Insurtech Corgi hires experienced investment bankers on commission only
No base salary shifts the entire bet onto the candidate, banking labour glut deep enough that seasoned bankers entertain salesman terms
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Buzzy insurtech Corgi is hiring experienced investment bankers — and offering to pay them nothing unless they close. The compensation is commission-only, no base salary, Business Insider reports. The company's cofounders rang the Nasdaq bell last year to celebrate the listing of Corgi's ETF, so this is a firm with a public profile choosing to staff its deal team the way a brokerage staffs a sales floor.
Two readings, both instructive. The first is about the bankers. After two lean years in dealmaking, the supply of experienced investment bankers willing to work for a percentage of what they originate says something about how deep the labour glut runs. A commission-only structure means the hire prices his own pipeline at zero guaranteed value — the employer's estimate of each candidate's book is, literally, nothing until proven otherwise. In a tight market, that offer would be laughed off the phone.
The second is about the employer. Fixed payroll is the cost a company carries because it believes in its own plan; commission converts that belief into a contingent liability carried by the worker. An insurtech that cannot carry bankers' salaries is an insurtech whose unit economics no longer support the fixed-cost version of itself — so it sells the variable version instead, and lets the hires discover whether the product works one deal at a time.
Skin in the game, taken to its endpoint, looks like this: the party with the most information about whether the deals will close — the company — has arranged things so it pays only when they do. The banker absorbs the dry months, the company keeps the option. It is a coherent structure, and it is also a confession: the fixed salary was the last thing on the income statement that assumed the future would show up.