Municipal market underwriting just got more crowded.
Guggenheim Securities announced Wednesday that it has snatched four public finance veterans from the New York office of Stone & Youngberg. The new team of underwriters complements a municipal sales and trading desk established in 2008.
The hires include Ramiro Albarran and Jeff Hyman, who will co-head the new public finance group in New York, as well as managing directors Jay Murphy and Walter Kulakowski.
“Under Ramiro and Jeff’s leadership, this new team will further bolster our growing range of services and capabilities,” Alan Schwartz, executive chairman of parent company Guggenheim Partners, said in a press release.
| Albarran |
“Since forming our municipal sales and trading effort in 2008, we have steadily built a formidable team with deep expertise and a proven track record in the secondary markets,” Schwartz added. “Banking is the next logical step in expanding our public finance footprint.”
Each hire joined Stone & Youngberg in recent years. A source at S&Y confirmed the departures but said that its push to expand operations in the Northeast had not changed course.
Albarran had been director of S&Y’s East Coast operations since May 2009. Previously he led the public finance division at Banc of America Securities for seven years.
He specializes in project finance, real estate and other specialty municipal banking.
| Hyman |
Hyman had joined S&Y less than a year ago as a managing director and head of the Albany office. He previously ran the Northeast municipal group at JPMorgan, and before that was head of New York public finance at UBS.
He specializes in project-related finance, securitizations, story bonds and infrastructure finance.
| Kulakowski |
Kulakowski had joined S&Y in September as managing director. He is best known for his 20 years at Citi, where he was a director of public finance until 2007. He also spent a year at Roosevelt & Cross providing investment banking services to municipal clients.
His specialties are infrastructure finance, privatization, environmental and energy credits.
| Murphy |
Murphy is a 28-year veteran from Goldman, Sachs & Co., where he was co-head of the syndicate-underwriting desk. He led national underwriting efforts at S&Y beginning in April 2010. His expertise is competitive and negotiated underwriting across the municipal credit spectrum.
The four hires are specialists rather than run-of-the-mill generalists, according to Jeffrey Kelley, a spokesman at Guggenheim. He said that while the team is based in New York, it will go after deals across the country.
Kelley described the introduction of a municipal underwriting team as part and parcel of an expansion initiated in June 2009 when Schwartz took the helm.
“Prior to 2009 we had a capital markets arena that focused mostly in fixed-income sales and trading,” Kelley said. “Since Alan Schwartz’s arrival, he’s really been building out the fuller array of corporate advisory investment banking and underwriting capabilities.”
Guggenheim’s New York-based municipal team already provides sales, trading, and research to institutional clients. Its parent, headquartered in New York and Chicago, is a privately held global financial services firm which manages more than $80 billion in assets. It has 22 offices in nine countries.
