Bank of America wants its European clients to
feel important. It's head of global markets Arrington Mixon's
job is to make them feel that way. At least on the debt side
of the business, where she is overseeing the bank's current
push into European markets.
"Being in Europe now reminds me of the US in 1991," she says.
"We're not very big and everyone is together on two trading floors
in the same building."
Unfortunately that building is in one of the least salubrious
parts of the City of London - Aldgate - but for the moment the bank
doesn't exactly have clients beating a path to its door. Bank of
America languishes in 27th place in league tables of bond deals for
European issuers so far this year.
Early next year, the location at least will change as Bank of
America moves into a new tower block on Canary Wharf. It's Mixon's
hope that by that stage the bank will have established a decent
customer base too.
Formerly head of syndicated finance for Bank of America based in
Charlotte, Mixon moved to London at the beginning of the year to
take up her current role.
She began working in the syndicated finance group in 1991, and
helped build the division from a five-person operation to one with
400 employees. In 2000 she was named co-head of leveraged finance.
Before her stint in the loans business, Mixon worked in Bank of
America's Chicago office, managing its relationships with large
corporates. In total she has been with the bank for 20 years,
having joined it in 1982 and survived through the various mergers
in its past.
Mixon admits she was a little apprehensive about taking up her
new position in London. "When I looked at who my management team
were going to be and saw no-one had been here for more than two
years I thought it was going to be a bit of a culture mix," she
admits. But she claims that team spirit is in fact plentiful and
there's no "star culture" at Bank of America.
She's confident that this will help the bank to build out its
European operations without too much expense. "You're not going to
see us hiring whole teams of people," she says. "We'll be saying
here's a spot, let's fill it with the one right person."
It also took time to get a handle on who the major market
participants are in Europe. Soon after arriving in London, she was
talking to some managers about a deal Bank of America was pitching
for. "I asked them who we were up against," she recalls, "and when
they told me I was like 'that's who we're up against?'"
The business heads quickly filled her in on the fact that the
two banks in question were actually two of their biggest
competitors in Europe.
The aim of the exercise was to compile lists of target clients
in each country - often those for whom it is important to have a US
flavour - and identify potential inroads to them. "If we just go
out and try to get 1,000 clients, those clients are not going to
feel as if they are really important to us," she explains.
It's a boon for Bank of America that these days the key to a
corporate's heart is often hard cash. It has plenty of it and Mixon
isn't shy about making the most of that asset. While the bank was
able to shrink its loan book when it was building its investment
bank in the US, she recognizes that the same is not true in Europe
where house banks are still an important influence and where the
bank doesn't have the same breadth and depth of experience.
"We're going to do what it takes to win clients and we will use
our balance sheet to help them," she says. "But we're also saying
to them 'do you know we have these league table places in the US,
we have these distribution capabilities and here's who we've been
hiring'." As a result, she says, "You're suddenly a bank they want
to talk to.