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Christian Steffens / Agenda.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Philip Alexander

In July 2008, when the threat of mass redundancies hung over the capital markets divisions of most investment banks, UniCredit was hiring. Mike Hammond, co-head of capital markets at UniCredit, appointed Christian Steffens as global head of equity capital markets (ECM). Mr Steffens was then at Anglo-German corporate finance advisor Sietz and Partner and had previously headed Lehman Brothers' German and Austrian ECM and equity-linked teams until 2002.

Quietly spoken with two decades experience in corporate finance, Mr Steffens was given a clear task to make UniCredit Group's sprawling ECM business more cohesive. "Mike Hammond hired me to pull the various parts of the ECM business together. We have strong regional business in Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland and wider central and eastern Europe (CEE) including Russia, and each business was operating largely independently," he says. The process of creating a single unit capable of exchanging ideas, expertise and market knowledge is now largely complete, including central databases and regular meetings across the 45-member global ECM group. The equity research team is undertaking a similar process.

Echoing the description Mr Hammond himself often uses, Mr Steffens refers to UniCredit's strength as a "multi-local" bank, but explains that it is aiming to add an extra dimension. "We generally have a local presence in each country, we have always been seen as the local bank to win mandates, but what we have been doing is creating the awareness with clients that we also have an international presence,"...

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