A Q&A with Will Hannaford, CEO, on why the widest age range on a desk might be its biggest advantage, and what firms are getting wrong about the handoff.

You're seeing something interesting in the teams that are performing well right now. What is it?

The teams I find most interesting hold the widest range of ages, and the firms pulling ahead have stopped treating that as friction. They're treating it as leverage. On one side you've got graduates who've never worked a market without AI tools and real-time everything. On the other, senior traders and bankers whose instincts were built across rate cycles, credit events, and at least one crisis most of the floor has only read about.

The obvious read on that is a culture clash, younger talent wanting flexibility, older talent wanting presence. Is that what's happening?

That's the usual take, and it misses the point. In markets, the value of a mixed-generation desk isn't harmony, it's knowledge transfer. A 26-year-old's fluency with new tools and a 50-year-old's memory of how a market actually breaks aren't in competition. They compound. But only if the desk is built for it.

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If it's not a culture problem, what is the real risk?

The real risk is quieter than a culture clash. It's that institutional memory walks out the door as senior people retire, and nobody notices until the next stress event. The people who traded through 2008 or the 2022 rate shock carry pattern recognition you can't learn off a screen or train in a graduate programme. Lose that, and you don't find out until you need it.

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So what are the firms getting this right actually doing differently?

They're not enforcing sameness. They're designing for the handoff, pairing junior and senior deliberately, and making the transfer of judgment part of the job rather than a happy accident.

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If you had to sum up the takeaway for firms building desks right now, what would it be?

Hiring for a single generation is easy. Building a desk where four of them make each other better is the harder, more durable thing, and it's the one that actually pays off when markets turn.