A few weeks ago the position of BNP Paribas as one of the leading players in European securitization was in some doubt following Credit Suisse First Boston's swoop for almost its entire structured finance team. But the French bank has fought back recently and has managed to corral around half of the original defectors back into the fold.
At first count, it was believed that somewhere in the region of 20 staff were off to CSFB, including the global head of ABS, Maarten Stegwee, and head of its European syndicate desk, Adrian Carr. Paribas was unable to entice those two away from their new posts, but was more successful with other key members of its team.
Andrea Perona, the lead banker on many of its Southern European mandates, including the high-profile Telecom Italia deal, and the rest of the Italian team will stay. Paribas has also managed to bring back its entire French securitization team, which had left to join CDC Marches even before CSFB made its move.
There has been a lot of speculation in the market as to what practices the bank used to entice the strays. Initially, the talk was that Paribas would make its own wholesale approach to a rival bank's securitization team, but it would appear that it valued its own team highly enough to make huge salary offers for them to remain, some suggest offers 50% higher than those from CSFB. Whatever the means, it should, for the time being at least, end speculation over what will happen to the mandates it has won recently.
The bank also announced some re-organization plans in the wake of the recent departures. Both the securitization and global derivatives teams will be run by the current credit derivatives boss, Matteo Mazzocchi. Following Stegwee's departure, the securitization group will be split into three regional divisions. Masumi Ikawa, in Tokyo, takes charge of the Asian region, Andrea Perona will be responsible for Southern Europe and Fabrice Susini will head the Northern European division.
