Rafael Buenaventura, Governor, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas
In 1990, Lord Bridport, then a managing director at Shearson Lehman Hutton Finance (SLHF) in Geneva, began to wonder whether he could make a living in Switzerland as an independent fixed-income agency broker. He would, he thought, take no positions at any time, but simply attach himself to the investor, and "help him in the jungle".
We are sitting in the London house of Bridport's friend Tim von Halle, who recently gave up his job at WestLB in order to open the London branch of Bridport (awaiting SFA approval and due to start business in July). Bridport and von Halle's paths crossed a couple of years ago when von Halle wanted WestLB to buy Bridport. "We might well have done a deal," remembers Bridport. "We were growing too slowly, and we couldn't see what we needed to get to the next level." But it never happened, and Bridport suggested von Halle come and join him instead. "Although it wasn't immediately obvious," says Bridport, "I think the answer was most definitely that we could [attach ourselves to the investor]. Otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here today. When Tim came along, we felt super-comfortable," Bridport recalls. "He believed in what we were doing, and we said one day: 'Why the hell don't we do this from London?' - where for one thing the pool of talent is much greater."
Says von Halle: "There are masses of interdealer brokers, but there's no-one I'm aware of who is doing exactly what Alex is doing, with a seriously investor-led focus."
Gone shooting with von Clemm
Von Halle's ancestors on his father's side were Prussians - his father arrived in England in 1933 and set up one of the first German bank branches in London in the 1960s. Von Halle spent most of the 1980s with SBC and most of the early 1990s as head of syndicate at Merrill Lynch - from where he would regularly set off on shooting trips around the world with its chairman of capital markets, Michael von Clemm. "I've done the super-tanker approach now for 23 years," he says. "That's all fine and good, but with the advent of the euro, and the change in emphasis that banks are putting on the use of their capital in terms of supporting trading and sales and underwriting operations, now seems the right time to be putting the focus on the investor side."
Bridport traces his family back to famous English naval commanders, Admiral Nelson and the two Admiral Hood brothers. He was born Alexander Nelson Hood in 1948, the son of the third Viscount Bridport (and sixth Duke of Bronte). He grew up at the Castello di Maniace on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily. The estate had been handed down from Admiral Nelson, who, after the Battle of the Nile, went to Naples to take charge of the Mediterranean fleet (and also to fall in love with Lady Hamilton, the wife of the British consul). Despite having no mandate to involve himself in local politics, Nelson and his sailors helped put down a coup against King Ferdinand II and in recompense Nelson was given the Duchy of Bronte in 1799, together with some 30,000 hectares and a derelict 11th-century Norman castle run by Benedictine monks.
Alex Bridport's father inherited the property in 1937, just in time for Mussolini to confiscate it. In 1946 he went to Sicily and won a legal battle against the Italian government, who had sought to nullify the original deed of gift to Nelson. His father lived there and farmed fruit on its 2,000 acres.
When his father died in 1969, Bridport was already working for Kleinwort Benson in London. He struggled with the property for 10 years before deciding it could never pay for itself, and he sold it. The castle is now a museum and although his father is buried there he has never been back. "I will go back one day," he says, "but it was a painful experience to sell somewhere you've been brought up and loved, but it was just hopeless."
Bridport had joined Kleinwort after Eton and the Sorbonne, having been offered a job by his godfather, David Robertson, who was then a director of the bank. By the early 1970s Bridport was responsible for Eurobond underwriting, syndication and sales, and by 1979 he was the youngest senior manager at the firm. But once he had decided to sell the estate in Sicily, Bridport realized that he would have to leave Kleinwort and go to live in Sicily until the sale was completed. When it was, he went on a skiing holiday in Switzerland (Bridport has little interest in pistes, favouring "extreme" slopes reachable only by helicopter), where he met his first wife.
Bridport returned to banking in 1983, joining Chase Manhattan Bank in London as an executive director in charge of France, Benelux and European-based supranationals. At Chase Manhattan's London office he was responsible for the $1.24 billion syndicated loan to the European Economic Community on-lent to the Republic of France.
In 1986 Bridport moved to Switzerland to become deputy general manager of Chase in Switzerland, but left shortly afterwards - along with the majority of his team - to found Shearson Lehman Amex Finance, originally a joint venture between American Express and Shearson Lehman. Bridport managed the investment-banking division, whose activities included underwriting Swiss franc bonds. SLHF - as it became - was also at the forefront in Switzerland in developing hedged warrant issues for US companies.
After leaving SLHF in August 1990, Bridport took a year to write the business plan and raise the money that he needed to set up his own firm. Eleven external investors put up 51% of the capital, but by December 1997 Bridport was able to buy out seven of them.
Mechanics to the market
From the early days of the business, Bridport and his team had set about developing an in-house fixed-income analytical system known as Domino, which is used for cross-currency bond selection and institutional portfolio monitoring. It is also now used by Moody's and Standard & Poor's to monitor triple A-rated bond funds.