No surprises at the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development after the departure of treasurer Mark Cutis to Nomura. His successor is Marcus Fedder, the 38-year-old former deputy and a member of the EBRD's only profit-maximizing team since 1991.
Tall, thin, with youthful good looks, and the air of a well-behaved school prefect, Fedder was recruited by René Karsenti, EBRD'S first treasurer, now finance director general at the Euopean Investment Bank (EIB), on advice from friends at the World Bank.
Fedder's no-nonsense, problem-solving effectiveness helped Karsenti design the terms and conditions of the EBRD's first loan - a $50 million single-currency facility for a Polish urban-heating project. Despite a spread three times that charged by the World Bank, it has served as a blueprint for the bank's lending.
Fedder recalls: "The World Bank in those days was a one-product institution, but its currency mix (a third yen, a third US dollar and a third Deutschmark) did not always enable clients to best limit their risk. Our approach at the EBRD was investor- and client-driven from the outset."
Fedder set about designing the most sophisticated risk-management system in a supranational institution. Others, he says, including the World Bank and EIB, have followed the EBRD example. He developed products adapted to the needs of the bank's clients in eastern Europe and in 1994 oversaw the first borrowing in an eastern European currency by any foreign financial institution.
He's now in overall charge of EBRD borrowing in international capital markets (about Ecu17 billion - $19.4 billion), investing the bank's liquidity (some $9 billion), managing the asset liability, and dealing with financial risks of the bank's eastern European clients.
Few doubt that he is up to the job. "He's outstandingly clever," says one who has worked with him. "Intellectually disciplined, a problem solver, and an extremely reliable and loyal colleague - a man of high integrity." Another adds: "Technically, he's very good. As a former swaps trader, he knows the products well and has a broad synthetic vision."
Born in Hanover in 1959, Fedder studied politics, economics and English in Berlin. He then did a London School of Economics diploma in international relations, a master's at Cambridge, and a PhD on Nato strategy at Berlin, completed in less than a year.
Deciding that his future lay in international finance, he joined Deutsche Bank's trainee programme in Berlin, and in 1985 came to London to the bank's capital markets department, where he began specializing in derivatives, then a newly developing area.
In 1987 he moved to the swap desk of CIBC and in 1990 to the World Bank in Washington, advising governments on liability and debt management.
If he has a non-banking ambition, it is to go into politics - he's a self-styled libertarian. He also favours closer European ties. "I have to: my father's Dutch, my mother's German, my wife's French, and I live in England."
Married with three children, he is a cellist and a keen sports player - tennis, skiing and climbing. He claims now to have reached the summit of his ambitions at the EBRD. So what next? "Probably back to the street." Philip Eade