predecessors. 

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A long and popular thread on forum website Wall Street Oasis details the array of complaints against Gen-Z in banking. They include: two-hour lunches; weekend unavailability; sick days booked in advance; no attention to detail; failing to respond to emails, needing incredibly detailed instructions and being technically incapable of doing the job. The vice president who initiated the WSO thread says his analysts don't deserve their associate promotions as a result. 

Similar complaints have been levelled for a while, but with deals likely to return in 2025, they're assuming a new level urgency. We spoke to multiple managing directors (MDs) who confirmed that their Gen-Z juniors are a big issue. "It’s a constant complaint of MDs that the juniors don’t work as hard as they did; but it’s not just Gen X - the  Millennials in banking say the same," says one. "— I’m older enough to remember people complaining about “f*cking Millennials' now they’re like “holy heck, we thought they were bad.'"

Another managing director from a US bank says juniors now have "a totally different mindset to previous generations." They aren't prepared to put in the same effort, he says: "They don’t care for accuracy and brilliance and they’re more likely to know what they want re work/life balance and get it." He says his team didn't make any offers to this year's summer interns because of their poor attitude. - "That's very rare." 

MDs say the issues go far beyond those detailed on WSO. There are complaints of Gen-Z waiting in the office to order paid food and then leaving directly after eating it, of staring at their mobile phones instead of working, and of failing to get to the office on time because they won't walk more than 10 minutes to a station.

Mostly, though, banking MDs complain about the lack of resilience of their new junior colleagues who they say are prone to complaining of "microaggressions", especially in New York. "I got to a point where I just had to accept a lower quality pitch book because asking for a better one would result in a huff or tears or a junior taking time out sick. So you have to stop asking for better," says one. 

Another MD says a junior complained because he was using red ink for mark-ups. "She said it was aggressive and that we should be using green instead," he says. 

"We had one girl who demanded extra holidays, because her skin needed more sunshine," the same MD adds. "She actually managed to get occupational health to agree, via lots of bullying. Still can’t believe she got away with that. She was a party animal, we saw her pictures of her in Ibiza on her Insta." 

While MDs in banking are despairing of the new generation, though, the new generation is equally despairing of the MDs. One junior associate at a major US bank in London says senior bankers need to get real. "Banking is no longer a premium job," he tells us. "My generation can earn £100k+ working 40-hour weeks for tech firms. Smart people are making those calculations." 

The generational stand-off is such that managing directors say they're being driven to replace juniors with AI as quickly as possible. It doesn't help that some young bankers are objecting to the use of Excel. "Excel is their core tool, but I have analysts coming to me saying that it's difficult and ancient and questioning why they can't just have an app for valuation work," says one MD. "I also always had to drum into them not to always trust numbers out of Bloomberg or FactSet. — 'Use your BRAIN, does it make sense'?"

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