A man who seemed safe disappeared from a French bank and everyone is shocked
As we observed on Friday, French bank BNP Paribas appears to be ushering people out of its London office. BNP is not commenting, but we understand from insiders that at least 20 people have recently submitted to this process.
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They include Will Fairley and Dan Smith, the bank's head of hedge fund coordination and a senior equities trader, whose disappearances we reported last week. They also include Georges Debbas, whose disappearance we didn't.
Like Fairley and Smith, Debbas didn't respond to a request to comment for this article. Like Fairley and Smith, Debbas is understood to be working through his notice.
BNP Paribas insiders say they are shocked by Debbas's apparent departure. He was considered highly capable and didn't previously work for Exane but joined BNP's London office in 2022 as head of equity derivatives strategy for Europe. More particularly, he was the lead for the French bank's initiative 'AI@M360,' in which he used generative AI to help "leverage" research.
Writing on his own personal Substack, Alistair Smallwood, a former director in equity sales at UBS, said last month that the nature of equity research is changing and will in future involve "systems that can learn how a specific portfolio manager or analyst thinks, maintain a live understanding of a company and a thesis, monitor developments continuously, and surface fully developed angles in a way that starts to resemble a different kind of colleague." Smallwood is currently head of AI at primer, a company that happens to do precisely this. He is also hiring. Maybe Debbas could work there instead.
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