Though shrewd and seasoned, Jeff Peek never did quite reach the top on Wall Street, where he cut his teeth as a topflight adviser to financial institutions. First, Stan O’Neal outmaneuvered him for the CEO’s chair at Merrill Lynch; then things didn’t work out quite as he had envisioned at Credit Suisse First Boston, where as vice chairman and head of the financial services division he had been a potential successor to former chief executive John Mack. Now, less than one year after becoming the No. 2 executive at CIT Group, Peek is finally a CEO. And one of his top priorities is moving the $50 billion-in-assets commercial and consumer lender -- which in June 2002 became a subsidiary of embattled conglomerate Tyco International, only to be spun off a month later in a $4.6 billion IPO -- on to his old Wall Street turf.
“I think you’ll see us try to add more products onto our existing relationships,” says Peek, 57, who in July succeeded longtime CIT chief Albert Gamper. That could mean providing M&A advice and potentially underwriting securities for the hundreds of midsize corporations that rely on the Livingston, New Jerseybased firm for loans, leases and vendor financing.
Peek knows a thing or two about investment banking, having run that business at Merrill in the mid-1990s, when the firm was the world’s top underwriter of securities. He sees a big opportunity in serving the middle-market companies that the Street’s ever-larger financial institutions are ignoring. “We find a lot of our competitors evacuating that sector about as fast as they can,” he says. “If we’re doing business with a company in two or three products, to add a fourth or fifth is not that difficult.”
So how does it feel to finally be calling all the shots? “It’s exciting and energizing -- and somewhat sobering,” Peek confides. “It’s a whole new level of accountability. It’s everything from ‘I don’t like the color of the coffee cups in the cafeteria’ to ‘What are we doing about our China strategy?’” But he’s confident that experience has prepared him for the challenge. “I’ve had the opportunity to watch several CEOs from the shotgun seat,” including Mack and former Merrill chief David Komansky, he says. “Hopefully, I’ve picked up the best of what each of those guys had to offer.”
