I worked in Hong Kong because I couldn’t get a job in New York

Getting an investment banking internship or graduate job in New York requires a lot of forward planning. If you’re unlucky or just late to the party, you could try for an off-cycle internship or take a chance on opportunities abroad. An ex-Morgan Stanley analyst who did the latter revealed on a podcast this week that it can be a very bumpy road.

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Hannah Zhang worked in Morgan Stanley’s Hong Kong office from 2016 to 2019, first joining as an intern. Speaking to ex-JPMorgan analyst Ben Chon (aka Rareliquid), she said she worked in Asia “because I couldn’t get a job in New York… by the time I realized I wanted to go into investment banking, it was already junior year and a lot of the recruiting pipelines were filled up.” Recruiting for US internships generally starts in the first year of university but Europe and APAC recruitment starts a year later, so roles in Hong Kong, Singapore or London would all be available.

Zhang initially joined in sales and trading, but said that the sector “pigeon holes” you more than IB because “you don’t have quite as many transferable skills [or] exit opportunities.” Chon said that Asia is colloquially known as the “slaughterhouse” for investment banking jobs, which Zhang said “resonates a ton.” 

Zhang said she kept a list of all the reasons why she wanted to quit. In her worst ever day(s), she said she worked 25 hours overnight to deliver a pitch deck only for the meeting to be pushed to next week the morning after. Zhang said she had to “decipher [her] MD’s chicken scratch handwriting in Chinese on a piece of paper” at 3:00am, and turn comments left in WeChat voice notes.  Some of this no doubt resonates with New York analysts, but Zhang said that banking jobs in Asia are more hierarchical, with more “unspoken rules and etiquette” as well as the need to have a “bilingual version of everything.” 

Today, Zhang works in fintech at blockchain infrastructure firm Allium. While she still works a lot of hours, she said that the amount of work was not really the problem: “the work just wasn’t impacting anything… that’s what got me at the end of the day.” Indeed, ex-bankers who leave for fintech frequently tell us their jobs are even more intense post-banking,  but they seem happier.

Zhang has been out of banking for a while. In that time jobs got easier, then even more intense. Dealmaking in Hong Kong slumped in the early 2020s, as did working hours, but last year it saw a massive increase in activity that has spilled into 2026. Reuters reported last month that Morgan Stanley made the unusual move of bringing in contract investment banking staff in Hong Kong to help it deal with that workload.

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