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Clearly then, Topsy Mathew, MD, M&A, Standard Chartered Bank, or his peers Sameer Nath at Citi, Gaurav Gupta of Macquarie or Nikhil Nath, who recently got promoted as Nomura's Asia (excluding Japan) head of investment banking, are mavericks.
Cynics will sneer, but the fact is that for any company keen on the global Indian takeover, these four bankers are likely to be the key brain trusts. Shopping, they say, becomes easier when these men are around as advisors.
It helps to be the quintessential global bankers in today's age of big capital where even the role of the housebanker has changed. He is no longer a cult figurehead. Nor is he exclusive to any company.
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Just like Sameer, Nikhil Nath, too, has worked on Wall Street before moving back to Mumbai and admits we are following a global phenomenon.
"I am a product of institutional thinking," he says. "In a cross-border transaction, there is advisory, financing, cross-regional and cross-cultural coordination. So the whole firm is behind a deal. And, honestly, the deepest relationships are the ones that are institutionalised."
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A large quotient of Mathew's and Standard Chartered's success in Asia, especially India, has been team effort.
"Most of the original team of seven of 2003 have come back and stuck together as a cohesive team. And over the years we have all grown up understanding the challenges of cross-border transactions."
Mathew, too, came back after stints in DSP Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse, but, in retrospect, his corporate finance stint in Hong Kong with Pacific Century Cyberworks (PCCW), a Hutchison group company, was the turning point.
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Being part of that one deal was good enough for Mathew to master the nuances of the sector. Since then he has become a deal magnet. "It has been a happy coincidence as telecom deal volumes in the last decade have been the highest," he says.
The list of his telecom deals is exhaustive: VSNL's acquisition of Teleglobe, a first listed company deal by an Indian, Bharti-Zain, Aircel's tower sale to GTL, advising Essar during Hutchison's exit from India in 2006 and even helping the Ruias value their stake in Vodafone.
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Naturally, Mathew cringes when peers point fingers at many of his headline-grabbing assignments "that ride piggyback" on the financing that Standard Chartered offers in the deals.
"Ours is an ideas business. The quality of advice is the basis for a mandate and that in turn leads to trust over a period. When a company hires you for advisory and pays you accordingly, he expects that only. Financing is important but it comes later," he says.
"You won't have recurring relationships if you are only offering the balance sheet."
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SAMEER NATH
Managing director and head of M&A, India
Citibank
Age:37
Memorable deals:
KKR-Flextronics
Wipro-Infocrossing
JSW-JFE
A Citibanker to the core, Nath's career graph can be split into three distinct phases. The first six years as a technology banker in Wall Street, then a critical year in between, where he wore a different internal strategy hat, and then the last three years back home with an expansive mandate of heading a significant franchise.
He's every bit a global citizen, He is enjoying the spotlight in India now, but the bets are on as to how long till the next challenge is thrown at him? Nath himself doesn't hide from the fact and says: "Who knows what lies ahead, but it has to be something in Citi."
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To be fair, even during his stint as a techie dealmaker at the heart of the Big Apple, there was a significant India play.
Remember KKR-Flextronics, IBM-Daksh, IFlex-Oracle, EDS-Mphasis or Wipro-Infocrossing? "All these deals where we were involved or even during the Infosys ADRs or during the IPOs of Genpact and EXL, there was intense interaction with my colleagues in India," Nath reminisces.
But 2007 was the turning point. For a year, Nath was handpicked to work with the two global co-heads of the investment bank to help them formalise an internal strategy and figure out the machinations of a global entity.
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Fitting into the shoes of a famous predecessor and build on the India piece in the spring of 2008 was no stroll in the park, though, especially when Citi itself got sucked into the global financial whirlpool.
"Getting through the downturn with those headwinds was a fantastic learning experience."
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And now that he has settled in, he can build on the team and work in tandem with his colleagues to originate business ideas for clients.
The Wall Street exposure certainly comes handy as Nath diversifies into other sectors like telecom, pharmaceuticals, steel, mining and energy as a team leader.
"We don't want to miss any big deal opportunity but that's not at the cost of smaller and mid-size deals." That's Nath's mission statement.
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That zeal comes handy when you have a challenging task at hand. Macquarie has always had a strong infrastructure focus in India and for Gaurav the brief from the headquarters was to broadbase the coverage.
Before Macquarie, life was comfortable in Nomura. It was early 2010 and Gaurav, along with a motley bunch of I-bankers from three other big banks had just closed Aircel's telecom tower arm's sale to GTL, when all of a sudden the opportunity came to lead this transformational journey for Macquarie investment banking in India.
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GG, as friends call him, has kept his promise. Macquarie has managed to pleasantly surprise most, by grabbing a handful of headline deals of 2010-11 across sectors in infrastructure, resources, industrials and healthcare.
It advised Axis bank when it bought Enam's investment banking division, managed the takeover defence and subsequent stake sale by Fortis Healthcare in Parkway Holdings and even helped affiliate Macquarie-SBI Infrastructure Fund to invest in Adhunik Power, Viom Networks and Moser Baer Power. Gupta is now busy raising $150 million for Tulsi Tanti's Suzlon.
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Additionally, there is also an "increased focus on capital market transactions" and principal investments.
Sensing more business potential in a volatile market, Gupta has also tweaked his team a bit to suit the persona of a full service bank and by the time you will probably be reading this piece, the 20- member strong M&A and capital markets team would have probably shifted to a swanky new glass and steel office in Mumbai's Bandra Kurla Complex.
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Like Sameer, Nikhil, too, has transformed his career over the years. Till 2004-05, he was a product banker on Wall Street but then it was the emerging markets experience for him in two successive postings in Japan and Hong Kong.
Nikhil knew no Japanese, or Cantonese, but Asia helped him get a grasp over cross-border deals and the Asian way of doing business.Click NEXT to read on
Despite working in the US and Asia, moving back to India, which itself was at the cusp in corporate financing and M&As, had its share of both challenges and fun.
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Nath has this one-liner and it goes like this: "It's about asking the right questions and giving the right advice, and not necessarily about how many CEOs you know personally."
His CEO clients at Apollo Tyres or Hero Group or at Aircel will vouch for that. They know if an M&A deal doesn't fructify, it won't stop Nikhil in advising them on capital raising or a debt restructuring.
A true friend for all seasons.
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