- Executive managing director/head, Montreal investment and corporate banking, BMO Capital Markets, Montreal
Financial services executive Darryl White has come a long way from his days as a University of Western Ontario business student who didn't know what he wanted to do until he was interviewing for jobs at the end of his studies.
"I always had a keen interest in business broadly, but I wasn't one of these guys who knew exactly what I was going to be," he says.
But after landing a job right after graduation in 1994 with Nesbitt Thomson (now BMO Nesbitt Burns) as an analyst, he knew he had found his niche.
Because he was in a general management program at UWO, he was comfortable with the idea of juggling several roles and tasks, which served him well during his initial years. He thrives on the challenge of a job where the agenda can change abruptly.
He thinks of himself as a "part-time financial expert, part-time accountant, part-time lawyer, part-time salesman, part-time psychologist and part-time coach. So if you are someone who is reasonably good at a lot of things, you can be really good at investment banking overall because it does draw on a lot of those things."
Mr. White describes his first years as an analyst and the gruelling 80- to 90-hour workweeks as a necessary "boot camp" to learn the ropes. In 1996, he was hired as an associate in investment banking at BMO Nesbitt Burns in Toronto; he was promoted to vice-president of investment banking in 1999 and then to managing director, investment and corporate banking, in 2002. He worked in various areas including M&A,, the forest products group and the diversified industries and media and communications practice.
In 2006, he made the jump from Toronto to his home town of Montreal. Heading up the company's investment and corporate banking practice for Quebec has been a "homecoming" for him and his family (wife Cassandra, son Nolan, 3, and daughter Leah, 1). He's thrilled to be able to get from home to office in seven minutes, and to take in the city's jazz festival and nearby skiing.
During his first full year in the position, his team achieved 40-per-cent growth in revenue. He believes part of that success may be because he has worked hard to develop rapport with his staff.
"You have to be sensitive to the fact that people are looking at you as having been sent by the Mother Ship: 'Are you one of us or one of them?' One of the things I'm proud of is I think I've achieved a sense of respect from the people who work with me."
Special to The Globe and Mail