| Ed Annunziato | ||||||
Wearing a suit (as I thoughtlessly did) to a new online investment bank is, you might say, a case of wilful overdressing. For Ed Annunziato, having quit Merrill Lynch for Wit Capital Europe, chinos and polo shirts are now more the thing. “I had to go out and buy all new clothes to comply with the dress code,” he jokes. “The world is changing. It’s bad news for Brooks Brothers.” Nowadays, the only time he feels the need to dress “appropriately” is when he visits London brokers Cazenove, which recently took a 10% strategic stake in Wit.
Annunziato, a 45-year-old New Yorker, left a big job setting up Merrill’s private equity division. Previously he had been co-head of investment banking for Europe. Now he is without an office of his own (he’s in the midst of negotiating a lease) let alone a secretary. Yet in these internet crazy times, his move does not seem in the least bit surprising – certainly not to Annunziato himself. “Even at Merrill I always tried to do new and entrepreneurial things. This has a very similar feel to some of those things. I like to build things, I like to build teams.”
A former colleague thinks the new venture plays to his strengths: “He’s better at starting things up than anything else. He’s a First-rate strategic thinker, but working in a big organization he had to make compromises – he had to get people to tick the various boxes and couldn’t always enact his own business judgment.”
Annunziato began to get seriously interested in the internet last year. “There seemed to be an explosion of venture-capital activity in the technology and I just saw a lot of great ideas coming across my desk.” At the same time Merrill was reassessing its whole retail strategy in light of the internet. “So I understood very well what the impact of the internet would be on Financial services. I also had a group of friends who invited me to help them start a new personal Finances company online (Moneygator.com) – an aggregator of best-of-breed personal Financial services products, [providing] one-stop-shopping.” He became a director and an investor, and “very excited about the prospects”. He adds: “I went from being a casual user to being a fanatic on what the internet could mean for the Financial services business, and I’ve been basically advising everybody whose asked me for career advice.”
Recently he had decided: “I’d either go to Moneygator and work full time, or do something else. And then Wit approached me. It was almost the perfect thing; it combined my desire to be involved in the new and changing world of Financial services with my skill set as a banker and a manager of bankers. It was almost like the perfect opportunity at the perfect time.”
Annunziato was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1955, a “honeymoon baby”, nine months and three days after his parents married. His father ran a chemical company. He grew up mostly on Long Island, where he still has a summer house, and studied political science at Brown University, Rhode Island, graduating in 1977. Inspired, he recalls, by watching Perry Mason every Sunday night on television, he then went to Vanderbilt University to study law. In 1980, he got a job at Simpson Thacher&Bartlett, a law Firm on Wall Street, but soon discovered that “there were no trials, just discovery ad nauseam. Ultimately everything would settle”.
But if there weren’t any trials on Wall St, there was an explosion of M&A activity.
Annunziato soon became involved in challenging the constitutionality of the state takeover statutes, which were in conflict with the federal securities laws. First as a litigator, then in the corporate department, he spent much of his time as a young associate working late into the night on big deals “ordering Chinese food and proof-reading documents”. “Then,” he recalls, “I saw a niche developing in the Financial institutions area.
In 1983 the US had 50 different legal systems and banking systems, all separately regulated, but that was beginning to change. As the states entered into the same banking laws, you could see that there was going to be a huge amount of consolidation within the industry.”
So Annunziato began to focus on that area and developed his own expertise in the M&A group. “I specialized in that area as a lawyer until 1986 and then I was recruited by a number of banks.” In 1987, he decided to go to Merrill Lynch. “At that time Merrill was not a major player in M&A, so it was an opportunity to help build a practice.” By 1991, Merrill had risen to the top of the M&A rankings, and it occupied either the number one or number two spot for the next two years. It was a heady time in the US of real estate and Financial crises, and Annunziato worked on three of the Five largest government-assisted bail-outs of banks in American history – NCNB’s acquisition of First Republic, Chemical’s acquisition of First City Bank and Fleet’s acquisition of Bank of New England.
In 1993, Merrill had decided that developing its international business was “a major priority” and so Annunziato came to London to Merrill as head of international M&A. At that time Merrill was outside the top 25 in European M&A. “Our bold goal was to be in the top three by the end of 1998,” recalls Annunziato. “We missed that by one year and got there in 1999.”
Annunziato has become a committed Londoner, and a Chelsea football club season ticket holder ever since Ruud Gullit started buying foreign stars. “We love it here as a family,” he says. His children (12 and 15) go to the American School, of which he is a member of the board of trustees. “Professionally there’s no better place to be in the world right now, with everything that is going on in Europe, politically and economically, and the impact of technology on what’s happening.”
