Citigroup Salutes Veteran-Owned BrokerDealers

Posted on October 27, 2015October 27, 2015 by admin

In advance of this year’s Veteran’s Day (Wed, Nov 11), BrokerDealer.com salutes Citigroup for its salute to veteran-owned brokerdealers. Citigroup (NYSE:C), is not only one of the world’s leading investment banks, it is also one of the financial industry’s most focused firms when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Citi’s leadership is long recognized for its corporate philosophy that strives to create good will among employees and respect of clients through initiatives that advance job creation and improving standard of living. In that spirit, Citi announced that it worked exclusively with veteran-owned brokerdealer firms to syndicate a recent $1.5 billion bond issuance, clearly showing Citi’s commitment to providing opportunities to the veterans’ community.

In the transaction, which priced on October 23, Citi hired five veteran-owned financial firms to distribute the bonds to investors. The firms comprised Academy Securities, Inc.; CAVU Securities, LLC; Drexel Hamilton, LLC; Mischler Financial Group, Inc.; and Multi-Bank Securities, Inc.

“Citi is proud to support our nation’s veterans and to partner with these firms, all of which executed with excellence and assisted us deliver a very successful transaction,” said Suni Harford, Citi’s Regional Head of Markets for North America. “This deal provides a great example of how companies can partner with veteran-owned businesses to provide opportunities for them to grow and succeed.”

BrokerDealer.com hosts the global financial industry’s most comprehensive database of broker-dealer firms, including comprehensive information for brokerdealers operating in more than 30 countries across the free world

Through the October 23 deal, Citi re-opened a $2 billion issuance originally priced in September, pricing $1.5 billion in additional bonds and bringing the total outstanding securities to $3.5 billion. Investors responded positively to the deal, which Citi hopes will be the first of similar transactions involving veteran-owned firms in the future.

Citigroup Inc., a diversified financial services holding company, provides various financial products and services for consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions worldwide. The company operates through two segments, Global Consumer Banking (GCB) and Institutional Clients Group (ICG).

CitiGroup Hired As Puerto Rico’s Broker-Dealer

Posted on July 10, 2015 by admin

Puerto Rico has hired CitiGroup as a broker-dealer as the island seeks to restructure its debt, an industry source said on Wednesday.

The bank will host a meeting with creditors in New York on Monday, Melba Acosta, head of the island’s Government Development Bank, said. That will be the first meeting with creditors since Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla said a week ago that he wants to restructure its $72 billion debt.

The gathering will focus on a report released last week by three former International Monetary Fund officials that said Puerto Rico is in a dire position because of high debt, unstable finances and a stagnant economy. Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla on June 29 said he would seek to delay some debt payments for “a number of years.”

His administration has yet to say which securities would be affected or how such a restructuring would work. Some bonds are protected by the commonwealth’s constitution or backed by revenue such as sales-tax collections. Garcia Padilla said the government would draw up a proposed restructuring plan by the end of August.

The meeting comes after the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority paid all principal and interest due to bondholders last week, buying the publicly owned utility time as it works to reach a deal with creditors. The authority, known as Prepa, said it had agreed with creditors, which include bondholders, banks and bond insurers, to extend restructuring talks to September.

A bondholders’ group said in a news release that they would continue to work with Prepa to reach a long-term plan. In addition to negotiations about Prepa’s $9 billion in debt, the talks involve plans to modernize the utility’s operations.

Investors and analysts had feared a default by Prepa could be the first of many from the commonwealth. Now, there’s hope among some investors that the utility will work out an agreement that could be a model for restructuring other Puerto Rico agencies.

To get the full story, read this article by reuters.com.

BrokerDealer-Backed Symphony Is Singing Happy Tune

Posted on April 22, 2015May 3, 2018 by admin

BrokerDealer.com blog update is courtesy of coverage from MarketsMuse.com Tech Talk and profiles the latest from Symphony, the brokerdealer-backed financial communications program that is looking to make the Bloomberg terminals (or at least their most-used messaging application) mute.

This David v. Goliath type battle pitting well-backed upstarts against the ubiquitous Bloomberg LP could become a trend among other aspiring fintech, trading system and specialty financial data providers and terminals when considering last week’s snafu that, for a few hours, rendered the Bloomberg LP terminal farm “tradus interruptus” across the globe (albeit, the fix was made prior to the opening bell of US markets.)

As spotted first by of all places, the NY Post, “Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters and a managing partner of Angelic Ventures, is joining Symphony’s board of directors, according to a person directly familiar with the company’s plans (according to the NY Post).”

Symphony, which received a $66 million investment last year from 15 financial companies has been seen as a viable alternative to the $24,000-a-year Bloomberg terminal.

The company’s backers include a who’s who of Wall Street financial companies: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNY Mellon, BlackRock, Citadel, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Jefferies, JPMorgan, Maverick, Morgan Stanley, Nomura and Wells Fargo.

Last fall, these companies contributed $66M to finance Symphony, and using that money, purchased Perzo, a company that was building a secure communications platform. After the purchase, they named Perzo founder David Gurle as Symphony CEO.

In addition to providing encrypted chat services, Symphony doesn’t store any communications as a third party, and allows a bank’s compliance officers to stop chats from leaving the company — an increasingly important factor for banks who are seeing chat records in court papers.

The addition of Glocer is only the latest of alum of the news and financial data company to join Symphony.

David Gurle, Symphony’s founder and CEO, was global head of collaborative services at Thomson Reuters, and worked on the company’s chat tool, according to the company’s Web site.

In addition to Gurle, there’s Eran Barak, Symphony’s global head of business operations, and Koray Oztekin and Ann Demirtjis, who do product management, according to the company’s Web site.
At least four other Symphony employees in business development have formerly worked at Thomson Reuters, according to LinkedIn.

Symphony is already in wide use at Goldman Sachs, which led the round of funding last year. The service is expected to be broadly rolled out to Wall Street by July.

BrokerDealers That Do Dare To Be Different: Diversity & Inclusion

Posted on April 15, 2015April 15, 2015 by admin

BrokerDealer.com blog update takes a different tact in this post and sends a salute to 6-pack leader Citigroup, along with interest-aligned boutique firms Mischler Financial Group and Williams Capital for a focus on something other than its trading PnL. The topic? Diversity & Inclusion. Sounds corny, sounds like a social program that merely meets the ‘check the box’ approach by those who know they have to seem good to get paid. But then again, because this platform connects with broker-dealers across the US, as well as throughout the rest of the free world in which capitalism reigns, the team at BrokerDealer.com knows that the initiative highlighted here is nothing short of genuine.

Mischler Financial Group, the financial industry’s oldest minority firm owned and operated by Service-Disabled Veterans [and the securities industry’s only federally-certified SDVBE] along with Williams Capital, the industry’s leading African-American owned brokerdealer have taken great pride in playing a supporting role in the below Citigroup-produced video profiling the firm’s unqualified dedication to diversity and inclusion that Citi, one of the world’s largest banks and a Top 25 Fortune corporations maintains across their entire ecosystem.

A founder of Veterans On Wall Street (VOWS) along with Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, as well as being “a lead book-runner” in multiple year-round initiatives to advance the support of many great causes, Citi is a true thought leader on the topic of D&I within the context of not only the financial services sector, but also within the framework of global corporation best practices.

The video below, which formally aired April 10 (also available on the Citi blog) is uniquely impactful thanks to the influential roles played by Citi leaders Kate Oddo, Director of Debt Capital Markets, Patrice Altongy Managing Director Fixed Income Capital Markets, Citigroup Global Markets Inc. and Karen Papazian, Director, Dealer Lending Operations, Toyota Financial Services. The presentation speaks volumes as to Citi’s D&I-driven relationship with Toyota Motors Inc. (NYSE:TM) wholly-owned subsidiary, Toyota Motor Credit Corporation (TMCC), one of the global capital markets’ most focused Issuers of securities, and indisputably, one of the corporate world’s most respected D&I practitioners.

The clip below, entitled “Wall Street Leaders Can Dare to be Different” profiles just one of many approaches on the part of Citi to further the importance of D&I initiatives, and represents a welcome and increasingly growing trend taking place across Wall Street.

Sharing the same philosophy that Citi is dedicated to, the leadership and team at Mischler Financial Group is unabashedly dedicated to the thesis that Diversity & Inclusion programs strike at the heart of corporate best practices. We believe that those who embrace the tenants of D&I are likely to be better for it in the eyes of their stakeholders , which necessarily include respective employees, the consumers and communities they serve, and the investors/shareholders who look to corporate leaders to always deliver better performance.