Skyscrapers that are home to big Canadian banks hover over a Bay Street intersection in Toronto. New CEOs, and a slowdown in the retail side of business, are likely to spur deals in the financial sector.Gloria Nieto/The Globe and Mail
Haywood Securities is moving one of its most prominent names from investment banking to research, looking to jump-start sales and trading activity that can feed corporate finance.
Dan Tsubouchi, who joined Haywood last year as head of investment banking, will now head energy research and spend his time courting clients at mutual funds and other institutions. Jeff Reymer, who joined at the same time as Mr. Tsubouchi, will replace him as head of investment banking.
The changes were announced internally at Haywood late Tuesday.
The investment banking business is very slow for boutiques such as Haywood that have focused on smaller energy and mining companies. Corporate clients are hunkered down, and merger and financing activity has cooled dramatically.
The plan at Haywood is to try to put more focus on trading securities for clients such as mutual funds on the buy side. That brings in commissions, but also will put Haywood more in the flow of information on who wants to buy stocks. That can help drive business in corporate finance when clients do look to raise money, because they often choose banks that are busy traders of their shares. The idea is that securities firms that trade shares in a company will have the best feel for how much money a company can raise and at what price.
It's a strategy that has worked in the past, notably at Mr. Tsubouchi's long-time employer, GMP Securities. That firm has long been renowned for its trading desk, which has fed investment banking business over the years.
The difference these days is it is much tougher to make money in sales and trading as a standalone business. Commissions are down and so are trading volumes, a combination that has left many firms losing money in what used to be a business that was a dependable moneymaker.
With Mr. Tsubouchi leaving investment banking, the firm is hiring a director level banker.
Mr. Reymer, who takes over, spent most of his career at Wellington West Capital Markets, an independent firm where he was head of investment banking for energy. He left about a year after Wellington was acquired by National Bank Financial.