There is a desire for change. There is a millennial generation that doesn't like what they're seeing, but doesn't quite know what the solution is.

I would point out is that most of the change over the past 5,000 years has been arithmetic, and it now logarithmic. Digitization, the whole Moore's law thing where it doubles every 18 months - that is a speed that is faster than most people are used to.

I worked at Drexel Burnham and DLJ, and then I worked at a financial conglomerate that had 60,000 people - there was a difference. But we went to the schools and said it's the same. The experience I had in 1992 is exactly what you're going to get in 2002.

Everybody is talking about synergies. You've got to take out every cost you possibly can. You have to position yourself as your services change.You have to think about in five years from now what is going to happen technologically to you. And then you do have to think about M&A or your balance sheet, and you have to think about everything in the context of, "Am I prepared to meet that challenge?".

The ability of people to reach their own news sources now, and create different views, is really unbelievable, and [populism] may be part of this.

I don't want to pick on Deutsche Bank, but I think the world of the regulated financial conglomerate, it is a strange thing. There is nothing in common between writing checks and running branch offices, issuing credit cards - those are good businesses, but they really have zero in common with M&A advice. They're a different customer.

We're a small part of this ecosystem. When we go to a school and talk about investment banking, they are these monster financial conglomerates, and so we end up in the same pot. That is still an issue for us.