"Which bank do you work for" and other dumb questions

Hi guys, as someone who has worked in finance for a very long time, I have been asked some pretty dumb questions over the years by people outside the industry and I am compiling the dumbest questions for you today. Look, I don't know much about what a chemical engineer does for a living but I would not make any stupid assumptions based on my ignorance - no, instead, if I sat down with a chemical engineer, I would then politely ask questions to learn more about what they do. But unfortunately, many people seem to assume that they know all about banking as they handle their own money, they have a bank account, perhaps they might even have some of their own investments but that is when it goes terribly wrong! Maybe it is because of the word 'banking' that makes most people associate what I do with banks and that is why many people would prefer to use this term 'financial services' rather than just 'banking', to make it more inclusive. 

Wait, what's the difference between banking and financial services then? 

I found a really good article online that explains this difference clearly but in a nutshell, banking is a category within the wider sector of financial services. Therefore people who work for banks are in the financial service industry but not everyone who work in the financial industry are in banking. Let me use an analogy to make my point: if we look at the category of 'fruits', then obviously there are many different kinds of fruits and oranges are a kind of fruit. Within the category of oranges, you have many different varieties of oranges. All oranges are fruits but not all fruits are oranges - there are plenty of other fruits like apples, bananas, peaches and watermelons. We are faced with a situation whereby everyone is very familiar with retail banking and thus they make the wrongful assumption that anyone who works in finance must be working in retail banking - that's the same as assuming that all fruits must be oranges just because that's the fruit they are most familiar with. Retail banking only represents a small part of the wider financial services sector - I don't work in retail banking: I work in corporate finance and that's in a totally different part of the financial services sector. 

"Which bank do you work for?"

Oh this is the most common stupid question I get - this is what I mean when stupid people use their own limited experiences of banking and try to view me in that context but of course, they are barely scraping the surface of banking. Look, I don't expect people outside my industry to understand anything about the complexities of the investment banking world, just please don't make any dumb assumptions about how much you actually know about my industry. So no, I don't work for a bank as I am a corporate finance specialist and since we don't deal with the retail public at all, unless you also work in corporate finance, then the chances of you recognizing the name of the companies I've worked for are zero. 

"Are you like an accountant?" 

No, I am not an accountant. You need to pass a lot of exams to become a fully qualified accountant and I never had any desire to go down that career path. It is simply not for me, mind you I have nothing against accountants, I have worked alongside loads of accountants before. After all, accountants don't necessarily have to work within the banking industry as any large business will need accountants. My friend Juan Carlos works for one of Spain's largest car rental chains, hence rather than outsource their accounting to a third party the company has their own accounting department. Thus Juan Carlos works in their accounting department, as an accountant - is he working in financial services? Yes, I would definitely say so, even if his employer is a car rental company rather than a bank or an accountancy specialist. There are a large number of jobs in the finance services industry and being an accountant is just one of many options. Honestly, I have no idea why that guy asked me if I worked as an accountant - maybe he knew someone who worked as an accountant in the financial services industry and assumed I did the same thing? Well, I certainly did not tell him anything to suggest that I was an actually accountant. I think this idiot was just trying hard to relate it to something he understood. 

"Can you launder money for drug dealers?" 

The short answer is no, for a few simple reasons. Do you know how ridiculously hard it is to launder money in this day and age? Every time we engage a client and have to move some money to facilitate an investment, we have to perform a lot of KYC (know your client) and AML (anti-money laundering) checks because that transaction can take place. The fact is the governments in all developed countries from Canada to Germany to the UK to Japan to Australia take this very seriously and have placed such strict measures in place to make it extremely hard to launder dirty money! If your company is caught not adhering to any of these super strict rules, the police would be knocking on your door within the hour and believe you me, I don't want to be arrested and sent to jail for a crazy long time. So does this kind of money laundering still happen today? Yes it does, in spite of all of these stringent measures but it is extremely difficult to move illicit money today. I can't just say, "oh yeah, my mate Jimmy will open a bank account for you in Panama, no questions asked and you can transfer all your drugs money there by next Monday." No instead it would involve such a complex process to obfuscate the paper trail to make the dirty money untraceable and quite frankly, I'm just not knowledgeable enough to figure all that out - it is way beyond me! I have no absolutely no idea how one would do that. I'll compare it to smuggling drugs into Singapore - of course you will face the death penalty if you get caught doing so, that's why most people will look at the risk vs the reward and think, no way, even if I am desperate to make money, I don't want to risk the death penalty, there has got to be a better way to make money than trying to smuggle drugs into Singapore. I am earning good money by doing everything by the book and why would I jeopardize all that by doing something so illegal, which comes with extremely long jail sentences? If you get caught laundering money for criminals, it is not like you get a small fine and you promise not to do it again - hell no, you get sent to jail for a very long time for crying out aloud. So it is not even a question of my morals preventing me doing anything illegal, no - it is the fear of these super harsh punishments that stops me from ever committing a crime and so which part of "I really don't want to go to jail" do you not understand?!

 "Do you work very long hours?" 

Not at all for a simple reason: I am rewarded for my good ideas and my problem solving skills. So let's compare me to a gymnastics coach - a gymnastics coach will only be paid for their services when they are actually in the gym, teaching a lesson. They are not even paid for the time they spend traveling to and from the gymnastics club. However for me, I can be doing gymnastics, lying on a beach, watching a movie or doing any other fun activity and still engage my brain to use my problem solving skills and deliver a lot of value for my clients. On the surface, compared to people in more traditional jobs like the gymnastics coaches as mentioned above, it looks like I'm barely working no more than like five to eight hours a week and I'm always on holiday doing fun stuff. But I am in a very privileged position to be paid for my ideas rather than my labour, thus work almost becomes a part time job that I think about as I am rewarded for my good ideas whilst I spend most of my time doing fun activities I enjoy. We are having a nasty heatwave in London right now and so yesterday I went swimming, I took the bus to get there and the bus driver was clearly struggling in the heat - that old man has no choice but to still go to work and drive that bus because he has to do that to earn money, he cannot say, "I will work from home today instead and just think about driving that bus all day." No, such is the difference between working class people who have to put in the hard labour to earn their wages and the elite who are paid for their brains. When I was swimming, yes I was thinking about work but note that I was having fun whilst doing that, rather than being sat at my desk staring at my computer. I have a completely different relationship with working hours given that my output isn't tied to me sitting at my desk staring at my computer as the work gets done when I use my brain to find solutions to problems. 

"It sounds like your brain never switches off and you can never truly relax if you're always thinking." 

My brain never switches off but that's just what highly intelligent people do, we have an urge to always be mentally stimulated and engaged because we find that process very rewarding and fun! Even when I don't have any work to do, I channel that energy into learning foreign languages which I find rewarding and interesting. I am currently learning Swahili and it is fascinating to study a non-European language for  change. I am surprised at how quickly I am learning and that is what keeps me going. So the more I subject my brain to, the more I get out of it. I can see why stupid people would want to switch their brains off when they relax as they have never had rewarding experiences when trying to use their brains, it is the complete opposite with very intelligent people. This is just part of being intelligent, it is not stressful as we're used to it - thus this is the norm for us as we enjoy using our brains, unlike stupid people who hate having to think. 

"Isn't your job very stressful?" 

Yes and no. The stress doesn't come from the nature of the job which I am good at - please let me state the obvious, at my age, I have been working for a long time. I have had plenty of time to find out what I am good at, what I suck at and thus I have managed to make a successful career by focusing on the activities I excel at. The variable I have less control over is that of people: sometimes, I have to work with difficult people and the stress arises from those working relationships. So I would describe such people as flawed: they are undependable, untrustworthy, fickle, emotionally unstable, untruthful, irresponsible and erratic. So let me give you an example of when an event caused me stress: some time ago, I received a Whatsapp message from my client that read something like, "don't make this mistake" and he went on to describe a mistake, as if he was accusing me of having made that mistake. As I had never ever made a mistake like that before, I got defensive as I didn't like being falsely accused of being incompetent. It turns out that my colleague Ben had made that mistake, it had upset my client so much that he wanted to make sure that no one else ever made that dumb mistake. However, he had not made it clear what the context of that Whatsapp message was and thus it was misunderstood. So I then replied, "Ben may be incompetent, but I'm not and you know that I would never make a mistake like that." My client did make it clear that he wasn't accusing me of anything, but he accepted that he should have made it clear what happened with Ben to have prompted that message in the first place. I used this example to show that stress on the job usually arises from situations like that when it comes to working in a team. By the same token, a bus driver or a primary school teacher can encounter a similar conflict at work so this is just part and parcel of being a working adult - this is inevitable, but we can develop great social skills to help us cope better when such situations arise. 

"Do you have to be very good at maths?" 

Oh this is such a common misconception. No, not at all, I've already dealt with this in a previous post. There are many different roles in the financial services sector, some require math skills but most don't! I hated maths at school and it was never ever something I enjoyed. I need to point out as well that even if you are good at maths, you will be strictly forbidden to do any maths in banking! This is because any kind of complex calculations can be done with computer programmes these days and that eliminates human error. No matter how great at maths you might be, you are still human and can make dumb errors like hit the 8 instead of 7 on the keyboard or put the decimal point in the wrong position. Hence maths skills are hugely overrated in the world of financial services. Rather if you're good at something like computer programming, you can write code then yeah you can get a job in financial services but that is not the same as pure mathematics and so you could thrive in the financial services industry, even if you really suck at maths, like me! 

"There are so many scams out there, why would anyone trust a smaller company instead of a big bank?"

"So many bankers have criminal intent to scam honest folks of their money, you guys are all crooks."

There are some issues to unpack here. Firstly, it is completely wrong to assume that the bigger banks wouldn't fuck up, there is a long list of big banks that have gone bust simply out of sheer incompetence on the part of the management. We have seen American big banks like Washington Mutual collapse in 2008 and Credit Suisse would have gone the same way this year if it wasn't sold off to its rival UBS. I would use the analogy of a car to explain this to most people - a car is only as safe as the driver. A very experienced, careful driver in a small car is far less likely to have an accident than an inexperienced, reckless young driver (who has had too much to drink) in a massive car - likewise, it is down to the judgment and behaviour of those in management to make sure that big companies are run well and do not fail. However, given the amount of corruption and nepotism in these big banks, often a lot of very incompetent people get promoted to positions of power where they are simply out of their depth - they fuck up because they don't know what the hell they are doing but are given decision making powers that they simply cannot handle. So these banks end up losing massive amounts of money not because these bankers were criminals who were trying to cheat all  the investors, but simply because they were stupid and incompetent, they tried their very best but still fucked up in the end; so I'd like to share with you a common Chinese idiom .滥竽充数. As the story goes, there was an emperor in the Qi kingdom who loved the music of the Yu instrument, which is similar to a flute. This emperor would hire dozens of musicians to perform for him and so this guy Nan Guo realized that the musicians were paid a lot to perform for the emperor in the royal court, but the problem was that Nan Guo didn't know how to play the Yu instrument. He wasn't a musician but he was a con artist - he realized that because the emperor loved having these big concerts with dozens of musicians, then he could just pretend to be playing the Yu and all he had to do was to copy the gestures and body language of all the other musicians. Thus the way Nan Guo got away with his deception is the meaning of this idiom 滥竽充数: that you can hide an incompetent person in a team of really competent people. Hence, that was exactly what William did for a few years in Mr Rich's team. 

So time for a 滥竽充数 story in real life from my industry - I knew this guy William (obviously not his real name) who came from a very rich family but William wasn't particularly intelligent. He ended up at a university near the bottom of the UK universities league tables as he simply wasn't that motivated to work hard. However after he graduated, his father called in  few favours from Mr Rich (obviously not his real name) and got William a job at a top investment bank. Mr Rich and William's fathers are old friends who have known each other for decades. Allow me to be extremely clear: this is a clear case of blatant nepotism and corruption where an incompetent candidate was hired not on any basis of meritocracy, but because Mr Rich wanted to help his old friend's son even though it was clear that William wasn't that intelligent or capable. So Mr Rich used the concept of 滥竽充数 to avoid getting into trouble for having given his old friend's stupid son a good job, Mr Rich put William in his own team and he surrounded William with some of his most capable people, knowing that team would always deliver great results. William enjoyed a great start to his career, maintaining the image of a very successful investment banker even though he did very little real work. Mr Rich then promoted William quickly, so William could then manage a team of young but very capable graduates - William would then make them do all the hard work whilst he would claim all the credit as the team leader. It was remarkable that William got away with it for so long, but eventually Mr Rich decided to retire one day but he figured he had already given William so much help, he believed that William would be able to make it on his own. Shortly after Mr Rich retired, there was a change in management and William's new boss Ms Light noticed the peculiar situation with William. She didn't like William, so she started scrutinizing his activities in the office a lot more closely. Sensing that his situation was about to be exposed by Ms Light, William knew that he was going to into trouble with Ms Light sooner or later. decided to jump before he was pushed - just like in the story of Nan Guo who had to flee the royal court when the new emperor wanted to hear his musicians perform solo. William thought, I have worked several years at this famous investment bank and I can get a job anywhere I want now. So that was when our paths crossed, when William moved on to small company in London I was working at.  

The thing about small companies is that there is nowhere to hide, if you are incompetent, you will be exposed very quickly. William couldn't do his 滥竽充数 routine anymore in a small company, to be fair to him, he did try to pull his weight but it was evident that he was way out of his depth. He was quite keen to prove himself so he boldly took a decision that proved to be wrong, worried that people were going to realize how incompetent he was, he tried to blame that bad decision on me but I was not going to let him get away with it. A lot of drama ensued as I wasn't prepared to just let him throw me under the bus after that incident, so once again, like Nan Guo, he decided to leave the company when he had to prove himself to others. That was unpleasant to say the least as I actually did manage to get along well with William for a while, we would go out to nice restaurants together at lunchtime and had these lavish corporate lunches that he would put on the company credit card; we would just chat for ages instead of doing any work and it was like, woah so that's what rich and privileged people do instead of work. After he left the company, he blocked me on all social media and Whatsapp, even on Skype and I thought, right you've made it very clear how you felt about the situation. I was never a friend or colleague, you thought I was just another pawn you could use to do all the hard work whilst you took all the credit. The reason why I knew the whole story is because of Ms Light, I actually got to know her quite well (that's another long story) but when we realized we both had worked with William, she shared what happened at the investment bank. So that was a very long story about William to make a point that you can actually hide an incompetent person in a big bank using the 滥竽充数 principle but in a small company, there is nowhere to hide. Way too many people assume that bankers are corrupt or evil, that they are criminals out to scam honest, ordinary folks but actually, that couldn't be further from the truth actually. The main reason big banks fail is because of people like William who were brought up with that sense of entitlement, who simply assume that they will get good jobs in senior positions because of their family connections and they do, only to then fuck up royally because they turn out to be really quite incompetent; there are way too many 'William's in the big banks today, so that is good reason not to blindly trust them more than smaller companies! 

Since you speak Chinese, do you deal with investors from China? 

No, I don't - I don't have any Chinese clients. I do not deal with China at all for a number of reasons. Firstly, due to very strict capital controls, it is  extremely hard for Chinese citizens to get their money out of China. The Chinese government wants rich Chinese people to keep their wealth in China by investing in China, rather than for them to take all that money out of China and investing it elsewhere. It is still possible to get money out of China but the Chinese government has done everything it can to make that process as difficult as possible. Secondly, Chinese investors actually have a very wide range of investment opportunities within China. There are some sectors in China which are doing very well - as long as you avoid real estate investments! Thus given the double whammy of it being so hard to get money out of China plus the availability of decent investment opportunities in China, rich investors in China tend to keep their money in China. Hence it is simply not a market that I touch at all, given that I live in London and the investment opportunities I deal with are either in North America or Europe, but never in Asia. Hence it is for those three reasons that I have absolutely nothing to offer Chinese investors now and thus I don't have any Chinese clients at all and probably never will. The reason why a lot of Singaporean people ask me that question is because they are very working class and uneducated (like my parents), such uneducated working class folks have so few useful skills at their disposal but one of the skills they have is the ability to speak Mandarin, thus enabling them to communicate with people from China. So people like that think that this skill must be so vital that we must absolutely use it whereas for people like me, not only do I speak 25 languages, I also have a very technical understanding of the whole corporate finance investment process and so for me, the ability to speak Mandarin fluently is just one of the many skills I don't use to make a living. By the same token, I'm also very good with dogs but does that mean that I have to use that skill to work in a pet store? That would only make sense if I had no other skills that enabled me to find well paid work, if that was the case, then I would work in a pet store. Since I do have so many other useful skills, I'd work in corporate finance instead without dealing with clients from China. 

But China is booming, there is money to be made if you were willing to deal with Chinese clients. 

Again, that would only make sense if I was so terrible at languages that I was only fluent in Chinese and absolutely nothing else. But of course, that's not the case at all, Mandarin is my third language after English and French. I am a lot more comfortable doing business in English or French. In life, we should always pick the lowest hanging fruit. Thus by that token, it makes absolutely no sense for me to even try to deal with China when it is so much easier for me to make money in English or French speaking markets. In any case, the only way I can realistically do my job is if I moved to China and worked for a Chinese company - but that would never ever happen as no Chinese company would hire me on the basis of my Chinese simply not being good enough. Besides, even if I do speak the language, I am not familiar with the business culture in China at all given that I have never lived in China! More to the point, I can't tell you just how much I fucking hate the way people work such long hours in Asia, serious, fuck that. That is how much I fucking detest it - please, I am very happy where I am, thank you. So once and for all, can you all stop ucking telling me to deal with China!

You did economics whilst at school for A levels, did it come in useful for your work today? 

Absolutely not! It was just a fucking waste of time. Even though I did A level economics, the skills I use on a day by day basis were things I have taught myself as an adult, rather than things taught to be as a student in a classroom. I hate to be cruel but I earn so much more than my economics teacher. If my teacher was so great at economics, why did he settle for the humble life of a school teacher when he could've been making millions in finance? When I had to tutor my nephew through his A level economics exam and I realized I didn't actually remember anything from what I learnt back in the day but it didn't matter at all as I never relied on that knowledge to do my job well in any case. What I did was simply go through his syllabus and revisited all the relevant topics, so I could help him with his exams. You may as well have asked me, "did you learn to count to ten before you started primary school? You did? That is great, so that is why you're so good with investments today!" If you think that sounds fucking ludicrous, then it is an example of how people are desperately trying to link to completely unrelated events. They want to say "you're successful because you did this activity - therefore this activity is important and useful." You could even ask me, "did you brush your teeth everyday as a child? You did? That is great, so that's why you're so successful today in finance! You brushed youth teeth!" Yes I brushed my teeth everyday as a child, yes I have achieved success in the world of finance, but are the two events even vaguely related? Is there any correlation at all? No, there isn't. The same can be said about any and every part of my primary and secondary education. The fact is the vast majority of people do go through primary and secondary education the same way everyone learnt how to count to ten as young children and brushed their teeth back then, but it is absolutely ludicrous to try to establish any kind of meaningful correlation between what we did as children/teenagers and our success as adults. Depriving a child of primary and secondary education (say if they were refugees who had to flee a warzone) can have a detrimental effect on that individual's long term prospects, however simply giving them that basic primary and secondary education doesn't guarantee any kind of future success. No, you need to do a lot more than that as an adult if you wish to achieve great success in your career - especially in a field as competitive as financial services. 

You speak a lot of languages, do you use it to translate stuff for clients who don't speak English?

Actually no. This shouldn't come as any surprise but anyone who is educated to a degree level can speak some English - so it might not be totally fluent but it is rare to find someone who speaks no English at all in this day and age. If a Japanese company was dealing with a client in Italy, they would just default to English to understand each other and do the deal, even if neither parties happen to speak it as a first language or mother tongue. I ONLY work with highly qualified, highly trained, highly intelligent, highly educated people in my industry with no exception and thus the chances of me having to deal with someone who doesn't speak English is extremely low. I am not saying it has never happened before, but it is the exception rather than the norm. If someone doesn't speak English well, it usually indicates that they are not well educated and thus would be a waste of time. I know that sounds like a very anglo-centric view of the world, but it's often the case. My friend Emily is a social worker - she helps people with all kinds of disabilities do a lot of basic tasks that they are not able to do because of their physical and mental disabilities. Now in this case, Emily is helping those who are less capable and/or intelligent than her and earning a living that way - I'm sure her helpful and kind nature will earn her a place in heaven, but sadly she isn't being paid that much as a social worker. The fact is it is extremely hard to make money by working with those less intelligent than you because they are not rich and the fastest way to get rich is to work with those a lot more talented and/or capable than you - these people can either pay you a lot or teach you a lot (and in some cases, both). So take my Kenyan clients for example: they speak Swahili at home but the language of business in Kenya is English, I can deal with them just in English but I make the effort to speak Swahili to prove that I'm not just another guy from London trying to get their business, I stand out because I have demonstrated that I understand their local culture. I'm not speaking Swahili with them because they don't speak English - their English is actually native standard perfect. I am using my language skills to express my sincerity and respect, rather than facilitate communication because the real business is often done in English whilst building that relationship is done in the clients' native language. 

Oh I could go on and on with a lot more stupid questions that I've encountered over the years but I will now invite you to ask me any question that you want (stupid or not) about working in finance. What common misconceptions do people have about finance and banking and where do these misconceptions come from? Have you encountered other dumb questions from idiots, when it comes to your own profession? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.