| William Fall | ||||||
William Fall wants to get one thing clear at the start of our interview. “This mustn’t come across as the William Fall show. I have a very strong belief in teamwork.” That may be so, but this is the People page and some biographical probing is in order. It soon becomes apparent that Fall’s stress on collective endeavour is not for want of things to say about his own career, which has had intriguing twists and turns.
Born in 1957, Fall grew up in England on a farm outside Tunbridge Wells, Kent. His father was a farmer, his mother a doctor. “I had absolutely no interest in finance,” he recalls. “I barely knew what a £5 note looked like.” After school at Tonbridge, he went to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, to read veterinary medicine, and then spent 18 months working as a surgeon in a practice in Aylesbury. Each morning and evening, he would do the rounds of farms, performing such operations as sewing cows’ teats back on after they had become detached during milking. “I look back on it as one of the happiest periods of my life,” he says. “But at the same time I knew there must be more to life. I wanted to try something different.”
Deciding to make the switch into merchant banking, he was recruited in 1981 by Kleinwort Benson after an interview with David Clementi (now of the Bank of England). He began in the corporate finance group, working on high-grade bonds and M&A under Simon Robertson and John Nelson.
Despite the quality of the people, and the fact that merchant banks were obviously good at what they did, it was, he recalls, already becoming clear that they were going to have a tough time competing because they were too small. When in 1984 he went to New York as a salesman for the international corporate finance group, he “realized within a week of getting there that Kleinwort frankly had nothing to sell in North America at that time. The US commercial banks were pre-eminent and we simply didn’t have the balance sheet to compete with them. So we had to see what else we could do.”
At that time, derivatives were just getting started and, Fall remembers: “It seemed an interesting business to get involved in.” When ISDA – initially called the International Swap Dealers Association – was founded in 1986, Kleinwort Benson was among the 10 founder members.
With his scientific background, Fall took well to this new line of work, and in 1987 he followed his boss Duncan Goldie-Morrison to Westpac Banking Corp, then a AAA-rated bank with aspirations to be a much larger capital markets player. Over the next three years, Westpac’s new derivatives team built a robust business from nothing; in 1990 the bank was ranked No 2 globally in yen fixed-income derivatives. But then things started to go awry. When US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan raised interest rates sharply in 1994, following the losses sustained by Procter&Gamble in 1993 on its highly leveraged derivatives plays, the whole structured market turned down. Westpac also suffered from having lent too much money to Australian corporations, and cuts became necessary.
Disillusioned, Fall quit finance and went to live in Italy with his Russian fiancée (now wife). This spell of relaxation and reflection ended when he decided to study architecture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, a school that “emphasized the classic, contextual aspects of building design”. “I adored it,” he says, “and planned to make it a long-term career.” But then six months before Fall was due to finish the accelerated two-and-a-half-year course, Goldie-Morrison – by then with Nationsbanc-CRT – flew down from Chicago and stopped off on his way to Nationsbank’s headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. “He told me what a great man Hugh McColl was, and how he was looking to recruit people who could build businesses. I’ve never been a quant or regarded myself as the best deal doer. But what I do reckon I do do pretty well is build businesses.”
So in late 1994 the budding architect returned to what he did best, now as head of marketing at Nationsbank’s state-of-the-art Chicago-based derivatives subsidiary Nationsbanc-CRT, a third of the way up Sears Tower. Nationsbank’s acquisition of the options house Chicago Research and Trading (CRT) in 1993 had come at a time when CRT was experiencing difficulty breaking into the expanding OTC market, and Nationsbank was keen to acquire the technology and expertise for a fully fledged risk management system. CRT had been trading over-the-counter energy derivatives and treasury options for several years, but when it joined Nationsbank it moved down the food chain into swap products, more customized options and trading in the underlying markets such as foreign exchange.
Nationsbanc-CRT quickly gained a high reputation in some of the more arcane areas of derivatives trading, running swaption positions as big as those of JP Morgan, SBC and CSFB. By the end of 1995, a year after Fall joined, it had broken into the top 10 derivatives houses following an aggressive expansion of its contracts. From there it has progressed to a position in which Fall says “we believe we are market leader in the use of fixed-income derivatives for US corporates, and in terms of sophistication and profit and loss, in the top five globally”.
Two years after the merger with Bank of America, (which despite the retention of that name has come to look more like a takeover by Nationsbank in terms of personnel in key positions) Fall was asked to move to London to become head of global risk management. His mission was to pull together the fragmented trading activities of the bank in Europe and establishing a risk-based capital-allocation system.
Last year, Fall’s group recorded revenue growth of 25% in far from friendly market conditions. He was appointed president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in October, responsible for delivering and expanding the bank’s range of commercial and investment banking products to its clients in the region. “Right now we’re focusing on choosing the customers and delivering the institution,” he says. “We don’t want to leave any crumbs on the table. I won’t pretend that we are anything but a long way from being considered a major European financial institution, but I’m not interested in a quick hit. I want to build a durable business.”
His efforts towards this end make for a punishing schedule – Fall, say colleagues, expects a lot from people, but also from himself – and has little time for outside interests. But his other professions do remain hobbies: he owns two small-animal veterinary practices in London, and says he is looking to buy more. And by way of indulging his interest in building design, he has subjected his family to a more than adequate number of alterations to their houses over the years.
