- Navid Mahmoodzadegan will replace Ken Moelis as CEO of Moelis & Co. in October.
- Mahmoodzadegan, whose daughter is also an investment banker, said banks should not haze staff.
- The 56-year-old said Moelis & Co. is "not fully there yet" when it comes to stopping hazing.
Navid Mahmoodzadegan, the incoming CEO of Moelis & Co., said investment banks need to change the hazing mentality some bosses adopt when managing junior bankers.
"When I was going through the ranks, there was a little bit of a hazing mentality to some of the work," Mahmoodzadegan told Bloomberg in an interview published on Wednesday.
Mahmoodzadegan, whose daughter is also an investment banker, said banks should remove "some of the excess out of that experience."
The 56-year-old cofounded the boutique investment bank with Ken Moelis in 2007 and is set to take over as CEO in October. Moelis, 66, will instead become the bank's executive chair.
To be sure, Mahmoodzadegan may be against hazing, but he still expects his staff to be diligent and intensely focused on their work.
"You can't be a high-performing athlete in any position on the athletic field if you're not working hard and pushing yourself a little bit," he told Bloomberg.
Working as an investment banker has long been associated with long hours and gruelling work schedules.
In May 2024, an investment banker at Bank of America died after working on a $2 billion deal. Former and current Bank of America employees told Business Insider then that junior bankers had to put in more than 100 hours a week at work.
Moelis and Co. said in March that it was ending its hybrid work arrangements and getting its employees to return to the office five days a week. A spokesperson for the bank told BI that the five-day RTO mandate would take effect in May and apply to roughly 1,300 employees.
Mahmoodzadegan told Bloomberg that the bank still had some way to go. Junior bankers at Moelis and Co. are given eight protected weekends a year, per Bloomberg.
"We've done some good work — maybe not fully there yet — in taking some of the hazing out of it," he said.
Moelis & Co. did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
Read next
Where Big Tech secrets go public — unfiltered in your inbox weekly.
