Before we get going, if you’re a fan of podcasts you might enjoy this interview I had with State Street chief operating officer Lou Maiuri. The beginning talks about the acquisition of Brown Brothers Harriman’s Investor Services unit, but the second half is more a strategy/thought discussion about interoperability, linking acquired systems, and remote working. I thought it was quite interesting…maybe you will, too. (Here’s the Spotify link if that’s better for you: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3RxlT2wAnNOujZmpsUPyWF?si=b6e026f84e79486e)

Let’s get to it.

Wall Street’s largest self-made wall

A little more than a decade, ago, I met a PR contact at a bar on Stone Street in Manhattan’s Financial District. It was autumn. I was wearing a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers. He was dressed to the nines in a perfectly tailored black suit, sporting a tie, cufflinks, and a handkerchief.  

When I arrived, he said, “Glad to see you dressed up for me.”

“We’re at a shitty bar on Stone Street—what the fuck were you expecting?” I responded.

We laughed. A little later, we got back on the subject of clothing.

“If you dress professionally, professional people will treat you professionally, and they might open up to you more.”

“Buddy, I’ll let my charming disposition and questions speak for me. Who the fuck cares what I look like, so long as I write a good story,” was my retort.

Now, to be fair, he was right—first impressions matter. But if you don’t respect me at the start of a conversation because of the way I dress, hopefully you will after I open my foul mouth. And if you still don’t, I have only two words for you. At the end of the day, though, hopefully I’ll win you over with my talent.

The point that I’m trying to convey is that Wall Street likes clones. Dress well, offer a firm handshake, maintain eye contact. Exude confidence, if not outright hubris. And not for nothing, if you look at the senior ranks of most trading firms, the most coveted jobs are held by old, white men.

The meek shall not inherit that plot of Earth in lower Manhattan, my friend. Too often, if you don’t mold yourself within the cookie-cutter boundaries that Wall Street firms have constructed, you’re stuck on the outskirts. And I suspect it’s a major reason why innovation in capital markets technology has lagged the more “Silicon-Valley-friendly-esque” sectors.

Sure, corporate bureaucracy, regulation, and market-structure complexities are hindrances that are especially prevalent in financial services, but if you intentionally shrink the pool of talent available in favor of old-school norms, you eventually hit a ceiling.

Outside the box

A couple weeks ago, Reb Natale asked if I knew what “neurodiversity” meant. I did not. She explained that it’s a term used to describe someone with a variation in their brain that affects sociability, learning, attention, or mood. It’s an umbrella term used to describe a wide range of atypical brain functions, including autism and Asperger’s, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, obsessive compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome, among other conditions.

Reb was telling me this because she had spoken with chief information security officers (CISOs) at HSBC and Bank of America who had set up programs at their respective organizations to identify and help improve the work experiences for these individuals.

It’s not totally altruistic, though. What these CISOs have found is that some of the unique qualities of the neurodivergent pair quite well with jobs in cybersecurity, a sector that has a massive talent gap at the moment.

You can read the resulting story about those programs here, but BofA’s Craig Froelich attributes the rise in the number of patents his group has produced and had accepted to the bank widening its search for talent in this area. HSBC’s Jonathan Scott-Lee, on the other hand, has intimate insight into neurodiversity, as he has been diagnosed with both ADHD and Asperger’s.

“One of our suspicions is that people within cybersecurity are more neurodiverse than not,” he said, adding that “financial institutions use a lot of standardized testing to filter people out, so we suspect that cybersecurity talent is getting filtered out before they even come in to interview.”

Neurodiversity is different from the race and gender diversity issues that afflict Wall Street—much less those of us who simply have a lack of style, which is quite trivial in comparison—but what HSBC and BofA are learning is that by searching for talent that falls outside of traditional constructs, you can find talent for hard-to-fill roles, and people who bring new and different ways of thinking to problems, which can lead to unique solutions and new products and services.

Location, location, location

Beyond people who might not look, think, dress, walk, talk, and live like you, let’s address one more trend that’s taking shape all over: satellite offices, remote work, and the hunt for talent in this new world we live in.

But first, another story about me because my ego knows no bounds. I was a C-student in high school, and after a few years at the State University of New York (SUNY, pronounced soo-knee) at New Paltz, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, I was carrying a 1.8 grade point average, which is…uh…not good. While I may not be the brightest crayon in the box, my grades weren’t an accurate barometer of my intelligence. Rather, they had more to do with the fact that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I did know that I liked alcohol and pot more than studying.

To make a seven-and-a-half-year-long story short, I eventually transferred to SUNY Plattsburgh (an even smaller liberal arts school much farther upstate), joined the student-run newspaper Cardinal Points (our mascot is a cardinal…the bird, not the clergy member), and I fell in love with journalism.

Plattsburgh—otherwise known as PSU—isn’t the kind of school that has a placement program for graduates, and journalism isn’t exactly a thriving profession. I had better prospects than a drama student, but not by much.

Fast forward a couple of years, and a woman named Holly Sraeel took a flyer on me and hired me as a junior reporter for American Banker Magazine (then known as US Banker). I was a sports reporter and I knew next to nothing about the banking sector, but she saw something in me. It’s a story as old as time. Sadly, most people I knew in the PSU journalism program at the same time were not so lucky and no one took a chance on them…today, many of them are in fields that have nothing to do with journalism.

A little more backstory (I promise, I’m getting to a point soon). I was hired here at WatersTechnology after American Banker because one of my best friends—and fellow Plattsburgh alum—Oksana Poltavets recommended me for an opening as a senior reporter (or editor…I don’t fully remember).

Eventually, I became US editor and hired PSU alum Dan DeFrancesco, who would eventually go on to Business Insider (the dirty traitor!), and I recommended another PSU alum, Mike O’Brien, for a reporter position on a sibling publication at our company. As editor-at-large, I pushed for the hiring of Reb, a PSU alum. As editor-in-chief, I hired Nyela Graham after Reb recommended her to me. And just a few weeks ago, we hired Marissa Gilliard, another PSU alum, as an events person for WatersTechnology. She was also recommended by Reb.

We’ve built something of a pipeline for PSU alums here, but all too often resumes from graduates of no-name schools get swept to the side during the filtering process in favor of candidates who went to more prestigious universities. So my point is this: If you limit the schools—or any arbitrary parameter—from which you seek talent, you’re limiting your options. It’s simple math.

That was meandering, I know. Hopefully it also proved thought-provoking (at times). If not, feel free to tell me I wasted your time: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com.

The image at the top of the page is “Hunting near Hartenfels Castle” by Lucas Cranach, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s open-access program.