Financial & Economic Blog

JP Rangaswami recently posted a series of interesting Musings on Facebook and Financial Services here, here, here, here, and here. Well worth the read - it is detailed, thoughtful, and thought provoking.

In his post from the airport today, he had the following table from the Financial Times and the following comments about it:

It listed a number of investment banks and showed the percentage of staff on FaceBook. The top five looked like this:

Goldmans 5510 employees or 19.7 per cent
Deutsche 7636 employees or 11.3 per cent
Lehmans 2951 employees or 10.4 per cent
UBS 8101 employees or 10.4 per cent
Morgan Stanley 5689 employees or 10.3 per cent.

My thanks to Financial News for the research.

It’s been a long nine months since I left investment banking, and much may have changed since then, it is a volatile industry. But when I left it, people like Goldmans were not known to employ large numbers of unintelligent time-wasters.

When one in five Goldman employees use FaceBook, it makes you sit up and think.

I accept the numbers may be flawed: they may include contractors, duplicate aliases with legitimate mail addresses, whatever.

Even if I discount the figures by 50 per cent, they remain formidable.

I haven’t the time to do the research now, but my gut feel is that the FaceBook usage league table looks remarkably similar to the M&A league tables.

Relationship before conversation before transaction.

Social Networking is not going away, and I don't see it as a bubble either.