The boutique bank still adding MDs and juniors
Investment banking as a sector might be straight up not having a great time, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plucky boutiques wading through the mud and gathering staff in the process. We’ve noticed two bankers, of very different seniorities, joining the same boutique – PJT Partners – in the last few weeks.
James Lilly is the MD. Lilly was with Evercore for 11 years before joining PJT last month. Somewhat ironically, despite being a descendant of Eli Lilly, who founded the pharmaceutical company that bears his name, he was with Evercore’s media and information group. Lilly is based in New York.
The associate, Lucas Xing, joined PJT earlier this week. He spent a year and half with Santander, which he joined from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). Xing was in London for both banks across a variety of teams in advisory and structured finance but will be part of PJT’s capital markets advisory team in the city.
The allure of working for PJT is self-evident. The bank was one of the few that increased revenues in 2022 over the blockbuster year that was 2021 and paid out somewhere between $734k to $740k per head to its staff. That’s not entirely due to a few heavy-hitters, either; Financial News reported last year that the bank had bumped its entry-level salary figure for juniors to £80k ($102k).
PJT is focused on expanding its footprint. Founder and CEO Paul Taubman told investors after the bank’s Q2 earnings that the “treacherous” current environment had nonetheless presented the bank with “an extraordinary opportunity to aggressively accelerate the pace of senior hiring.”
The scope of that hiring can’t be understated – by the end of April (the time of the call), PJT had already matched its entire 2022 hiring numbers. Some of those included top dealmakers from Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as reported by Financial News, and Anand Narayan from JPMorgan.
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