| Dow Kim | ||||||
The phone area code gives it away. Dow Kim, like thousands of other New York bankers, has been relocated to Jersey City following the terrorist attacks of September 11. “Unfortunately I was in the office at the time,” he recalls. “The window looked out onto the World Trade Centre, and I saw the second plane go in.”
Unlike Salomon Brothers’ office, Merrill Lynch’s headquarters building remains structurally sound (though access has been the problem) and senior management has already started to move back in. It won’t be long, says Kim, before everyone follows.
Dow Kim is one of Merrill Lynch’s rising stars but has nevertheless maintained a fairly low profile. A strong trader with a background in derivatives, he was appointed in the midst of the recent management reshuffle to succeed Kelly Martin as Merrill’s head of fixed income (Martin having become head of the firm’s international private client group).
Kim is now responsible for the company’s global fixed-income trading, sales, underwriting, derivatives and syndicated lending businesses. The promotion is reward for the success he made of running Merrill’s enterprise solutions group within the fixed-income department, where he was responsible for the fixed-income derivatives businesses globally. “He’s broadly a popular choice,” says a colleague.
“He’s very fair, to the point, very shrewd, can take in a lot of information and is willing to take decisions. He’s a demanding and driven boss, very on top of things, but his approach is to flatten out the hierarchy.”
Kim was born on November 3 1962 in Seoul, Korea, where his father was vice-chairman of the family business, Korindo, a conglomerate manufacturing such diverse products as Nike shoes and shipping containers. When Dow was 12 the family moved to Singapore so that his father could manage his mining company in Malaysia.
At the age of 16 he went to the US to attend boarding school at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and then went on to the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, to study accounting and finance.
“I knew even at high school that I wanted to be in finance,” he says, “and in trading specifically. I’d always wanted to do that. I suppose it had to do with my personality. I was attracted by the fact that every day the circumstances are different, and that the results are instantaneous, win or lose.”
After graduating from Wharton in 1984 he was, he recalls, “determined to work in New York, the centre of finance, to learn from the best people”. Eventually, in 1985 he managed to get a job at Manufacturers Hanover as a credit analyst.
After two years of that and a further two as a commercial banker, during which time he was sponsored to do a part-time MBA at Wharton, Kim was given a shot at what he really wanted to do – trading – by Don Layton, then global head of derivatives.
Kim began as trainee on the dollar options book in 1989, and soon progressed to trading cross-currency swaps. At the end of his MBA programme in 1992 he was relocated to Tokyo to run the yen options book.
The move was his biggest break so far, financially and in terms of career development, as he steered his bank’s business from being nowhere in the league tables to being number one.
Deciding though that that he was not being “adequately compensated” for his achievements, he left after receiving his bonus payment in 1994 to join Merrill Lynch, where he was put in charge of the derivatives trading desk in Tokyo.
Once again he set about making a lot of money for his bank, this time helped by very low interest rates in Japan and people betting that they would actually fall below zero. Kim was confident that they wouldn’t (“It was common sense, they were based on Libor”) and placed Merrill at the forefront of the market for selling 0% interest-rate floors.
In 1997, Kim was in charge of Merrill’s fixed-income franchise in Japan, at a time when it was felt that the bank was not taking full advantage of its client relationships in terms of value. His tenure was marked by record returns every year until 2000, with top positions in the league tables for European and samurai bonds. In March 2000, Kelly Martin brought Kim back to New York to run the global enterprise solutions group, and the platform designed to provide Merrill’s clients with “integrated risk solutions”.
For diversion away from work, Kim plays golf and spends time with his wife and two young children.
