- Robin Vince decided to quit Goldman Sachs after 26 years.
- He took a gap year and did not accept any job offers.
- Vince later joined BNY, one of the oldest banks in the
Having a back-up plan when it comes to their career is an essential part of a professional's life. But, sometimes, things fall into place without any effort.
At the age of 48, Robin Vince decided to quit his position at Goldman Sachs. He walked away without any other job offer. The day the news broke, the one of the oldest banks in the US, BNY, came to him with a job offer. However, Vince refused their idea and decided to take a “gap year”.
In an interview with CNBC, Vince has finally opened up on what made him consider a gap year and why he initially turned down BNY.
Now the Chief Executive Officer of BNY, Vince said he took a gap year so that he could explore what he wanted to do next. He decided that he could not step away from being in the “thick of it”, which led him to back to the bank's offer.
He revealed that he joined Goldman Sachs just after university, calling the workload “intense”. He said that decades later, he wanted to get back to markets and other things he had been closer to in the first part of his stint at the brokerage.
Vince revealed that BNY said he could join after six months if he wanted a break and offered him “any job” he wanted. However, the ex Goldman Sachs executive stuck to his decision to take a year off without any backup plan.
While he received advice from all quarters, one suggestion that stuck with Vince was to do something he would enjoy. At the same time, he was speaking to BNY executives during his year off. He later accepted their offer. Vince later became the CEO of the bank in 2022.
In a separate interview to Bloomberg, Vince said he was an “AI optimist”. He called artificial intelligence a “revolutionary technology that has to be well managed.”
The BNY CEO said that AI was a “superpower” and a “capacity creator” that would help the company do more things for clients, improve products and achieve more.
Vince admitted that there was a lot of doom-mongering around artificial intelligence and no one could predict how things would actually turn out years later.
Vince gave the example of stable hands and people who ran horse and carriage businesses and explained that while they might not have been happy with the invention of the motor car, they also could not have predicted that new professions and trades would be built around the vehicle. He said that there were now more jobs, just different ones which had evolved.
