Huge pay at this tiny boutique investment bank in London

Not many people work for Qatalyst Partners in London. The tech-focused boutique has just seven employees in the UK, and two senior executives, but despite this tiny heacount, it was unusually generous last year.

Qatalyst has just released its 2016 accounts for its European operation on Companies House and it had a very good year. Revenues were £27.6m, up from £3m in 2015, largely thanks to £23.8m being generated in the UK - up from a mere £451.5k the previous year. Qatalyst has passed this success on to its staff - it spent £7.2m (a 242% increase on 2015) on its seven employees last year. In other words, they got over £1m each on an average pay per head basis. This is up from an average of £353.5k the year before.

When we tracked the highest paying M&A boutiques in London, Qatalyst came in fourth last year (based on 2015 figures). The highest paying firm was Robey Warshaw, which shelled out an average of £520k for its employees. These figures suggest that Qatalyst is now head and shoulders above its rivals.

Qatalyst has also hiked pay for its senior employees. Its two directors are Jean Tardy-Joubert, the former head of European technology investment banking at Merrill Lynch who moved across to lead Qatalysts's London operation in 2009 and Jason DiLullo, the bank's president. The highest paid director received £4.42m in 2016 - up from £259.7k in 2015.

Last year, despite primarily focusing only on technology deals, Qatalyst Partners was the fifth-ranked boutique investment bank in 2016, advising on 12 deals worth $109.4bn. Among the big ticket deals was a role on the $47bn acquisition of NXP Semiconductors by U.S. mobile chipset firm Qualcomm.

Despite the uptick last year, Qatalyst has not been hiring in London this year. It still has just nine people registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, which is largely flat on the past 18 months.

Contact for news, tips and comments: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

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