CHICAGO - Former LaSalle Financial Services Inc. quantitative banker David Schott last week joined the public finance group of Wells Fargo & Co. - home of two of his former colleagues from the now-shuttered LaSalle group.
Schott will work as a senior analyst out of Wells Fargo Institutional Brokerage and SalesLLC's office in Greenwich, Conn., office supporting the firm's national investment banking team with an emphasis on Chicago. He will also focus on the larger Midwestern and Northeastern market as the bank seeks to expand its commercial banking presence in those markets.
Schott had worked for the last nine years at LaSalle Financial Services as a quantitative specialist until last fall when Bank of America Corp. laid off most of LaSalle's 30-plus municipal group of bankers, analysts, sales professionals, and traders following its acquisition of LaSalle.
"David Schott has extensive experience in structuring bond deals of all varieties, as well as specialized modeling and programming expertise," Wells Fargo said in a statement.
Wells Fargo late last year tapped Schott's former colleague, public finance banker Peter Glick, to join its Chicago office. Victor Chang, a longtime public finance banker at LaSalle who worked with both Glick and Schott, joined Wells Fargo last fall from Hutchinson, Shockey, Erley& Co. to manage the Chicago office and help carve out a bigger piece of the Midwestern bond business as part of the firm's overall growth goals.
Minneapolis-based Wells Fargo is seeking to double its public finance business by 2010. To that end, the firm has been on a hiring spree, adding seven investment bankers and four analysts and support staff over the last year. It now employs 39 investment bankers and 22 analytical and support professionals, about twice as many as it did four years ago, in 15 offices.
"The expansion of Wells Fargo's commercial banking means additional opportunities for our public finance group to partner with them to serve nonprofit and public customers," said William Gabler, head of the public finance group, in a statement.
In addition to Wells Fargo, some former LaSalle employees have landed at Robert W. Baird & Co.
