Mediobanca Adds Bankers for Finance Clients in London

By Sonia SirletMediobanca SpA (MB) hired Alexander Smith, formerly at Morgan Stanley (MS), and Barclays Plc (BARC)’s Francesco Rossitto, boosting the European team that advises financial clients to more than 20.

Benoit Weill, a former Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) financial-services banker, also joined this month in London as part of a plan by Italy’s biggest publicly traded investment bank to expand its international business, said a spokesman, who asked not to be identified in line with company policy.
Smith oversees the financial institutions group, or FIG, for the U.K., Ireland and the Nordic region, while Rossitto is co-head of FIG for Italy, Greece and Turkey. Weill is responsible for France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Middle East and North Africa, and the bank will hire more staff for the team, which is run by Francesco Canzonieri, the spokesman said.
Mediobanca is expanding its London presence as it makes the city the bank’s European center for all industry and capital-markets teams after hiring Barclays’s Stefano Marsaglia as co-head of corporate and investment banking. Chief Executive Officer Alberto Nagel last year set out to expand the company’s securities business and sharpen the focus on providing advice and
financing to the region’s banks and insurers.
Nagel said in May the bank was preparing capital markets transactions for 28 billion euros ($36 billion), targeting financial-services clients, that should be completed in coming quarters. The bank is seeking to increase the share of its total revenue it earns outside Italy to 45 percent by 2016 from 30 percent last year.

Deal Rankings

Mediobanca, based in Milan, ranks 11th among underwriters of stock sales in Europe this year, up from 15th in 2013, while it is 29th in advising mergers in the region compared with 51st in 2013, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Shares of Mediobanca gained as much as 0.5 percent and were 0.2 percent higher at 7.12 euros as of 9:53 a.m. in Milan, valuing the bank at about 6.1 billion euros. The shares have gained 12 percent this year, compared with a 4.8 percent gain in the benchmark STOXX 600 Banks Index.