Barclays has been in New York some 150 years but only recently has it begun to make any real headway in investment banking. This year, the American office of its investment banking arm has pulled off several notable coups, among them funding the First successful hostile take-over in the US utilities industry, with a $600 million loan facility to Finance the acquisition of Columbia Energy by Nisource Inc, the largest utility in Indiana.
| Griffin: three-year expansion plan | ||||||
Now Barclays Capital has appointed its First permanent head of investment banking for the Americas, a well-respected and experienced banker by the name of Robert Griffin.
Griffin, a veteran of Bank of America and before that Continental has had success in several different areas of investment banking.
According to Thomas Kalaris, CEO of Barclays Capital Americas, he represents “an ideal leader who will enable us to greatly accelerate our origination capacity”. In Griffin, Barclays has certainly recruited an enthusiast. “I just couldn’t be more excited about the values and brand image and ability to do business here,” he says. “I Find the team atmosphere and the desire to Find solutions and to push the business forward to be unparalleled in any organisation I’ve been involved with.”
The son of an attorney, Griffin was born in 1948 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up there and in south-western Ohio. He was keen on baseball, basketball and football but his real forte was golf: he was golf champion of Miami University. On graduating in 1969 with a business degree, he considered turning pro but after marrying decided that a steady income from banking might be more the thing.
Griffin took a job with Continental Bank in Chicago but was soon combining this with service in the National Guard in Louisiana and studying for his MBA at the Kellogg Business School at Northwestern University.
In Chicago he worked for Continental as an account officer for small Chicago-based businesses ranging from fresh fruit suppliers to small chemical companies. In 1974 he moved to Continental’s New York office where he was soon a relationship manager handling clients such as RCA, Zerox and GTE.
Still in his twenties, Griffin led a team and was promoted to vice-president after his bosses took note of his well-organized analytical approach, his talent for marketing and his ability to take advantage of oppor-tunities.
In 1979, Griffin left Continental to work for one of its clients, DWG Corporation, a family-controlled company that held strategic stakes in a number of other companies, and whose offices occupied the same building as those of Continental at 277 Park Avenue. DWG was highly acquisitive at the time, and as vice-president and treasurer Griffin handled all its external Financial relationships with investment banks, lenders and stock exchanges.
After seven years, Continental lured him back and he returned to Chicago to take over the asset-based lending business, leveraged Finance and real estate department. By 1994, when Bank of America bought Continental, Griffin was running a third of Continental’s corporate banking business with a “very eclectic” set of responsibilities.
After the merger he ended up in charge of loans syndication and trading as well as Financial sponsor coverage. In 1997 Bank of America consolidated all of its global debt-capital- raising activities which included loan syndications, high grade and high yield origination, private placements, asset securitization, project Finance and offshore investment banking. Griffin was appointed group executive vice-president to run the division.
Following BoA’s merger with Nationsbank, Griffin took charge of the Financial sponsors group with responsibility for global coverage of large and middle-market private equity Firms, helping them raise acquisition capital and equity finance as well as providing them with M&A advice.
At Barclays Capital, Griffin says his First priorities include taking “a quick yet studied look at our business and coming up with a three-year plan to expand dramatically. We have a very good client stable of issuer types, but my early view is that we can get a lot more out of our corporate client base,” he says.
