Author: Philip Eade
Last November Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of Barclays Capital, announced that in addition to his role as chairman he would take direct responsibility for continental Europe, to “increase strategic momentum” in the region. The hiring of Alberto Francioni, an old associate from Rudloff’s CSFB days, was perhaps one of the more significant events after this announcement. Francioni comes with an impressive track record in fixed income, although he left ABN Amro in June 1999 in rather mysterious circumstances – he had only recently been appointed joint head of global markets, but says that he left of his own accord. “There’s no point in asking why,” he says. “They were private reasons.” The position Francioni now occupies at Barclays Capital is less senior to his job at ABN Amro, but he claims he was won over by “the commitment of the senior people to make things happen in a very fast way”. He says: “I’ve committed myself to putting Barclays on the map on the distribution side in continental Europe very quickly. It also gives me the fun of having client contact again – something I didn’t really have much opportunity for while running a big department at ABN Amro.”
Francioni was born in Zurich in 1958 and grew up in Brugg, halfway between Zurich and Basel. He played in the first amateur Swiss football league until injuring his knee.
While at the Swiss Commerce School he did work experience at Swiss Volksbank and then became a trainee in Volksbank’s stock exchange department, spending a year in London on placements at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and SocGen, then another in Paris working for a small broker. Returning to Zurich, he arbitraged foreign stocks on the Zurich stock exchange and executed bond orders for high-net-worth individuals.
In 1983, he moved to Bank of America in San Francisco, with the understanding that he would open its fixed-income sales office in Zurich. The success of this and the fact that one of its biggest clients was Credit Suisse did not go unnoticed by Rudloff (then deputy chairman of Credit Suisse-First Boston) – who not unnaturally wondered why his bank was doing so much primary business with a US bank. In 1986, Rudloff persuaded Francioni to join his syndicate team at CSFB in London.
Francioni became a director of CSFB in 1988, in charge of fixed income, working closely with Rudloff. Besides the charismatic Rudloff, the firm boasted excellent origination and distribution capabilities and was highly regarded by borrowers. It consistently led the league tables and pulled off several notable coups such as the $1 billion 1988 deal for Italy that revitalized the Euromarket.
In 1989, Francioni’s wife felt it was time he saw more of his young son, so he switched to become the deputy head of the foreign securities department at Credit Suisse in Zurich, taking over from fialter Koller. But it wasn’t long before Francioni realised this wasn’t going to suit him. “At the end of the day I had become too international,” he says. “ The pace in Zurich wasn’t what I was used to.”
He struck a deal with Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt that he would build their distribution and that they would send him to the senior executive programme at Stanford. At 34 Francioni, became the youngest to attend the two-month course (a prerequisite of which is 12 years’ management experience).
“Before Stanford, I couldn’t pinpoint why CSFB was so successful and why Deutsche Bank in those days wasn’t,” he says. “Stanford gave me the tools to explain what the corporate culture had to look like to be successful in this business. Investment banking is about taking risk in a smart way whereas in commercial banking you avoid risk – so how can you expect people to be of the same nature? That’s the biggest problem for commercial banks trying to be successful in investment banking.”
Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt meanwhile became more international by the day – a trend dramatically illustrated in 1992 by the $5 billion deal for the UK, which was originated by Abigail Hoffman in London. (Both Hoffman and Rainer Stephan, who was Deutsche’s head of capital markets in London at the time, are now also at Barclays Capital.) But when he felt the market was heading back to London, Francioni left to go to SocGen, becoming head of fixed-income sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. After 15 months he was hired by George Cornelisson to become global head of sales and research at ABN Amro. Cornelisson made it clear that if Francioni lived up to his expectations, he would succeed him as global head of fixed income – which he did very quickly after just four months.
ABN Amro’s fixed-income business was already on the up when he joined, and Francioni’s task was to continue putting together the various decentralized units that the bank had acquired, such as Alfred Berg, Cimo, Riada etc. The various initiatives Francioni helped see through helped ABN Amro become government trading house of the year in 1999.
Francioni returns to Switzerland each weekend and spends much of his free time skiing, collecting art deco furniture and trading the spirits market: buying and selling pre-1945 vintage cognacs; his oldest bottle dates back to the French Revolution.
