Our Work
Vice Chairman
The Client
Placing a Vice Chairman for a Global Investment Bank.
The Challenge
Our head of investment banking coverage was invited by a US banking client to discuss how they could expand their board level coverage of DAX 40 clients in Germany. Given that there are only a small group of investment bankers with enough experience and network to be able to do this role, we needed to look at expanding the wider search beyond the more traditional senior level banker. The areas we discussed expanding into were:
– Current senior leading investment bankers at prominent banks in Germany
– Management consultants with significant board level access across the DAX 40
– Current NEDs within the DAX 40
– Former, or exiting C-Suite employees at the DAX 40
The overall problem our client had was to access the boardroom in this market and our solution was to expand our longlist to include those that have that access, even though they are not all investment banking trained. Access and strategic dialogue were the key priorities.
Our Approach
Our longlist included just over 20 candidates from a diverse background (as listed above). After some lengthy discussion with our client, we decided to focus on 11 to create our shortlist.
We ended up having two candidates interviewing extensively for this role, one from a traditional investment banking background and the other who was currently exiting from a DAX 40 business where they were the CEO.
Results
The client took the decision to ultimately hire the former DAX CEO into a Vice Chairman position. This enables the candidate to focus on building and developing relationships without the day-to-day management of a wider team. The lack of technical M&A experience was countered by the utilization of our clients local investment banking team in Frankfurt. This suited our client well and the hire is proving to be a success and given them the access that they wanted.
