| Chip Kruger | ||||||
No more international fire fighting for Chip Kruger and Gary Holloway. The two men, who stepped down as co-CEOs of NatWest’s capital markets business Greenwich Capital in March, have now gone back into business together. And this time they’re keeping it small.
They were two of the more high-profile, and certainly two of the most respected, executives to leave NatWest after it lost its battle for independence and was bought by Royal Bank of Scotland.
NatWest bought Greenwich in 1996, one of several acquisitions to try to build a global investment bank. That failed, and NatWest Markets made a $1 billion loss in 1997. Kruger and Holloway stayed on to run what was left, the credit businesses with Greenwich at its core, and turned the business around within two years into a profitable division that made £243 million in 1999, a return on equity of 18%.
By then NatWest was locked in a takeover battle, and the winners, RBS, had a different vision than Greenwich’s co-CEOs for the investment-banking business.
So, having saved it, they resigned. Asked what they might do next, Chip Kruger told Euromoney at the time “Oh, I’ll take some time off and consider my options. Who knows, Gary and I might even do something together.”
That’s exactly what they’re now doing, according to friends, at their old firm’s headquarters in Greenwich, Connecticut. The two are setting up a small venture-capital business that they are tentatively calling Seven Mile River, after the river that runs through their town in Connecticut.
It’s becoming a popular area for former bankers. Two months ago Chris Lynch, global head of high-grade debt capital markets at DLJ until the sell-out to CSFB, set up a one-man trading and investing firm from his house, calling it Smith Ridge Ventures after the name of his street.
