With Citi's top ECM bankers out, remaining lifers eye the exits

First, Vis Raghavan joined Citi from JPMorgan to run the investment bank. Then, Raghavan hired JPMorgan equity capital markets (ECM) head, Achintya Mangla, to run Citi's entire capital markets business. Now, Citi's existing top ECM bankers are leaving. 

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Paul Abrahimzadeh and Russell Chong, the co-heads of Citi's North American ECM business, are going. Collectively, the two have nearly 50 years' experience at Citi. Neither is retiring. Both have left of their own accords. Abrahimzadeh is joining 1789 Capital. Chong is going to Patient Square Capital. Both will be partners at their new ventures. 

With Abrahimzadeh and Chong gone, there's a risk that others will follow. This may even be Raghavan and Mangla's intention. Citi recently announced bonuses, and in many cases they were not great. "You can always send an implicit message with compensation," says one Citi insider. When senior bankers leave voluntarily, there's no need to pay them severance. 

One senior Citi banker who left recently and who is now in a position to hire at a rival bank says he's inundated with applications from former colleagues. "I get calls from people at Citi all the time," he says. Low bonuses are only part of the issue. "People there are wondering what's coming next. There's a clash between the old guard and Vis and Achtinya. It's not a nice culture." Banking headhunters in New York confirm that Citi calls have been coming thick and fast. 

Last summer's departures of Tyler Dickson and the sidelining of John Chirico in corporate banking are part of the problem.  Citi's US ECM business has plenty of the old guard, many of whom have been there for decades and who were Dickson and Chirico's people. They include the likes of global head of ECM Doug Adams, who's been there for 31 years. The North American business is an important revenue generator: Dealogic says the bank ranked fifth for US ECM revenues last year, with estimated revenues in the region of $415m, or 60% of the bank's global ECM total.

In Europe, Citi has also lost people, including Suneel Hargunani, its long-serving co-head of EMEA ECM, who left last November. There have been suggestions that various Raghavan favourites from JPMorgan are ready to join Citi's ECM business in his stead, most notably including Aloke Gupte, JPMorgan's co-head of equity capital markets for EMEA and APAC. 

With Hargunani gone, some Citi insiders claim there's a leadership vacuum at the top of the EMEA ECM business. When Hargunani left, Citi promoted James Fleming, a former co-head of ECM to run the whole UK banking cluster, while US-based Doug Adams now runs ECM globally from the US.  Sources say the recent lack of managing director (MD) promotions in the London ECM team has reinforced the notion that new ex-JPMorgan MDs will soon be parachuted in soon. "The fact that no one was promoted internally was not nice," says one.  

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libellous (in which case it won’t.)

Photo by andrzj brown on Unsplash