3i mandate will be coup for BarCap’s Renwick
IF, as seems likely, 3i decides to appoint Barclays Capital as its joint corporate broker at the end of the month it will be further proof that Barclays’s strategy of building up its equities business is bearing fruit.
Since hiring Jim Renwick as head of UK Equity Capital Markets and corporate broking in April 2009, Barclays Capital has won six FTSE 100 brokerships.
Renwick, formerly of UBS, must take a lot of the plaudits for this but it has to be said that the bank will also be benefiting from the strong lending relationships it already has with clients, to which it can now offer equity advice.
Some say that Renwick will be hard pressed to serve the bank’s growing number of broking clients, which include Barclays (no surprise there), National Grid and Resolution.
But the team is a dozen strong and includes other experienced names such as Alisdair Gayne (ex Morgan Stanley), Jon Bathard-Smith (also ex Morgan Stanley) and Bertie Whitehead (formerly of Citigroup).
“So long as Barclays Capital employs enough supporting players, it will be able to keep its growing number of clients happy,” says one corporate broker.
As well as the corporate brokerships, Barclays Capital was also chosen as one of three advisers to the LSE on its bid for Canada’s TMX, alongside RBC Capital Markets and Morgan Stanley.
Joshua Critchley, the former Goldman Sachs banker turned head of RBC’s equity capital markets and corporate broking, is still getting tongues wagging with the sky-highpackages being offered to bankers to join his team.
Talk at the PLC awards dinner the other evening was of the £350,000ish pay and golden hello packages said to be being offered to encourage people like former Arden chief executive Jeremy Grime and colleague Sarah Spikes to join RBC.
Together with Peter Lenardos, the three Arden colleagues last year topped the Extel survey.
Tough for Arden, which by all accounts is a good place to work and yet can not really compete with the sort of sums on offer from RBC – but one must be a little concerned for the Canadian firm if it doesn’t win the business to match the pay packages it is offering. The Arden hires come on top of others from Cenkos.
Meanwhile, it’s not all one-way traffic out of Arden. John Goold, one of the firm’s original founders, last week returned from Oriel Securities to be its head of institutional sales.
david.hellier@cityam.com