How the structured credit revolution started
Tony Best faces a daunting task. As European head of investor client management at JPMorgan, he is one of a select band of managers charged with putting the bank back in what it still considers its rightful place – at the very pinnacle of the structured credit business.
The task is made all the more challenging by the ghosts of JPMorgan past – a gilded generation of investment bankers who can take credit not only for making JPMorgan enormously profitable but, also, for the creation of an entire market. In recent years, most of that group have left the bank.
There was a halcyon period when the name JPMorgan was almost synonymous with capital markets innovation. In the years before and after the turn of the century the bank was responsible for a series of advances using credit derivatives and traditional securitization technologies that culminated in the creation of the structured credit sector. And that was arguably the biggest product market development in the financial services industry in the past 20 years.
JPMorgan is approaching the end of its second large integration since the turn of the century.