Morning Coffee: How to make $1m talking about financial services on LinkedIn. Citi's head of London is leaving. 4 hours ago Many are the people who want to work in investment banks, electronic trading firms and hedge funds. Few are the people who actually do. If you have the good fortune to be in the latter category, the Financial Times suggests a new way of earning $50k a week has presented itself: becoming an influencer on LinkedIn. LinkedIn influencers are nothing new and have long been ridiculed on sites like Reddit for the vapidity of their niche. But times are changing and the FT has found people who say that LinkedIn has shifted its algorithm "from a feed that historically was all about your network and is [now] increasingly about the topics you're interested in". This apparently means that the site is now like "YouTube in the early 2010s, TikTok in 2018" and that brands will pay €50,000-€250,000 ($56k-$280k) sponsoring videos featuring trusted people. These brands include AI tools and customer relations platforms. These people include a marketing advisor at FedEx sharing career tips, and a software engineer at Airbnb, one of whom claims to have a "low seven-figure business by revenues". Sounds great, except banks aren't keen on people putting themselves out there on social media while still employed and the world is littered with people purporting to be other than they are, suddenly pulling their accounts after being found out, or making themselves into an influencer and then finding it's hard to get employed. Such things are better left to retirement, or to Jon Gray, president of Blackstone, who probably doesn't need the sponsorship anyway. Separately, Tiina Lee, Citi's chief executive officer in the UK is leaving the sort of regulated 'coupon-cutting' job that pays a lot and can make you richer than a LinkedIn influencer if you keep your head down and all goes well. The Banker reports that Lee stepped down after three years. She is doing so around one week after saying that Citi is committed to the UK even if the British government increases the surcharge on banks, which has now happened. Last year, Lee described her high pressure childhood as the child of immigrant parents in Hampstead and said she was overseeing the construction of Citi's new London office with a winter garden. As the official regulatory 'SMF1 Chief Executive' for Citi's London entity, Lee was personally accountable to regulators, and could have faced unlimited fines if found responsible for failings, or even prison in the event of a reckless decision that caused the bank to fail. There is no suggestion that this was a factor in her decision making. Now that the winter garden is open, maybe she decided there are better places to hang out. Meanwhile... There were tears as the chairman of Weil Gotshal revealed that the firm had exhausted its options and could be dissolved but now senior people at the law firm are being plagued by a "feeding frenzy" of recruiters. Young people are being paid for 90 days. (FT) JPMorgan will pay additional taxes of between £100m and £150m as a result of the corporation tax surcharge hike announced by John Healey in his budget. (Sky) ING is cutting 400 jobs in its wholesale banking unit. It is deploying AI "not only to save on costs, also to be able to enlarge the scalability of the growth."(WSJ) Marshall Wace will now have to disclose the emails its executives Anthony Clake and Alan Hofmeyr sent when they were recruiting credit portfolio manager Daniel Shatz from Citadel. (Bloomberg) Carlos Fernandez-Aller, co-head of global fixed income, currencies and commodities macro trading at Bank of America, says: "The market is very fragile - any small mishap can cause a continuation of the unwinds that we saw. We are running a relatively small amount of risk." (Bloomberg) Leopold Aschenbrenner of Situational Awareness is inviting people to invest alongside him in neocloud startup FluidStack. It's raised $830m so far. (Bloomberg) 32-year-old Australian Josh Payne wants to IPO his AI data centre business NScale for $30bn. "He's a tremendous dealmaker," says an early investor. Bloomberg says Payne's previous career includes an unprofitable Bitcoin mining operation, a failed special purpose acquisition vehicle and some investment firms with no identifiable portfolio or track record. (Bloomberg) Absa's got a new Dubai office. (Bloomberg) Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn. 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 [email protected]. 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Citi VP joins Marshall Wace as trader. Individual spent six years at the sell-side firm, where she worked across both analyst and vice president roles in market and electronic equity sales trading. Marshall Wace has appointed Violaine Ferrandez as a trader, based in London. Ferrandez joins the hedge fund manager after having previously worked on the sell-side, most recently as a vice president, electronic equity sales trader at Citi. She initially joined Citi in 2020 as a market analyst, and during her six years at the firm has also served in an assistant vice president position. Citi and Marshall Wace had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. Recently, Citi's global head of research Lucy Baldwin departed the firm in May 2026 to lead global equities at Rothschild & Co. She had previously spent five years at Citi, based in London. The TRADE > News > Buy-Side > Balyasny Asset Management brings Google Gemini into AI research platforms Balyasny Asset Management brings Google Gemini into AI research platforms. The integration will allow BAM's analysts to carry out high-volume document ingestion and complex multimodal financial analysis. Balyasny Asset Management (BAM) has collaborated with Google Cloud to deploy Gemini models into BAM's proprietary AI research platforms. The partnership will enable analysts to leverage Gemini's specialised capabilities for quantitative work, including rapid analysis of large financial datasets, high-accuracy document retrieval and cost-effective performance. BAM currently operates proprietary internal applications, such as BAMAgent, to streamline research workflows and orchestrate specialised AI models and agents across more than 80 internal databases and market feeds, which in turn can use Gemini to synthesise financial research, earnings transcripts, and live market data. Both firms have also confirmed that the new offering is integrated with Google Cloud's secure infrastructure and Gemini's strict data isolation, to ensure the asset manager's proprietary trading data and strategies remain confined to the private cloud environment. "Across our investment practice, different research tasks demand specialised model capabilities," said Charlie Flanagan, chief AI officer at Balyasny Asset Management. "When our research agents evaluate thousands of market feeds simultaneously, model speed, retrieval accuracy, and cost efficiency are critical. Gemini delivers the throughput our analysts need for high-volume document search, as well as the multimodal reasoning required to analyse complex financial charts and corporate disclosures." Both BAM's applied AI team and Google Cloud are set to continue their collaboration over the coming months, with developments expected in early access programs and testing upcoming Gemini models to enhance AI performance. Speaking to The TRADE in 2024, Flanagan explained that establishing and enhancing AI-focused education is key to successful implementation across the industry. "If something is working really well in one team or one vertical within the firm it then becomes about translating that. It's never a direct translation but taking the lessons about the AI technology that's working well somewhere and then adopting it somewhere else allows The Trade to achieve more scale within the firm. "[...] At the end of the day, before trust comes education. It's about helping folks understand where these models can add value right now and where they can't."