UBS junior bankers pitch tech ideas to investment bank

UBS
bankers deliver their pitch at the innovation
competition
UBS

• UBS held an innovation competition last week for junior
  bankers in its investment-banking division. 
• Five groups of finalists gave their pitches to a panel of
  judges made up of senior bankers. 
• The winning team, known as Dal.ia, proposed using artificial
  intelligence techniques to automate some of the job’s more
  mundane tasks, such as building financials models and creating
  term sheets.

In a 14th floor dining room at
UBS’s New York headquarters last Friday, five teams
of 20-something bankers readied their pitch.

They weren’t presenting an idea for a takeover, or even trying to
win the right to manage some institution’s wealth,
but rather competing for a
chance to bring some fresh technology ideas to UBS’s
investment-banking division. 

The five teams had been selected
from a field of 11 that submitted ideas for the division’s
first-ever innovation competition. In all, more than 30 of the
division’s junior bankers participated, according to Sam Kendall,
who runs Americas investment banking at UBS and served as one of
the judges.

Events like these are taking
place across Wall Street as firms look for ways
to engage younger workers and source good ideas for bringing
technology deeper into investment banking. All of the groups
targeted “pain points,” such as the mundane and often rote tasks
on which junior bankers spend much of their days. These include
building financial models, creating pitch books or filling out
standard documents.  

Read more:
Here’s why Wall Street hasn’t had an innovation since
the ATM

“The knowledge is at the edge of
these organizations and you have to create forums like this to
hear it,” said Kendall, who has also introduced pizza lunches and
created a lending library on a shelf outside his
office to help foster communication and
outside-the-box thinking since taking over in March. 

The assembled judges included
Kendall; Damian Krauze, his COO; Bethany Ropa, a real-estate
investment banker; Lauren Surzyn, a banker in UBS’s data
solutions distribution and data sourcing business; and Vik
Hebatpuria, global head of fintech investment banking.

Other senior leaders also
attended included Robert Karofsky, newly named co-head of
the unit that includes investment banking and sales and trading,
and 
investment-banking chair Ros
Stephenson. 

The master of ceremonies for
Friday’s event was Barry Hurewitz, the COO of the research
division and one of the creators behind the firm’s Evidence Lab
product.
In his
introduction, Hurewitz offered his own advice for coming up with
the next big thing: start small, organize the exercise so its
failure isn’t catastrophic, gather data, establish data-driven
feedback loops to make the product better, and then grow from
there.

The teams gave it a try. They got
seven minutes to present, and five minutes to answer questions
from the judges. Each had a slick PowerPoint presentation to aid
their remarks, and they all tried to answer common questions:
What was the addressable problem? How did their solution solve
it? What were the costs of the project, both direct and indirect?
How long was the implementation timeline?

Timelines and cost projections among the groups were a little
erratic, with some getting closer to the likely mark than others,
though the judges pledged to look through such shortcomings. In
the end, UBS is likely to implement elements of each solution,
Kendall said. 

But by the end, there could only
be one winner: the group that proposed using artificial
intelligence to help automate some of the more mundane tasks of
investing banking.

 

The proud winners
UBS

Their solution, a family of
applications with the promise and power to develop term sheets,
would create PowerPoint presentations or financial models,
and eventually, write entire documents. The team had help from
Ronald Jansen, head of UBS’s Data and Analytics Lab, who joined
earlier this year after 13 years running a team of quants at
Goldman Sachs.  

The winning team gets more time
and money to work on the project, and an additional year-end
bonus.

The runner up, a group proposing
a mobile app for communicating investor orders to clients selling
equity or debt into the market, fell to No. 2 in large part
because another group in UBS was already working on a similar
project. Other groups proposals included a front-end dashboard
for UBS’s customer relationship management software, a predictive
calendar for planning corporate meetings at upcoming conferences
and an idea for tablets to replace physical pitch books.

To be sure, other Wall
Street firms are already building some of the projects that these
junior bankers are proposing.
Goldman has begun automating the IPO process, other
banks have book-build apps and machine learning is a hot trend
across the industry.

But more than anything, the
competition was a place where junior bankers could have their
voices heard, get access to senior management, and enjoy a chance
to think creatively, if even for just a couple hours of the
day. 

“If we can release time from
bankers to just think, sit there with a blank sheet of paper to
think about their clients’ problems,” Kendall said, “then maybe
we’ll move the ball forward a little bit.” 

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