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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a former global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America and is now a managing director at Seda Experts
At a reunion of my old investment banking colleagues last month, almost 500 of us packed into a London hotel for a night that felt both familiar and surreal.
The whole thing brought to mind Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion, the 1997 comedy in which two friends (Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino) pretend they invented Post-it notes to impress old classmates. I was tempted to pull a Romy and Michele, but couldn’t dream up a sufficiently plausible fantasy career. So I told the truth and confessed to spending most days sleeping in late, walking the dog and curating my Spotify playlists.
I’ve attended plenty of school reunions but this one had a different vibe. For one thing, it wasn’t run by alumni relations, but by a former colleague determined to get us all back together. The ballroom was heaving; turnout exceeded all expectations. The deafening noise did not just reflect the acoustics of hard surfaces; it was the thundering roar of people reconnecting after years apart.
What also struck me was how familiar everyone looked. Nearly two decades had passed in some cases, and yet most faces were instantly recognisable. Thanks to diet, fitness and self-care (natural or otherwise), many looked better than they did years before.
This disciplined approach extended to the open bars, which were lively but civilised. It was a sharp contrast to the boozy events of my early banking days, where too much wine meant getting cornered by a spittle-flecking storyteller. It’s fashionable to complain that modern professional life has grown too prim and proper but I can’t say I miss being trapped by a City bar bore.
Wading through the crowd, I realised most people hadn’t strayed too far from their old paths, making modest course corrections rather than wholesale mid-life reinventions. Some had moved from bulge bracket banks to boutiques or crossed into venture capital or corporate roles. A few had joined government or multilateral bodies, always with a financial remit; several now split time between consulting and board seats. One ran a vineyard, another taught in a school, but the vast majority still traded on the same skillset, just in new settings.
Not everyone had left investment banking by choice. The 2008 financial crisis remains a defining fracture, shattering several senior careers, even for those with no hand in the trading losses. Some successfully reinvented themselves and flourished; others simply figured they’d been lucky to get as far as they did.
Reunions rarely deliver epiphanies. They hold up a mirror, letting you glimpse your former self. We hadn’t come to fabricate success stories, but to acknowledge old connections and enjoy them on their own terms. Showing up as ourselves was enough. Time changes us less than we think and the evening reminded us of what endures.
Nostalgia was in short supply. A few reminisced about an old deal or office mishap, but most talk was forward-looking: What are you doing now? What’s next? We were no longer colleagues so much as case studies, comparing notes without competing.
For this crowd, success had evolved from net worth to “personal yield.” How were we using our freedom? Many spoke of mentoring, philanthropy or creative pursuits; others of ultra-marathons and other feats of endurance. The evening turned into a kind of life audit — a collective sense check of how we were spending our post-finance years. I alternated between relief and embarrassment at how little I had done compared with my peers. I’d thought we had all moved on from ambition, but in truth we’d simply stopped competing for the same prizes.
The highlight of the reunion was the charity auction, which included a one-on-one writing workshop with me. (Yes, I know, but it wasn’t my idea, it was for a good cause, and bankers can’t resist this sort of thing.) The knockout winning bid, to my surprise, came from my old boss, whose calls I had not always been returning in recent years.
As I was leaving, he caught my eye, pointed at me, and said with a grin: “Now you have to pick up my calls — whether you like it or not.” He rang me the next morning, and we ended up having a long chat.
As the evening wound down, people swapped contact details and promised to stay in touch. But will we? Our lives have long since diverged due to new priorities. Yet for one night, we were back in the same room, reminded of who we once were and how, despite everything, that person isn’t so far away.
