Were it not for a meeting in Hong Kong on Boxing Day 1993, eFinancialCareers might not exist.
John Benson and Angus MacDonald, eFinancialCareers’ founders, met at a post-Christmas party for English expats on a beach in Hong Kong. It was more about cricket than dancing, but the two realised they had rhythm.
“eFinancialCareers has always had its own character,” says Benson. “It’s always been professional, fast-moving, free-thinking. We were always on.”
In the pre-internet days, the two men were publishers. McDonald had started Edinburgh Financial Publishing and The Estimate Directory (TED) and Benson joined him as Director of Asian operations in 1996. Angus moved back to London, John followed him a couple of years later after they had sold TED to Reuters.
The internet was in its nascence. “I saw a web page for the first time in the mid ’90s and was amazed and enthralled by it,” says John. “I think that because I had a publishing background, I could see how it could work really well. In those days, you had to apply to a man with a long beard somewhere in America to register your URL.”
McDonald was already running a print version of Financial News and Benson joined as managing director. “We were a buccaneering team in a tiny, airless office,” says John. “This was the peak of the dot-com boom and we wanted to move online. We came up with two distinct ideas: eFinancialNews and eFinancialCareers.”
eFinancialNews was news and eFinancialCareers was jobs, with jobs-focused news. At the time, the Financial Times was the place for recruitment advertising. “The naysayers would say, “The FT will wake up and eat your lunch,” says Benson. “It never did”.
eFinancialCareers survived the dot.com crash. It survived the financial crisis. In the 2000s, it was like “riding a rocket ship,” says Benson. In 2025, things are more sedate, but eFinancialCareers is a light of transparency for financial services professionals and a critical partner in financial services hiring and branding.
Benson and MacDonald are still close. “He’s my son’s godfather,” says John. “Angus is a change-maker. You need people like that in the world.
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