UBS Rebuilds LatAm Team

To counter a slew of senior LatAm investment banking defections, UBS has been quietly staffing up in a variety of product areas. Rafael Calderon started this week as a Mexico City-based director of investment banking for Latin America. He was previously at Rothschild. Since the start of the year, the Swiss bank has recruited some 37 bankers at a variety of levels for equity, FICC and investment banking. Among them are FICC MDs David Cannon, David Hobert, Diego Rivero, IB MD Kim Matthew, and several equity research analysts. “Yes, we’ve lost a few people over the last few weeks, there’s lots of competition,” Gerard Cremoux, co-head of LatAm investment banking at UBS, tells LatinFinance. “But hiring 37 people shows that net-net we are growing, and we’re growing very fast,” he adds. UBS continues to scout talent, mainly for Brazil and US-based positions. According to Cremoux, since UBS bought Brazilian brokerage Link Investimentos for BRL195m in April, it has jumped to fourth by market share of cash equity trading market, from seventh previously. And UBS says it will boost that by transferring its share of the business to Link. “I am very confident that we get to number three once we start to move our flow. So we will have a market share that is going to be bigger than JPMorgan and Merrill Lynch and Santander. It’s going to happen before the end of the year,” says Cremoux. UBS recently lost investment banking MD Francisco Salas to Citi. The move follows the exit of several senior LatAm investment bankers. They include Alejandro Matoso who went to Morgan Stanley, Luis Castro who quit for BofA Merrill Lynch, and Rodolfo Molina who quit for Jefferies.