Wells Fargo Adds to Government Group

With state and local governments struggling to find creative solutions to help with tight budgets, Wells Fargo & Co. recently expanded its government and institutional banking team with two key hires.

Don Lipkin joined the buy side three weeks ago as a managing director and desk credit analyst, while Nancy Feldman joined the sell side in late March as managing director and head of public finance credit strategies. Both are based in New York.

The GIB team is the umbrella group that contains Wells’ commercial banking, investment banking, and sales and trading capabilities. The bank said the group has about 450 employees, including 170 involved in public finance.

“The next few years will be challenging for government and institutional entities as they experience the effects of the current recession,” said Phil Smith, head of the GIB group. “Access to capital will be critical during this period, so we’re adding Nancy and Don to our team to ensure we provide the best credit strategies for our clients.”

Lipkin’s career in public finance dates back to 1984 when he joined the municipal group at First Boston. Since then, he has spent most of his years as a desk analyst, and for the past year he served as head of fixed-income research for U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management.

Lipkin previously spent three years as head of municipal market strategy and credit analytics for Banc of America Securities LLC, and served 14 years as co-head of municipal research at Bear Stearns.

Joining Wells “is a real opportunity to be with a firm that is expanding its franchise and has the resources to do so,” he said. “So many firms have gotten out of the market or have merged, so this is an exciting and interesting time to be in the muni market.”

The recent ratings recalibration by Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings to a global scale — while Standard & Poor’s gradually upgraded municipal bonds over the past few years — has led some market players to recognize a need for more detailed credit analysis to differentiate between the increasing number of higher-rated credits.

“What it means is that there is less information in the ratings,” Lipkin said. “They are still useful, and they are still a crucial tool that people will use because they aren’t necessarily going to do a full analysis on every bond that they buy. But certainly there is a lot less information there than there used to be. And that makes the role of a credit analyst more important.”

Lipkin reports to Martin Bingham, head of GIB’s sales, trading and syndicate segment.

Feldman, whose hire The Bond Buyer reported on in March, brings more than 25 years of experience to her role. Most recently she served four years as director of the New Jersey Treasury Department’s office of public finance.

In providing credit strategy to issuers, she said the challenge is finding the right balance in raising funds and cutting expenditures.

“States, local governments, and other municipal issuers are all facing tremendous stress right now, so the experiences that I had during the years that I worked for the state of New Jersey were very informative as to what options might be on the table,” she said.

Some issuers have already implemented revenue-raising options but perhaps haven’t spent as much time on expenditure-reduction, Feldman said, while others are in the opposite situation.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, she said — it all depends on where they started.

“This continues to be very stressful,” she added. “The federal fiscal stimulus money that has gone to the states and trickled down from that has been very helpful in providing a transition from a very difficult period in 2008 and 2009 to where we are today. However, the end of the federal fiscal stimulus … is now putting states and local governments in a position where they really have to take the next step.”

Prior to working for New Jersey, Feldman spent 12 years with Goldman, Sachs & Co. From 1984 to 1992, she was a credit analyst for Standard & Poor’s.

Feldman will report to Peter Hill, head of the GIB team’s public finance investment banking segment.

Wells Fargo has consistently been the ninth-largest underwriter for the past four years, according to Thomson Reuters. To date this year, the firm has senior managed 147 issues worth $4.32 billion, while last year it completed 378 deals totaling $11.17 billion.

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