RBC Capital Markets' hiring streak continued this week, with its announcement that it has hired four new health care bankers.
Gerry Means, formerly a vice president in JPMorgan's Dallas office, joined RBC to head its national health care municipal finance practice. David Fields and Bruce Kelley joined the firm as managing directors, and Rob Whitlock is now a vice president.
During the last 10 years, RBC's health care practice has bounced around in Thomson Financial's list of the nation's busiest underwriters. RBC was the 11th busiest senior manager of health care deals in 2004 and 2005, but was only the 26th busiest in this category in 2001.
Through the beginning of this week, RBC was ranked 15th among health care underwriters this year, having run the books on 14 deals totaling $281.5 million.
Means will be in charge of growing RBC's municipal health care banking practice, both by market presence and staff size, the company said in a statement Tuesday. While at JPMorgan, she led that firm's health care business in the Southwest region and helped expand its reach in the senior living sector. Means is based out of RBC's Dallas and New York offices.
Fields, also a specialist in financing senior living facilities projects, joins RBC from UBS Securities LLC, where he was in charge of the senior living finance practice nationally for the last six years, according to RBC. He will work from RBC's Albany office.
Kelley will cover health care issuers in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. He joins the firm after helping start and run health care advisory firm CJK Securities, and worked for RBC's predecessor Dain Rauscherfor eight years before that, according to RBC. Kelley will be based in Phoenix.
Whitlock, like Fields, comes to RBC from UBS' senior living finance group. He also has worked as a health care consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Whitlock will work from Philadelphia.
These four recent hires are just the latest in a continuing effort from RBC to expand its municipal underwriting presence. The firm has long been the busiest underwriter of bond sales smaller than $10 million, but a string of hiring and acquiring has shown RBC's ambition to continue growing.
The firm has targeted successful regional broker-dealers as acquisitions, the most recent of which was Ohio mainstay Seasongood & Mayer LLC. RBC closed on this purchase in mid-June.
Chris Hamel, RBC's head of municipal finance, said in an interview last month that the firm was not in talks for more acquisitions.
