Cantor Fitzgerald

Shawn Matthews Comments: Cantor Fitzgerald To Add 100 Staff In London - Reuters

Reuters, July 2, 2009

Cantor Fitzgerald plans to add at least 100 more people in London in the coming year as it builds a merchant banking business for mid-sized companies, the head of the U.S. group's broker-dealer unit said. It has just hired Stuart Levett from Credit Suisse as a managing director in loan sales, planning to broaden its largely equity-based operations into fixed income.

"We want London to be a bigger percentage of our business going forward. It's the number one opportunity," said Shawn Matthews, the head of Cantor Fitzgerald & Co, a unit of U.S. brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald.

"The real growth certainly is outside the United States," he said in an interview on Tuesday.

The private partnership has escaped the credit crunch largely unscathed and is now thriving as other banks reduce their lending capacity in a deleveraging process which Matthews said could take another five to 10 years. It embarked on a hiring spree of hundreds of brokers across the world last year, saying small and mid-sized companies were "underbanked" as large investment banks had their hands full working on blue chip clients. "It is very difficult for some very good companies to access the capital markets ... typical manufacturing companies who are cash-flow positive who just have issues because of debt, they cannot refinance," Matthews said.

Investors were now often looking to invest anywhere in the capital structure and not just in equity or debt and Cantor expects its business to eventually be split equally between the two asset classes.

The business was often driven by U.S. institutional investors who wanted access to European markets. "The buy-side is telling us to go into these businesses," he said.

Once the capital market business is in place Cantor would think about expanding into the investment banking business, such as mergers and acquisition (M&A) advisory.

Hiring was relatively easy as so many rivals have laid off staff, Matthews said, and job openings attracted strong interest from people with good financial skills.