We meet in a nondescript Costa Coffee shop. She orders a cappuccino.
“Banking is not bungee jumping but it is living on the edge. There I am with six guys in a room, all smarter than me. These people get it, they know all there is to know about a given subject and they know how to talk about it. Especially for maths nerds banking is great. They are not athletes yet banking lets them compete in a similarly exciting context. With their brains.
“My job meant I got to see the top players in action, without actually being part of the team. It makes you look at the world differently sometimes. I had excellent relationships with the senior bankers but that doesn’t mean I can’t see the truth either. They’re not necessarily nice people. It’s the nature of the job.
“I worked for a number of major ‘tier 1’ investment banks for 10 years. Late 2006, early 2007 almost every conversation between financial journalists and bankers came to the question: how does this end? Everybody was vaguely aware it couldn’t carry on forever. But nobody expected us to fall off a cliff.
The public feel a lot of anger at investment bankers. Why only at them? How about retail bankers who gave huge mortgages without asking for proof of income? And the people who lied to get a mortgage? You can be very critical of the big banks while acknowledging they are not the only ones to blame.
“Top bankers live in a different world. And they don’t suffer fools. This is the 21st century. Top bankers today are nuclear physicists, maths PhDs, top experts in their fields. The public image still seems that of ‘barrow’ and ‘city boys’ traders; loud and crass blokes from Essex. Sure, they exist. But at the top it’s a different breed. This is part of the problem: people there are so smart, analytically I mean, that they have lost sight of what normal people think and feel.
“A major bank is a massive animal. We had 1,000s of people in our London bank alone. Yet often only one person could talk intelligently and on the record about a particular niche. That’s how specialised it has become.
“My job basically consisted of talking to journalists all day, usually over the phone. Or I was being briefed by people in the bank. Then I’d be the most junior by far. And the only woman. When there’s an issue of some sort, I don’t generally get called in until they’ve decided what they want to do. The version I hear might be sanitised. There are a lot of things I don’t know. I don’t want to know as sometimes knowledge can make you less persuasive. This is as it should be. They make up their mind, then call on me for a specific service; getting something in or keeping something out of the press.
“To do a job like mine right you must be able to find information or sources in the bank really quickly for journalists. Credibility is all. Top bankers expect to be understood immediately, it drives them crazy if they have to talk to people who don’t know their stuff.
“I must also have a clear picture of what could interest a particular journalist. You can’t just call one up and say, hey I have a great story. You need to package your pitch. Generally if a journalist bites you must answer their first three questions or they’ll lose interest right away. Again it comes back to knowing your stuff.
“It’s a fascinating game. Sometimes I want publicity for stories, other times journalists come to me for quotes, verification or background information. Then I might tell them: ‘well, I could possibly hook you up for 10 minutes with a top guy, off the record.’
“The dynamism of it all: Ten calls an hour from journalists; can you check this? What’s that about? Can I talk to someone in area x? And all the while you must be absorbing the world around you, taking in as much info as you can.
“Senior bankers become really nice to us just before and after they get promoted to the level where they are allowed to talk to the press. Suddenly they realise that we have the power to put them in front of journalists authorisation to speak to journalists can be another status symbol.
“When journalists are given access to bankers it’s always under clear guidelines; we have the right to check and remove quotes. There are grey areas. Some journalists will tell you something is off the record but still put it in without directly attributing it to you, so technically it isn’t a quote. A good PR officer knows which journalists do this so we can warn the banker.
“You will not believe how easily many bankers get complacent with journalists. Is it an ego thing? Carelessness? Good journalists know how to do this. Get chatty, create a relaxed atmosphere
“It’s different with very senior bankers. They would rather kill their mother than go to an interview without a PR person. We act as witnesses and set the rules. Before the interview we will agree on the topics. If a journalist veers away it’s my job to step in: ‘Nice try but he’s not gonna answer that.’ Or even better: ‘He can’t answer that but let me try and hook you up later with someone who can.’
“Vague questions are traps: ‘So how do you justify all the money the bank is making?’ Then I interject: ‘I’m sure it would be really interesting to have a wide ranging discussion on issues of morality but we’re here to talk about the potential for major deals in emerging markets ‘
“After the interview we ‘clean the quotes’. Remove anything that, when taken out of context, could damage the bank or make the banker sound stupid. Often what they say in person doesn’t come across as well when they’re quoted. It’s about making sure that the quotes make sense in context and that if there’s something that could be misinterpreted, it’s removed.
“Those lower in the hierarchy always want to talk to journalists. Some think being quoted helps with the rankings, or with recruiters. Or maybe talking to journalists gives them a sense of power or self-importance? The 25-year-old who almost desperately tries to slither away, mumbling: ‘I am meeting a journalist tonight but you don’t have to come.’ To which I reply: ‘Oh yes I do.’ It’s a beginner’s mistake. They need to learn that no matter how nice the journalist is, he is not your friend.
“When somebody has spoken to the press without authorisation there can be a disciplinary hearing and they can be fired, or disciplined. Sometimes it’s more subtle. One time a senior trader took a call from a journalist, pre-crisis. When asked what it’s like to work in London he passed the phone to a trainee who without thinking talked about the Ferrari, the flat, the restaurants
“That senior banker had his promotion delayed by 12 months. There was the banker who had a habit of talking to the press without permission. He ended up on the front page of the FT. ‘But the journalist said it was off the record,’ he said. Yeah right. This guy never got promoted.
“At least in my bank enough people have been disciplined by now for unauthorised speaking to the press that it hardly happens any more. You have to be careful. A junior banker gives a speech at a conference. He puts in a small flippant comment without realising there are journalists in the audience who can blow this up to ridiculous proportions.
“How do we find out that bankers have spoken to the press without authorisation? There are external agencies that monitor the media for us. We flick through those. You can pay extra for summaries which is great because financial coverage can be ridiculously boring and time-consuming. Sometimes people in the bank send you stuff; look at this.
“Reputation is a bank’s core asset. And there are regulatory issues about what we can and can’t say. Also, the bank has a strategy which its communications must match. Say, a desk has done this great trade for an insurance company and they think other insurers might be interested in one, too. So they call me: can you organise industry press coverage? But the bank has decided this type of product is not part of its core offering or they don’t want to publicise it because of the reputational risk. The trade gets buried in a small story to a specialist journal. This can make bankers very unhappy.
“People in investment banks say they understand you have a family. But they expect 24/7 availability. And since everybody is only judged on results, not on how they achieved them, the most demanding people are the most successful. I could tell you crazy stories about people being dragged from the toilets, from hospital, from holidays. A colleague would get a call at 2am from her boss in New York: send me X right away! So she says: I already sent it to you. Reply: Well, whatever, send it again.
“Investment banks burn through people, but there’s a logic to it. If you can’t take the pace or the culture you’re not going to last. Some of those people just don’t get it and are probably resentful afterwards. Others probably are happy to go off and do something different. Open a restaurant or a BB or sail round the world, whatever.
“At some point I had an appointment with a doctor, a highly private matter. But I had to tell my assistant where I was and how to contact me because if there was a problem, my manager had to be able to track me down.
“The thing for PR people is, you cannot let journalists’ calls go to voicemail. They may have a story that only works if we don’t immediately debunk it. Now if they get voicemail they can say: ‘Bank X could not be reached for comment.’ And my bank gets savaged in the press. This is why our phones never ever go to voicemail.
“Quite a few journalists go to work for banks, that’s true. Why? There’s better pay, sure. But it’s also because journalists have no idea what they’re in for. Sometimes I would come across one who had gone over to our side and he’d have this shell-shocked look. The first six months they are like, what the f***? They had no idea because bankers were always really, really nice to them.
“Some financial journalists can be a bit naive about how much they know. We are very careful to ensure our people are media trained so they only give journalists what they want to give. And the guys with really good intel won’t speak to journalists in the first place. They won’t even speak to me. They’re the ones who know where all the skeletons are.
— Guardian News and Media Ltd
