Deutsche Bank's new capital markets head on 7.45am starts
Deutsche Bank has got a new co-head of capital markets in EMEA and for a bank with a long-established preponderance of middle-aged white men at senior levels, she's a breath of fresh air.
Hoby Buvat is Madagascan by birth. She and her family moved to Paris in search of a better life when she was eight years old. She didn't know much about banking as a child, but her interest in microeconomics and corporate performance encouraged Buvat to study at ESCP, the French business school whose graduates are on a trajectory to earn $130k soon after emerging. "Coming from a different country and a different language...reinforced my sense of curiosity," she told students at UCL last year. "I'm quite open-minded...and generally not afraid of changing anything." she added.
One of the things that Buvat has changed at Deutsche Bank is morning meetings. Early meetings are a challenge for mothers with young children, she told the students. "I used to have a morning meeting...7.45am in the morning," she said. "A few years ago, that was just like the worst possible time for me because...that's getting everyone ready for school." She asked to make the meeting later and it was moved. It was a small thing, she said - but the sort of thing that makes a big difference to working mothers.
Buvat has other ideas for changes, too. Instead of just hiring a lot more junior women into banking, she'd like to increase mobility in the mid-ranks in the bank. "That means retraining, that makes taking a bit more risk on people because they're not like the sort of profile we've seen so far, coming from analyst in an investment bank to MD in an investment bank, it would be more lateral," she said. "I would like to see a more horizontal view of the talent pool to increase diversity." The implication is that Buvat would like to take diverse candidates from the middle and back office and train them up to do front office roles instead.
Buvat herself has spent her career in the front office. Since starting at SocGen in 1998, she's spent most of her banking career at Deutsche Bank, which she joined in 2000 and has stuck with, save for a brief interlude at Merrill Lynch in the run-up to the financial crisis. Her specialism is leveraged finance, which isn't the best place to be right now, especially at Deutsche Bank, which is facing restrictions from ECB.
That doesn't seem to have impacted her career. In a memo seen by eFinancialCareers, Deutsche Bank announced yesterday that Buvat and Mark Lewellen (the bank's head of DCM origination) will become co-heads of capital markets, EMEA, a division that comprises DCM, ECM, LDCM (leveraged debt capital markets) and SETG (strategic equity transactions group). They report to Henrik Johnsson, co-head of the investment bank in EMEA.
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