American global investment bank, Jefferies Group LLC, has now officially started a new practice that is now expanding as a technology investment banking practice. The company will have six new managing directors who will all start their new jobs in San Francisco. The news was sent out to the clients of the company this week in a memo. Jefferies is a unit of the Leucadia National Corp.
The investment bank hired five bankers from the Credit Suisse Group AG, back in May, according to previous reports. The five bankers who were poached from the Credit Suisse Group were Bill Brady, Cully Davis, Cameron Lester, John Metz, and Steve West. The sixth member who is joining the banking group is Storm Duncan.
Duncan is also a former employee of the Credit Suisse group having worked at the banking group until 2011. His most recent position was as the managing director and the global head of technology M&A investment banking. Ever since Duncan left Credit Suisse group, he has dabbled in some of the tech start ups. He will now become the global co-head of technology at the M&A investment banking.
The investment bank said that their approach when it comes to the technology would be combining the boutique M&A advice they would get together with the global full service platform which would include the equity research, leveraged finance and the bond franchise also. The new recruitments by the bank means the group now has close to 20 senior managing directors in the technology group alone. It now has a total of the technology 70 bankers combined worldwide.
The news comes at a time when Jefferies was sued just last month ago. The lawsuit was as a result of some of the recent recruits the company has done. Credit Suisse, the bank that Jefferies has been taking most of its new employees accused the five of stealing some confidential information and then so conspiring to attract some of their former colleagues from the bank to join them at Jefferies. Obviously, the five bankers deny the allegations, and attempts to get a statement from both banks are futile because both banks decline to comment.
The turnover of technology bankers is high, as just last year the bank lost four of its bankers to the UBS Group AG, which also included some three managing directors. Jefferies was tanked the 17th US technology M&A advisory bank, according to the Thomson Reuters data.
