They're the junior analyst on a deal rather than a junior analyst, and the client and their boss expect the updates complete by tomorrow's meeting. The banks could certainly afford to train an extra analyst, but a lot of the work is drudgery updating single documents where it's easier to let one half awake person deal with it than divide it between two. Junior analysts don't usually push back on requests, and banks don't ask clients to wait a bit longer whilst they get things ready either.
The salary is high, but not more than two professional jobs for top grads high. They are eligible for bonuses though, and that carrot of six figure salaries is dangled.
> banks don't ask clients to wait a bit longer whilst they get things ready
To be fair, the clients are paying the banks tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for this work. And the work is time sensitive--a bond offering today may price differently from one tomorrow. Doing all this with reasonable working hours isn't impossible--it just requires a global, co-ordinated team.
"Why not hire more analysts?", you may ask. Well, who will pay for them? If you take it out of the senior bankers' pay, they'll quit. Start their own firm. People will work those hours, and they'll find them, and they'll take a bunch of their clients with them. If the house pays for it, shareholders protest. Why is ROE falling? Why are fixed costs so high when you had a dry year?
It's a collective-action problem likely only addressable by regulation. That or litigation.
> To be fair, the clients are paying the banks tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for this work. And the work is time sensitive--a bond offering today may price differently from one tomorrow.
I get that, even though though the closest I've come is having a banker struggle to keep it civil as I passed on the message that no we couldn't just fudge the asset valuation after the client admitted at the last minute they'd supplied us with an incorrect detail, and no our analysts were going to do it tomorrow, not this evening. But as they stood to earn four orders of magnitude more than we did from them and actually had more competition they weren't in the same position to tell the client that we weren't going to drop everything to rectify their error.
I thought the division of labour problem was more of an issue than a salary at the entry level though, not so much because a pitchbook can't be handed to a suitably qualified employee on a different continent to finish but because they don't trust that setup. Dividing the pie between more senior bankers is obviously going to cause consternation, but surely a few extra graduate analysts isn't going to dramatically affect Goldman's bottom line, especially if they can cut those entry level salaries a bit and still retain more?
The salary is high, but not more than two professional jobs for top grads high. They are eligible for bonuses though, and that carrot of six figure salaries is dangled.