The European bank still hiring in ECM
Some equity capital markets (ECM) bankers might still be in demand, despite tough market conditions. However, it may not be the big US banks that hire them.
Santander Corporate and Investment Bank appears to be in the market. It's just recruited Vlad Konovalov, a former ECM director at Citi, as a director in private placements. Konovalov left Citi in December, implying he's just finished a three month notice period.
Santander didn't respond to a request to comment on whether Konovalov will be the first of other hires, but he arrives at a challenging time for the ECM business. ECM revenues were utterly brutalized in 2022, and 2023 hasn’t given any real indication of being different so far. In the US, Bloomberg notes that this issuance has fallen off a cliff post the latest banking traumas. $3.8bn in capital was raised across more than a dozen deals last week; this week there's been a single deal that's raised around a tenth of that amount.
Oddly, Konovalov isn’t the only Citi director that’s joined Santander as an executive director this week. On the other side of the word – in Bogota, Colombia – Alejandro Pineda joined Santander to be its head of corporate finance for Colombia and Central America. Small world.
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