George Cornelissen
Executive vice-president, global fixed-income and derivative markets, ABN Amro Hoare Govett
The Dutch are coming. More than 300 years ago that cry incited panic along the south coast of England as Dutch admirals, including Van Tromp (he with the broom tied to his mast to sweep the English from the sea) and De Ruyter, regularly ran rings round a tired and ill-equipped home fleet. Now the Dutch are here and like Van Tromp and De Ruyter are making waves. ING bought Barings. Dutch pension funds have been major buyers of prime commercial property in London. ABN Amro, rich and ambitious, certainly looked at SG Warburg and even more closely at Barings but came away empty-handed.
But ABN Amro isn't shedding any tears. Also, the bank had its hands full in London without having to go through the laborious "nursemaid" experience of managing the sensitivities of a newly-acquired foreign bank. ABN Amro was already in London. In fact, it was all over London, which was just one of the problems: it had three offices in the City.
Then there was Hoare Govett (acquired by Security Pacific in the mid-1980s and sold to ABN Amro in 1991) which was a consistent money-maker but was located in yet another office and operated with almost total independence.
Back in Amsterdam HQ, there were already plans afoot which not only would integrate the offices but also create a capital-markets operation based in London to take on the world. The architects behind the strategy to build a blockbuster bond house were Dolf Van den Brink, senior executive vice-president and a member of the management committee for investment banking and global clients, and George Cornelissen, executive VP and head of global fixed-income derivatives.
The plan, initiated only two years ago, was simple. ABN Amro already held a dominant position in guilder-denominated bonds with around 48% of the domestic market. Given its excellent skills in foreign exchange, options and futures, there was an opportunity for Cornelissen's group to develop a bond-trading and derivatives operation which would become one of the bank's largest revenue producers.
Certainly the ABN Amro Group has formidable in-house fire-power. The merger of Algemene Bank and Amsterdam-Rotterdam Bank had created a bank with assets of Dfl506 billion. It also has more than 1,000 domestic branches, another 627 branches in 67 countries and 65,800 employees. And just to add icing to the cake, the thrifty Dutch savers provide ABN Amro with a retail customer base which even Swiss bankers admire.
Having streamlined all of the bank's fixed-income operations into single reporting lines (offices and branches no longer compete with each other) the group is now a primary dealer in most of the major currency markets.
Cornelissen has also been waving the bank's ample chequebook to attract top capital-market specialists. Ian Abrams and Sam Berwick were hired from Nomura. Jonathan Greenwood was poached from Goldman Sachs to head syndication and origination. Christine Dare and a team came from Deutsche Morgan Grenfell to specialize in private placements and structured products.
The results of the Cornelissen plans are beginning to show. Recently ABN Amro Hoare Govett was ranked eighth in the league tables for new international fixed-income issues. And no longer is the bank perceived as solely a guilder house. This year it has been a lead manager for offerings denominated in Deutschmarks, sterling and dollars.
For Cornelissen, this has been a long ordeal by fire. The ABN Amro name had been seriously diluted in the Euromarkets during the late 1980s. "They almost disappeared completely," says a veteran trader from CS First Boston. Now, the bank's trading operations in London, masterminded by Dominic Hubble and Carl Holt, have made it a leading player in non-guilder securities markets with secondary trading volume in, say, Deutschmarks sometimes exceeding that of Deutsche Bank. Soon it will become a primary dealer in the US treasury market. "A natural extension, given our current trading volume in treasuries and the overall strength of the New York securities operation," says Abrams, now deputy managing director.
Cornelissen, 52, has spent his entire career with the bank. Colleagues applaud his instinctive understanding of the most complex ideas and the development of new financial instruments. Perhaps his expertise is drawn from his family trading roots (he began his ABN Amro career dealing in foreign exchange and Euro-deposits) which go back to Cornelissen & Van Droge, founded by his grandparents at the turn of the century.
The father of two teenagers, Cornelissen skis and plays tennis. And like many Dutch bankers, he is a lover of good food. Not only that - he's also a skilled chef. His specialities are French and Italian dishes. However, we have already booked ourselves in for his Dutch domestic dishes of hutspot, hete bliksem, blinde vinken followed by kaassoesjes.
Michael Phair
Co-head of telecoms corporate finance, UBS Turn the clock back five years. Look at UBS in London. Disorganization was the rule of the day before Rudi Mueller made his mark. There was a good treasury and foreign exchange business, an admired asset management operation and in international bond issues UBS was always there or thereabouts in the top 10 on the leader-board.
But where were the UBS investment bankers? "To be brutally honest, they simply didn't have the right people," says a managing director of a leading UK merchant bank.
But times change. Under Malcolm Le May as head of corporate finance, there is a new sense of urgency about the division. No longer are UBS investment bankers labelled as also-rans and no-hopers.
Look at the numbers for confirmation. In the first quarter of this year UBS was ranked first among financial advisers for UK public takeovers and mergers, according to Acquisitions Monthly. The bank was involved in five transactions valued at almost £4.5 billion. No doubt UBS will be delighted by that performance, especially in the intensely competitive UK market where domestic houses are reluctant to cede an inch of turf.
But the bank and Le May have broader international ambitions and more strings to their bow. After more than a year of negotiations, Le May has persuaded Michael Phair, 45, to leave NM Rothschild, where he was director in charge of corporate finance for central and eastern Europe and other emerging markets, to join UBS as head of telecoms banking. Phair is a prize catch. "We've had him in our sights for years but the feeling was that he would never leave NMR," remarks a senior executive recruiter. Certainly Phair enjoyed his eight years with the bank. "The atmosphere was always vibrant, intellectually challenging and fun," says the new UBS recruit.
For NMR the loss of Phair takes out a recognized deal-maker and originator from their front-line team. He joined the bank in 1988, initially developing its activities in emerging-market funds for Latin America. Then, as NMR sensed business opportunities in eastern Europe, he was chosen by Evelyn de Rothschild to spearhead that effort. Among the London banks, NMR and CS First Boston stole a two-year march on the competition in eastern Europe which they exploited to the full.
Despite Rothschild's notoriously tight-fisted budgets, Phair built a corporate finance and advisory business which, dollar for dollar, was arguably the best in central and eastern Europe. Business began to flow with deals including the first Polish bank privatization and the restructuring and recapitalization of Cesko-Slovenska Obchodni Banka.
When NMR advised MATAV, the Hungarian state telephone company, on its privatization, Phair immediately realized the growth potential in the telecom sector. Within three years NMR was involved in telecom assignments in Canada, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Moldavia, Hungary, France, Russia, the UK and Belgium.
Which were the most memorable deals? Phair likes to think that he "came within a hair's breadth of completing the capitalist society's ultimate dream" in 1995, when he was poised to privatize the telecommunications systems of Russia and Cuba. Looking back on that situation, Phair says: "I wonder what president John F Kennedy would have said?" In fact the Russian deal collapsed when the Russian government and the Italian government-owned STET failed to agree final terms on December 22.
Phair leaves NMR with an active calendar of deals outstanding. There are assignments for telecom deals in Russia, the Czech Republic, Cuba and Hungary. The globe-trotting Phair (he rarely spends more than three months a year in London) was born in Canada and served as senior representative for Toronto Dominion Bank's office in Mexico City before being head-hunted to become president of Banque Anval in Panama at the age of 29. No stranger to flying bullets and the sound of tanks in the streets, he can tell hair-raising stories about life in Latin America, including one about following in the wake of the Sandinistas in Managua to retrieve a deposit at the Nicaraguan central bank. A three-year spell with the IFC in Washington honed his skills as an investment banker and developed Phair's interest in emerging-market funds, an interest which finally caught the attention of Rothschilds.
Every inch the cosmopolitan investment banker, Phair is married to the stunning Margot from Argentina. At their London home in Notting Hill Gate, conversation with children Stephanie and Nicholas moves effortlessly between English, French and Spanish. Surely it's not possible that there could be a chink in this banker's armour as he prepares to move to UBS? Alas, it seems so. According to Margot, his German and Schweizer-Deutsch are "precisely zero".
Anders Bergendahl
Global co-head of debt capital markets, Merrill Lynch, London John McNiven is a tough act to follow. Step forward Anders Bergendahl who succeeds him as co-head of Merrill's hugely successful debt capital markets group in London. The position carries responsibility for all debt origination and liability strategies throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
In a market where cult figures are deliberately stiffed and acts of supreme bravado are preferably carried out behind locked doors, McNiven stood out like a beacon. The feisty, no-nonsense Australian, who has been described as "the only amusing person to come out of JP Morgan in the last 10 years", had a charisma that overwhelmed most competitors and colleagues.
Under McNiven's direction, Merrill powered to the top of the fixed-income league tables last year. As of mid-April this year, the bank was again back in the lead, narrowly ahead of Morgan Stanley.
Bergendahl's background is not fixed-income but investment banking. He has no lurid tales of times as a mortgage-backed trader or life on the Brady bond roller-coaster. Perhaps the nearest he came to being a true "bondy" was an interview at Kidder Peabody Securities, then the premier Eurobond trading house, in 1977. Kidder didn't offer him a job (thank your stars, Anders) and instead he went to Merrill.
Throughout his career at Merrill, Bergendahl has been closely involved with his native Sweden and the Scandinavian region. When, during the 1980s, the kingdom, the agencies and Swedish industrial companies were among the largest borrowers in the international capital markets, he became fully familiar with bond operations in all of the major currencies. Moreover, because Scandinavian borrowers were among the most receptive to innovative ideas, Bergendahl was involved directly in the marketing of new financial instruments and new funding techniques. He was also in the thick of the 1980s M&A boom when Scandinavian companies, particularly Swedish corporations, embarked on a buying spree in continental Europe and the US.
Can Bergendahl make the transition from investment banking to running the busiest capital markets house in Europe? He is remarkably self-assured. Much of that confidence stems from the backlog of issues in Merrill's pipeline. "It's not just the volume but the diversity across currencies, countries and types of borrowers which is the most encouraging," says Bergendahl.
When we mention Deutsche Morgan Grenfell as his main threat in the league tables, Bergendahl's lack of concern is almost disparaging. "We're several billion ahead already and I doubt they have the quality of our pipeline." Do league tables matter to him? "Of course, because they are part of the Merrill franchise," he responds.
Bergendahl is delighted with Merrill's performance in the Swiss franc and Deutschmark primary bond markets and hopes to improve its position in Eurosterling bonds. Although this sector is highly competitive and fiercely defended by the British banks, he sees the introductions and corporate contacts of Smith New Court as a valuable entrée.
Still only 44, Bergendahl enjoys skiing, sailing, jogging, squash and tennis. He is married with two young boys and two grown-up step-children. But what about the question everyone wants to ask McNiven's successor - related to those photographs of a smiling John in front of a gleaming Rolls-Royce Corniche with the totally unassuming number plate, MCNIV? What are Bergendahl's four wheels atttached to? "I did have a car, a very ordinary family car, but it was stolen and now I use taxis," he says. Surely the bank can provide him with a suitable limo? "The firm doesn't have a car scheme," he tells us.
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