Richard Boath

Richard Boath seems to have lots of friends and no enemies. He is also seen to be a very creative banker. Some say that when he left Salomon Brother’s London office (along with 10 others) in the spring of 1999, he set off a chain of events that eventually led to his old firm buying Schroders. “When he left,” recalls a former colleague, “lights started flashing in New York.”

One of the reasons that Boath left Salomon was his frustration at the restrictions on the development of its investment banking. After he left, Michael Klein and Edward Miller were parachuted into the London office to sort this out. After a few months Klein apparently concluded that the firm, part of Citigroup following the merger of Citibank and Travelers, the owner of Salomon Smith Barney, was not going to be able to develop a leading European investment banking business organically. Hence, so the causation argument goes, was born the decision to go for an acquisition.

At Salomon, Boath had looked after banks and building societies, specializing in regulatory capital, designing securities with the characteristics of preference shares. In 1995 he came up with the groundbreaking permanent interest bearing shares (Pibs) for Leeds Permanent Building Society. A forerunner to many of the other instruments that Boath and his team went on to develop, the deeply subordinated Pibs were effectively bonds for tax purposes and equities for regulatory purposes.

Shortly after this, when the corporate finance team led by the mercurially brilliant Bruno Gabriele (later tragically killed in a car crash) defected en masse to Lehman Brothers, Boath was asked to transfer to investment banking and step into the breach. “As well as being a very smart banker,” recalls the former colleague, “Boath was seen as someone with genuine management skills, a great team builder and motivator. He can think laterally and solve a problem but he can also inspire others to do so for him. He evokes great loyalty. The other thing about him is that he really does understand how banks work. He can sit down with the chief executive of a bank and talk knowledgeably about strategy. When he left Salomon there was only sadness.”

Richard Boath was born in Harrogate in 1958. His father worked for chemicals company ICI. His mother was a former Miss Manchester. He went to Oakham School and then read management science at the University of Manchester Institute of Science&Technology (UMIST) under professor Rowland Smith, a well-known corporate doctor. “Professor Smith’s big thing was marketing,” recalls Boath, “and although I had no idea what I wanted to do as a job, I did think I wanted to do something to do with marketing.”

He was all set to join the marketing department of food and households goods conglomerate Unilever when the recruiters from Bank of America visited the university campus. “They were giving away free food and beer,” Boath recalls. “That just didn’t happen in those days. There was a queue of 500 students waiting to get in.”

Boath joined Bank of America in 1980 as an account officer in corporate banking. In 1982 he moved to Security Pacific to do corporate loans. When Security Pacific bought Hoare Govett in 1984, he started doing syndicated loans and swaps. In 1988 he moved to Merrill Lynch, where he joined the financial institutions investment banking group, and from there, two years later, he, Charlie Berman and David Karat were headhunted to go to Salomon Brothers.

His transfer into investment banking in 1995 meant that he now ran the financial institutions corporate finance group, comprising some 30 people, doing M&A and equity offerings in addition to the transactions that he had been doing previously.

From Salomon he went to Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette, which was expanding into Europe, but when DLJ was bought by Credit Suisse First Boston last year, he decided to leave rather than accept the job then offered to him.

During his three months of gardening leave he walked the Inca Trail in Peru and watched his nine-year-old son Freddie perform his role in the Hollywood film The Mummy Returns.

Now, he says, “it’s nice to be back at work”, adding that he’s “very compelled by the strategy and the people”. At Barclays Capital, Boath has responsibility for the debt capital markets group run by Abigail Hoffman, the securitization team headed by Allen Appen and the transaction management team run by Hanne Marrot-Poulson.