The rise of the AI funding banker | USAEMALL.com

One thing to start: Paramount is willing to strike a deal to resolve President Donald Trump’s $20bn lawsuit against CBS News, after the studio’s owner, Shari Redstone, grew “concerned” about the network’s balance in recent months.

And another thing: Greensill Capital’s administrator has filed a lawsuit against its founder Lex Greensill and six other former directors of the failed financial firm, adding to the legal challenges facing the Australian financier.

In today’s newsletter: 

• Your new AI banking analyst

• The ‘Goldman of the Tropics’

• Goldman’s John Waldron on tariffs

The AI chatbot coming for analysts’ jobs

Junior bankers are notoriously overworked. 

A new start-up is hoping to change that, but it might also put the 20-somethings out of a job in the process.

Rogo, an artificial intelligence start-up developed by former Lazard analyst Gabriel Stengel, aims to automate some of the grunt work that fills the days of junior investment bankers.

The chatbot that Rogo has developed can assess a company’s market position and pull basic valuation comparisons.

It’s already been deployed at investment banks Moelis and Nomura, as well as investment firms Tiger Global and GTCR.

Stengel said he’d spend days as an analyst at Lazard triangulating research reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission to calculate a “peak sales” valuation ratio. Rogo can now do that in minutes.

In its latest funding round, the start-up raised $50mn from a group of investors led by Thrive Capital, valuing it at $350mn, up from $80mn four years ago.

The world’s biggest banks and trading firms are already spending billions of dollars on AI applications.

At JPMorgan Chase, employees have access to an in-house large language model, while private capital firms have their own AI models to assess buyouts.

“We’re training reasoning models that think like investors and investment bankers,” said Stengel. “You run these big experiments to see, hey, can we be as thoughtful as a partner at Tiger Global? Can we be as thoughtful as Blair Effron at Centerview?”

So, is it time to say goodbye to the humble analyst?

The verdict’s still out. Some bankers think AI tools will eventually allow Wall Street banks to cut the number of entry-level positions. Others think they’ll free up banks to work on more deals, meaning more hands needed on deck.

For now, though, MDs will still need someone to call at 3am when they discover that their PitchBook uses Times New Roman instead of Garamond.

‘Brazil’s Goldman’ wants in on commodities

Latin America’s top investment banker, André Esteves, has taken Brazil’s BTG Pactual from its roots in dealmaking and the trading floor to become a diversified lender worth $30bn.

His next ambition for the institution once nicknamed the “Goldman of the Tropics”? To beat the world’s biggest commodities traders at their own game.

The 56-year-old former bond trader wants to make the São Paulo-headquartered bank “one of the main global players in the sector”, capitalising on his country’s status as a leading exporter of agricultural produce.

“BTG can provide for its clients a service from the farm gate to delivery to a Chinese buyer, or an Arab buyer in Abu Dhabi, or in India,” BTG’s chair told the FT’s Michael Pooler and Michael Stott in his first media interview in six years.

It’s a typically daring move by Esteves, a Rio de Janeiro native who’s among the most influential business figures in the South American nation.

The computer science and maths wunderkind became a self-made billionaire before the age of 40 by selling BTG’s predecessor Pactual to UBS in 2006. He then bought it back for about the same amount three years later during the global financial crisis.

Famous for an aggressive and risk-taking culture, BTG has grown corporate banking and digital retail arms, alongside roughly $330bn under management across its asset and wealth management divisions.

BTG — who some like to joke spells out “Better than Goldman” — remains majority-owned by its partners, vanishingly rare for a 21st century bank.

This model has helped Esteves amass a fortune of $6.9bn, making him Brazil’s fifth-richest person, according to Forbes. He’s known for his top-level contacts in Brasília and the brutally long hours he works.

Yet the banker’s meteoric ascent almost fizzled a decade ago.

Arrested in connection with a sprawling corruption scandal at state-owned oil producer Petrobras, Esteves was forced to step down from executive roles at BTG.

He spent three weeks in Rio’s infamous Bangu prison — home to hitmen and drug traffickers. But he was cleared of all charges in 2018.

Esteves’ comeback was sealed with a return as BTG’s chair three years ago. His grand plans for the group also include expansion in the US and Europe, where it now has banking licences.

John Waldron’s Labor Day wish

The old summer cliché on Wall Street is “Sell in May and go away”. In 2025, with a trade war raging, the credo may be “Wait for Labor Day and pray”.

That sentiment was encapsulated by Goldman Sachs president John Waldron who told the FT that the “bull case” for investors “is that we don’t have to debate trade after Labor Day, and we have across-the-board lower reciprocal tariffs and reduced non-trade barriers”.

Waldron has plenty of reasons to hope things are smoothed over by Labor Day (the US public holiday that this year falls on September 1). 

That could give investment banks such as Goldman some time to salvage a year that started with so much optimism but has been derailed by economic uncertainty from the impact of Donald Trump’s policies. 

The US president is in the early weeks of a 90-day pause to many of the sweeping tariffs he had announced on April 2 to negotiate new trade deals.

Waldron, widely viewed as Goldman’s most likely next chief executive, said the market was “hyper-focused on those early trade deals”, which could set the tone for how investors view the White House’s tariff policies going forward

“Whatever emerges from those trade negotiations we hope will be pretty definitional. It may or may not be bullish, but it could serve as a template,” Waldron said.

Waldron said financial markets were “normalising albeit with more concern about the growth forecast” following a frantic start to April before Trump announced his pause on most of the tariffs.

He said companies were holding off on making any major alterations to their operations until they could see what the result would be from the ongoing trade talks. 

“Most people are making no changes because they are thinking, in 90 days you will know more,” Waldron said. 

Job moves

• Brightstar Capital Partners has named Marcelo Claure as partner and co-chair. Claure founded Brightstar Corp in 1997 before leaving in 2014 to become chief executive of Sprint. He currently leads Claure Group.

• Millennium Management has hired Steve Schurr, a senior equities manager at Balyasny Asset Management, reports Bloomberg. Schurr’s background includes work at multiple hedge funds, and before that a spell as the FT’s hedge fund correspondent. He’s credited with coming up with the name for the FT’s Alphaville blog.

• Matthew Newton, a London-based managing director and head of communications for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Goldman Sachs, is leaving after eight years at the bank.

• White & Case has hired Henry Birch as a partner in the firm’s global M&A and private equity groups. He joins from Kirkland & Ellis, where he was a partner.

• Moelis has appointed Jeff Hammer and Paul Sanabria as managing directors in the firm’s private funds advisory team. They previously headed Manulife Investment Management’s secondaries unit.

Smart reads

Entertainment machine Ticketmaster owner Live Nation has built a controversial events empire that touches every facet of the live entertainment industry, the FT reports. It now faces a DoJ case that could set the tone for antitrust under Trump.

White House Inc Donald Trump’s crypto enterprise has blurred the boundaries between private business and government policy. The New York Times charts the rise of World Liberty Financial.

A smart listen How did David Solomon reassert control over Goldman Sachs? The FT’s Joshua Franklin went on the Behind the Money podcast to explain DJ D-Sol’s resurgence, and who might succeed him as chief executive.

News round-up

UBS, Barclays and SocGen reap trading windfall from market turmoil (FT)

Shein explores US restructuring as tariffs threaten to derail London IPO (FT)

Microsoft vows to protect European operations from Donald Trump (FT)

Equinor weighs suing Trump administration over ‘unlawful’ halt to wind project (FT)

Private acquisitions strip more than $1tn from European equity markets in a decade (FT)

Airbus chief warns there will be ‘only losers’ from prolonged trade war (FT)