CHICAGO — As a first step in a three-state expansion, PNC Capital Markets Inc. has opened a Michigan office and hired Anton Colon to head it.
The Pittsburgh-based firm also announced this week that it has launched a new municipal transportation team that will work out of the Philadelphia office. John B. Kelly will lead the four-member team.
The moves come more than a year after PNC Financial Services Group acquired National City Corp. Late last year the two firms completed the integration of their public finance groups, PNC Capital Markets and NatCity Investments Inc. NatCity’s five-member Pittsburgh office was closed as a result of the integration.
Now with a total of 40 muni finance professionals, PNC plans to hire several new bankers and expand into Michigan, Illinois, and Florida with an eye toward securing the same strong middle-market senior-manager position it has achieved in parts of the Northeast.
The new Grand Rapids office is part of an overall strategy to open public finance offices where PNC already has a commercial banking presence. It also allows the firm to expand into areas where NatCity had a strong public finance team, according to Tom Henson, head of PNC’s public finance group.
“If you look at NatCity’s footprint, there were four states where they were in the top 10 in muni bond underwriting: Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida,” he said. “So we’re looking at those states first.”
PNC plans at some point to hire three bankers in Illinois and three bankers in Florida, Henson said. It also plans to hire two more bankers to in Ohio, boosting to eight the number of public finance employees there.
All new bankers will focus on local government issues, he said. In Michigan, Colon will also specialize in local and state government finance. He comes to PNC Capital Markets from the corporate finance side of National City. Before that, he worked in public finance at Mesirow Financial Inc.’s Michigan office.
Though Michigan is one of the economically weakest states in the country, its population remains large enough to support a strong municipal market, according to Henson.
“It’s still going to be a major player in the marketplace. Right now it’s probably not as robust as in the past, but we believe it will return, and we want to be there when it does,” he said.
Kelly, who has been at PNC since 2004, will head up a new four-member team in Philadelphia dedicated to municipal transportation clients, the others being Dan Rohr, Nicholas Tripician, and Jason DiMartini.
The decision to form a dedicated transportation group comes after the firm has worked with several transportation issuers, including the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, Henson said.
“There’s more and more of these types of clients,” he said. “To service those clients properly we needed to have someone dedicated to it because of the special issues.”
PNC has doubled the size of its public finance team between 2003 and 2007 and says it has continued to grow its operations in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
PNC Capital Markets ranked 22nd among senior managers nationally in 2009 working on a total of $2.35 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. It ranked 14th nationally in 2008 with a total volume of $4.04 billion.
In the Midwest, the firm ranked 28th among senior managers in 2009, with a total volume of $566 million. It ranked 17th in 2008, working on a total of $911.5 million.
