When Google Gets Its Revenge on the Almighty Financial Industry

Anglo-Saxon media are already saying that this is the transfer of the year. We’re obviously not talking about a football player transfer, but about the transfer of Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer to Google.

This is no simple transfer for the economic press; this is the sign that we are in the midst of moving from one era to the next and that yesterday’s almighty financial industry is giving way to the Silicon Valley business stars. Today’s leading industry is no longer related to the banking or financial sector. No. It is made up of the Internet-based companies and those linked to the digital revolution.

Of course, this type of transfer is not the first of its kind; other similar transfers have already taken place before, like Twitter’s financial officer who also comes from a bank, namely Goldman Sachs. Even Snapchat’s chief strategy officer is from Credit Suisse, all of which goes to show that this transfer movement from the finance sector to the gems of Silicon Valley already began a few months back. However, as observers have highlighted, this transfer to Google is impressive, since the chief financial officer from Morgan Stanley was with the company for 27 years!

Many people are happy with this change. Why? Because for years, the brightest brains, often the engineers and mathematicians, used to head straight for the finance sector, which was in need of math whizzes, particularly for the management and creation of complex financial products. For the engineers, it was a way of making money much more quickly than they would if they were to apply for an industry-related job.

Incidentally, numerous persons used to complain that, instead of propelling an industry considered to be a useful sector, the brightest brains used to seek refuge in the finance sector – a sector whose turmoil caused the crisis that we are still going through today.

This symbolic transfer from Morgan Stanley to Google is a form of revenge on the almighty financial industry. Besides, today’s brightest young graduates want to launch their own startups or work for one of them, not land some bank job in the private sector, so much so that a very large London bank built its new headquarters in the spirit of the Silicon Valley businesses, with entire open-space floors, dotted with areas to chat or have a coffee with colleagues. As a result, these user-friendly floors are constantly squatted in, and young graduates are never found at their desks. This little world then becomes merrily mixed up to the point where it sometimes causes problems for the bank, since bank rules impose “Japanese walls” between some departments, just to avoid conflicts of interest and without taking into account that the younger generation works differently than the older generation, and at different hours, which is something difficult for human resources to manage in the banking sector. This is yet another sign that the financial world of our parents has had its day.