There aren't many real ex-rocket scientists for hire, but another area investment banks might look at is nuclear engineering - a skill that's becoming less sought after these days. Merrill Lynch's affable new hire Dante Roscini spent five years designing nuclear power plant before dwindling enthusiasm for the nuclear industry prompted a rethink. After business school he ended up at Goldman Sachs in 1988.
His timing could hardly have been better. After two years as a generalist in New York, he was assigned to the European equity capital markets department (ECM), which had been created in the mid-1980s by Eric Dobkin. Roscini's move to London coincided with an explosive growth in European privatizations and other equity issues. In 1990 total European equity issuance amounted to $4 billion. Last year it was close to $100 billion.
Goldman's ECM was in the thick of this business. Specializing in southern Europe, Roscini led several breakthrough transactions, helping to introduce US-style equity underwriting and distribution techniques to continental Europe. He led the $1 billion flotation of Credito Italiano, Italy's first privatization and the first deal in the world to involve a negative yield bond.
He went on to lead what was then, at $3.2 billion, the largest IPO in the insurance sector for INA in 1994, and two years later, for the same company the largest Euroconvertible bond issue, totalling $2.1 billion. In addition he led, among others, the largest Portuguese equity offerings for Electridade do Portugal I and II and all five privatization offerings from Spanish oil company Repsol (raising over $5 billion). Roscini was appointed an executive director in 1992, chief operating officer in 1995 and co-head of ECM in January 1998.
Roscini combines good technical knowledge of financial structures and procedures with an instinctive feeling for the market. His friendly demeanour belies a fiercely competitive edge - he's not one to sit back and wait on events, and when provoked he can become tough. But he is generally, it seems, a pleasant person to work with. According to Carmelo de las Morenas, chief financial officer of Repsol, Roscini possesses the "perfect combination of the Anglo-Saxon business approach - thrift, seriousness and so on - and the Latin science of knowing how to deal with people. In that sense he's very rare."
Other clients say he excels at understanding a company's strengths and weaknesses, and at suggesting the best way of gaining the confidence of shareholders without compromising fairness and transparency. He is particularly alive to the fact that different business environments demand different styles of presentation. One chief executive remembers discussing a forthcoming roadshow for an issue in New York. The CEO suggested a low-key speech. "No," said Roscini. "That may be how to do it London, but in New York they expect you to sell your company."
Clues to Roscini's adaptability can be found in his childhood. He was born in Perugia, Italy, in 1958. His father was an engineer, his mother a schoolteacher.
When he was nine his father was posted to Lausanne by oil and gas group ENI, and from then on all Dante's schooling would be in French (the family moved to Lyon three years later). It is still the language he and his brother use with each other. After school, Roscini came close to staying on in France but studied nuclear engineering at the University of Rome.
This was 1975. "I'd always had a great interest in nuclear physics," he recalls. "And at this time it looked like nuclear power was going to be the thing." Roscini's professor, Sebastiano Sciuti, remembers him as a brilliant student - he gained the highest marks of anyone in the engineering faculty for many years. "He was very fortunate because he loved everything," remembers Sciuti. "Not just science, but also literature and art. I was very impressed by the young man. He was out of the ordinary."
After graduation, Roscini began work as a nuclear engineer at Italian industrial holding group IRI, which had a licensing agreement with Westinghouse in the US. His English - acquired during summer holidays in the US - soon put him in line to act as liaison between the two companies and learn the business in the US.
On his return to Italy, he was put in charge of a team to design and construct the main components for the Italian pressurized water reactor programme. But by 1985 he sensed that opinion in Italy was turning against nuclear power, and decided he'd like to do something else.
After graduating from Harvard Business School, his first instinct was to become a management consultant, but a friend at Goldman persuaded him that he should at least consider finance. Goldman was the only bank Roscini talked to, and in due course he became the bank's first Italian associate.
Away from banking, Roscini's interests include golf, but he's using his gardening leave mainly to spend time with his journalist wife and two young children in the London suburb of Barnes, to catch up on his reading and to travel.
When he starts at Merrill in April, he will, he says, be aiming to help the bank expand its equity capital-markets business in Europe. "I see a tremendous opportunity, because this market will continue to grow at a very fast pace and Merrill is already a leader in European equities. I think its global/local strategy is the right one. Its worldwide distribution is remarkable and it has in place all the elements that are instrumental to success in the European primary equity business." Philip Eade