Last month Citigroup’s global research and retail brokerage chief, Sallie Krawcheck, plucked the 36-year-old Spaniard from the relative obscurity of the bank’s Latin American operation to head its European research team. The reshuffling was part of a major shake-up that bounced veteran European research co-heads Richard Dale and Michael Crawshaw.
García-Cantera agrees that he’s come a long way since 1991, when, fresh out of business school at Madrid’s Instituto de Empresa, he joined thenSalomon Brothers’ fledgling equity operation in London as a junior analyst covering Spain and Portugal. One weekend, he recalls, he and his wife splurged on an umbrella only to discover that they didn’t have enough money left over for dinner. “I pulled a lot of all-nighters for a salary that was lower than my secretary’s,” he says. (Much of analysts’ pay, then as now, was in the form of bonuses.)
Salary shouldn’t be an issue in García-Cantera’s new post: Sales will be. He’ll have to figure out how to generate more income from his 100 researchers. “We’re not going to be a cost center; we’re going to be a profit center,” he says. “We’re in business because we want to make money.” That will mean giving a higher priority to the big institutional investors that account for the bulk of the firm’s fees.
García-Cantera should be able to enjoy a more settled life once his wife and two-year-old daughter join him in London. As co-head of Latin American equity research for the past four years (and a top-ranked financial institutions analyst on II‘s Latin America Research Team), García-Cantera lived a nomadic existence, shuttling among Madrid, where he lived; New York, home base for the Latin American team; and London, where the European operation was quartered. “American Airlines used to send me cookies every month as a sign of appreciation,” he says.
