Morning Coffee: Ex-JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs bankers paid $150 an hour to ruin their old jobs. How to handle your associate at Centerview

If you left your job as a junior banker, it used to be that there were a few paths: private equity, corporate development, maybe even a hedge fund. Now, though, you can chuck it all in and earn $150 an hour writing AI prompts instead. 

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

Bloomberg says this is what disaffected young bankers from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have been doing. There is no shortage of them: 100 have been recruited by OpenAI to 'write prompts and build financial models for a range of transaction types, including restructurings and initial public offerings' as part of something called Project Mercury.

The ex-junior bankers are not proper employees at OpenAI. They are not earning the $1m+ pay packages that engineers at OpenAI get; they're not getting valuable stock. They're not even getting a salary. They've given up their $100k+ junior banker salaries and their circa $100k bonuses, and they're on an hourly rate instead. Given that average hourly pay for bankers at all levels was $112 according to our most recent pay survey, $150 an hour isn't bad. But nor is it good, when you consider that it's just a short term gig.

There's no going back. Once the 100 bankers have taught OpenAI's LLM how to build financial models, banks won't need them again. Nor will banks have as much need of similar juniors in the future. JPMorgan was already raring to cut junior jobs by two thirds and to shift jobs to India.  

In the meantime, the Project Mercury jobs don't sound hard to come by, but do involve an interview process. There's a 20-minute interview with an AI chatbot, a test of your knowledge of financial statements and then a modelling test. If you succeed, you can work flexibly (maybe even remotely) and will be expected to submit one model a week, which will be reviewed by a 'reviewer.' 

If it all sounds very impersonal, it is. If it all sounds like the death of junior banking jobs, maybe it's that too. In the meantime, ex-junior bankers are dismantling their former profession for a short term hourly wage, while AI's top technologists collect the upside. Welcome to the new world.

Separately, Business Insider has been combing through the court case involving boutique firm Centerview and a junior banker who says she needed eight hours sleep and that the bank didn't make it clear that this wouldn't always be a possibility.

BI notes that the junior banker - Kathryn Shiber - was staffed on an active deal called "Project Dragon." Shiber worked until 2am for a few days, until a fateful Friday, when she worked until 1am and then logged off without telling anyone. 

This was a cardinal error. Shiber's Centerview associate, Timothy Ernst, attempted to explain that this wasn't the way of the world. "When I was first starting and wasn't sure if I was done or not, I would always email/jabber my associate/analyst to make sure there was nothing else for me to be doing or if I was done for the night," he gently informed her. 

Ernst is still at Centerview. Shiber is not. Survival in banking means asking for permission to sign off, even at 1am. It's easy to see why banks want AI to do the work instead.

Meanwhile...

How the economy works now. 'NVDA receives money from MAG7, they give it to AMD and INTC and OpenAI and those guys come back and work with or buy from NVDA. This triggers more buying of tech stocks, which increases the US weighting in MSCI World, which forces global investors to buy more US tech, which increases the wealth of the richest Americans, and they spend like crazy...' (SpectraMarkets) 

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey says there seem to be eerie parallels to the financial crisis. Keep an eye on private credit. (Bloomberg) 

Ross Berger, a former Wells Fargo veteran, leads Jefferies' problematic Point Bonita Capital fund. When a reporter tried to talk to him about it, he said he was too busy and hung up. (Bloomberg) 

Lehman Brothers International Europe spent £667m on its employees from September 2008 until the conclusion of its administration on 7 October this year 2025. (Financial News) 

ExodusPoint has a pass-through rate materially below Citadel and Millennium. It's also done a good job of controlling headcount. Eisler Capital's costs went through the roof once it became a multistrategy hedge fund and charged pass-through fees. (RupakGhose)

Citadel's Kevin Mulhern joined Jain Global as a senior investor, based in New York. He's in the fundamental equities team focused on energy. (Financial News)

Private equity firms are deploying some capital. Blackstone and TPG have struck a $18.3bn takeover of healthcare technology company Hologic. (Financial Times) 

JPMorgan's tower has sensors which will know everything about everyone. "They'll know when you register for a conference room how you like the temperature, et cetera. They'll know when you show up at Starbucks in the morning or whatever other coffee shops we have, how you like your latte." (Business Insider)

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.