OLIVER SARKOZY HAS YET TO COME TO TERMS WITH BEING a manager. The joint global head of financial-institutions-group investment banking at Swiss giant UBS pokes fun at the title on his business card. “It’s like ‘sanitation engineer.’ The longer it is, the less I do,” says Sarkozy, who assumed his post when former FIG chief Michael Martin decamped last year to manage money for credit card titan MBNA’s Lerner family.
Sarkozy has enjoyed more than enough success to be confidently self-deprecating. He and his team are currently advising ABN Amro on its pending, $101 billion sale to a three-bank consortium led by Royal Bank of Scotland Group, which, if it goes through, will be the largest bank acquisition in history. He’s also representing student lender Sallie Mae on its contentious sale to private equity firm J.C. Flowers & Co. and a group of big banks. If Sarkozy’s group manages to wrap up the ABN and Sallie Mae deals, it will pull in more than $200 million in fees this year. What’s his secret? Nothing more than traditional relationship building.
“As firms have grown and pressures to meet performance and profitability standards have increased, the business generally has become much more transactional in nature, and we’ve actively resisted that,” says the France-born banker. “We don’t think we can be all things to all people, and we want to be very relationship-driven.”
Sometimes that means talking a client out of a deal. “He’s been just as forthcoming with opinions as to why Associated Bank shouldn’t do transactions as he has with ones we have done,” says Paul Beideman, CEO of the Green Bay, Wisconsinbased institution. “That’s somewhat rare for an investment banker.”
Sarkozy, the half-brother of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, credits his stepfather, a U.S. diplomat, with teaching him the skills he uses to win over clients -- some of whom were executives who sat across the table from him on previous deals.
That was how Steven Scheid, chairman of Janus Capital Group, first met him in 1995, during Wells Fargo & Co.'s hostile takeover of First Interstate Bancorp. Scheid was CFO of First Interstate, and Sarkozy was the No. 2 banker on the team, representing Wells for Credit Suisse First Boston. “I was just extremely impressed with his ability to grasp the big picture and to understand the numbers,” Scheid recalls. “I decided that I wanted him on my side of the table.”
Never mind that Sarkozy was all of 26 years old during that meeting. Even today, at 38, he shows a composure and maturity that belie his age. “Oliver has always been 40,” says Joseph Martinetto, CFO of Charles Schwab Corp., which Sarkozy advised on the sale of its U.S. Trust business to Bank of America for $3.3 billion earlier this year.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for this rising star to ascend further in UBS’s management ranks. He says he has no interest in upper management and took over leadership of his group only at the request of mentor Martin, who wanted a stable transition following his resignation. Sarkozy agreed but still gets the biggest charge not from managing other bankers but from working on deals, which he says are getting more stimulating by the minute in financial services.
“For a while, to be candid, it was formulaic,” he says, referring to the 1990s, when the bulk of FIG deals were simple pooling of interests between banks -- an accounting method that regulators outlawed in 2001, opening the door for hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts and other creative approaches that had been rare in financial services. “It was like adding two numbers and coming up with a third number, and we used to sit around and go, ‘Gee, how much more of this can we do before we really start having a hard time respecting ourselves?’”
Without pooling, finance has become among the most dynamic sectors in the global economy, home to ever-bigger and more diverse institutions. “I genuinely believe we’ll be looking at $200 billion deals within the next 12 to 24 months,” he says. “The companies being created will be here 300 years from now. Nothing will ever be able to catch up with what the end product of those mergers will be.”
