BONUS: JP Morgan Co-Head of Global Banking Filippo Gori

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.
This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, what a fascinating conversation. Filippo Gori is co-head of Global Banking at JP. Morgan. He has started in London and eventually moved over to Hong Kong, where he worked for 13 years before coming recently to New York. He's seen just about every aspect there is when it comes to commercial, corporate, investment banking around the world. I thought this conversation was quite fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, JP. Morgan's Filippo Gori.

**Filippo Gori** (0:51)
Thank you for having me.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:53)
I'm fascinated by the mispronunciation of your name, Filippo Gori. Did the people in Hong Kong really think you were Scottish or Irish?

**Filippo Gori** (1:03)
At the beginning, when I just moved to Hong Kong, people were surprised when I arrived there, because the way they pronounce my name and surname, it sounds more like Filippo Gori. So they were expecting an Irish or a Scottish person, then they had an Italian, so they had to adjust to that.
That's very funny.

**Barry Ritholtz** (1:22)
So let's roll a little back before Hong Kong. You get your Masters of Science and Economics, summa cum laude, from, is that Bocconi, or University of Milan.
Was markets and investment banking always the career plan?

**Filippo Gori** (1:37)
No, absolutely not. The plan, well, not that I really had any plans back then, but my passion was and still is history. So my idea was I was gonna, I grew up in rural Tuscany, and I'm the by-product of the Italian state education. So you have, you take your high school exam at the age of 19, and then you apply to university. So in the three months between finishing high school and deciding where you go to university, I thought I was gonna go and study history in Florence.
But my dad, who has been a central figure in my life, he suggested to me, why don't you apply to Bocconi University? I didn't really have an idea what it was, and I only knew it was in Milan. And maybe more to please him, I took the test, and I went on with the rest of my holidays, summer holidays, and then I got accepted to Bocconi, and I decided to go there, but with no real plans back then.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:51)
Well, you mentioned you were thinking about going into history. You taught classical civilization in the UK. Tell us, was the academic career ever in the cards?

**Filippo Gori** (3:05)
Yeah, so when I finished with Bocconi, I thought I was going to do a... I graduated in economic history, and I thought I was going to do a PhD in that topic. Back then, there was a rule whereby you are not allowed to move from master to PhD straight away. You need to work for a couple of years, and then you apply for the PhD. And therefore, it made sense to think about, okay, you know what? I'm gonna remain in academia as I start thinking about the dissertation that I will work on for my PhD. And therefore, for a variety of totally strange reasons, I ended up as a teacher in North Yorkshire in an English college teaching. Italian as a foreign language and a classical civilization too.
And then by pure chance, I stepped into the opportunity to apply to JP Morgan, and I applied to JP Morgan, and kind of I've never left since then.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:11)
That was London in 1999?

**Filippo Gori** (4:13)
Yes.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:14)
So first, you start, did you start in markets or in asset management or banking?

**Filippo Gori** (4:21)
I started, that's a very good question. I started in a graduate program back then. So I joined JP Morgan pre-merger with Chase. It was a tiny, back then, global institution of around 15,000 people globally. Think about it, now we have 330,000.
We had lost the cover of the AAA rating back in the middle of the 90s. And it was a bank that was trying to find its roots back. So we were not one of the five broker dealers. They were the shining objects of the era. We were probably a tier two, or if not tier three institution back then. And I joined in a graduate program called Internal Consulting Services. The idea was they were hiring the most diverse people with the most diverse of the backgrounds, and somebody like me, to work on a variety of different things, including the internet, which was something that was coming to be back then.

**Barry Ritholtz** (5:26)