In conjunction with an overall company expansion, New York-based investment bank M.R. Beal & Co. has hired municipal market veteran Jacob Alpert as executive vice president and head of its tax-exempt sales and trading efforts.
M.R. Beal said it is counting on Alpert’s experience of more than 30 years on Wall Street to be a catalyst for the growth of the firm’s municipal department.
While managing tax-exempt sales and trading, Alpert will also lead a recruitment effort aimed at expanding the size of M.R. Beal’s current muni sales staff by at least three people from their current team of six, and also establishing a trading staff, according to Stan Grayson, president and chief operating officer.
“Jay came from a firm that did mostly secondary business, so that expertise, melded with our proficiency in primary business, gives us the opportunity for substantial growth,” Grayson said.
“Jay has a proven track record and his unparalleled municipal bond experience speaks for itself,” Bernard B. Beal, founder and chief executive of the firm, said in a release. “Jay will help us to reach out and improve our current buy-side relationships as well as expand with new institutional buyers.”
Prior to joining the firm, Alpert worked for Birmingham, Ala.-based Sterne, Agee & Leach Inc. He opened a New York office for the Southeast regional firm in 2001, and also served as a senior vice president and manager of institutional municipal sales in that office — which was its institutional underwriting, sales, and trading hub — for five and a half years.
Alpert fills a vacancy left by Howard Mackey, who joined Rice Financial Products Co. in mid-May as president of its broker-dealer division, Apex Pryor Securities, in New York.
During his career in the municipal industry, Alpert has worked at several large Wall Street firms. He was an owner and partner of his own firm, the former Taylor Byrne Securities in the mid-1980s; served as manager of New York underwriting and trading at the former PaineWebber Inc.; and also held institutional sales positions at Glickenhaus & Co. and the now-defunct Fleet Securities. He began his career in 1970 at the former Shearson Hammill & Co. in New York.
Alpert is a member of the Municipal Bond Club of New York and the Municipal Forum of New York.
Besides seeking to expand its municipal sales and trading business, M.R. Beal also has its sights set on entering new markets on the public finance side of the business, according to Grayson.
In 2005, the firm senior-managed 11 issues totaling $690.7 million and was ranked 48 among senior managers nationally, according to Thomson Financial data.
“We think the next frontier for us is the state of Texas,” he said in an interview this week. “The firm has made a commitment to have physical people on the ground in Texas” by sometime next month, he said, noting that it will likely set up shop in Dallas.
Grayson said its Texas exposure will build new relationships with small local municipalities, as well as large state-level and nonprofit issuers in the Lone Star State, which will allow the firm to establish market share as senior and co-managing underwriter in one of the nation’s largest markets for municipal finance.
Most of the firm’s growth is centered around increasing its institutional account base by zeroing in on middle-market investors — or smaller second- and third-tier investors, such as financial advisers and small banks — which are often overshadowed by top-tier investors like large mutual funds and insurance companies, according to Grayson.
He said the firm is hoping to make the middle-market investors “our bread and butter.”
Doing so, Grayson said, will bring added value to issuers in terms of giving them broader market penetration and liquidity for their bonds from a group of investors that “tend to be overlooked in our marketplace.”
In addition to the institutional market, the firm will also target account growth among the retail crowd.
“I see us, at some point, concentrating on high net-worth, especially as we grow our variable-rate business,” Grayson said.
