German corporate financiers still in demand

A number of leading financial institutions including Merrill Lynch and UBS Warburg still feel 'underpowered' in Frankfurt, fuelling demand for German investment bankers despite the downturn in the markets, according to headhunters in London.

Jonathan Baines, sector chairman of global financial services at Whitehead Mann, said: 'We still have mandates to find senior investment bankers in Germany. Just because the markets have turned down we have not suddenly found ourselves with a whole lot of German bankers.

They don't exist now any more than they ever have done.'

Big investment banks are desperate to find bankers with established relationships with the German banks and with the Mittelstand, the thousands of privately owned businesses that make up Germany's medium-sized company sector.

While compensation for such corporate financiers is not at the level it was two or three years ago, pay for those with the right relationships remains 'competitive', Baines said.

Heather Kleeman, a director and managing partner at the Rose Partnership, said: 'It is not only Germany. Everyone wants the same thing - the senior relationship banker with the ear of the CEO.'

Headhunters in London have resorted to ringing every single finance director of every FTSE company to get the names of their favoured investment bankers, the ones that are trusted to do the job right.

But Germany is widely deemed to be the toughest market in which to headhunt because even those German bankers with the right expertise do not always travel well in a pan-European context, say headhunters.

'Extracting them from a German background and putting them in a top-tier bulge-bracket institution does not always work,' said Kleeman.

Nor is demand for investment bankers with the right relationships restricted to the large banks. The smaller 'boutique' investment banks are also taking the opportunity to hire specialists with focused relationships, say headhunters.