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Nomura Securities' new head of global FIG and specialty finance investment banking for the Americas, James Kern, has hit the ground running. Within his first week at the firm, he was called in to be part of a team of advisors working on behalf of Athene Holding Ltd. which is buying Liberty Life, a unit of Royal Bank of Canada, for $628.1
million. That deal is expected to close early next year.
"It was a great way to learn the firm," Kern told IDD while en route to visit a client. "We got an inquiry on my second or third day on the job. It was a highly structured transaction that needed a lot of capital markets advice."
Kern comes to Nomura from JPMorgan where he where he served as a senior member of the financial institutions group practice focused on asset management and specialty finance clients.
Like many dealmakers at Nomura today, Kern has roots with Lehman Brothers; he interned at the firm while in college and worked there from 1989 to 1994.
Before his work at JPMorgan, he was at Bear Stearns & Co.
When it comes to FIG advisory work, Kern said 60% to 70% of the advice is related to financings - that is, raising capital in debt or equity markets - while the rest is related to mergers and acquisitions.
Looking ahead, Nomura's new dealmaker said, "we still have a way to go in the recapitalizations of banks."
GEORGE HORNIG JOINED PINEBRIDGE
Investments as senior managing director and chief operating officer. Hornig was managing director and co-global chief operating officer of Credit Suisse Asset Management and also a co-founder of Wasserstein Perella & Co.
Hornig, based in New York, will oversee the finance, operations, legal and compliance, technology, product development, and marketing and communications divisions at PineBridge. Previously, he was executive vice president and chief operating officer for the Americas at Deutsche Bank. His tenure at Wasserstein Perella followed that in the M&A group at First Boston Corp.
Hornig holds AB, MBA and JD degrees from Harvard University.
ERIKA WEINBERG IS COUNSEL IN THE
corporate department of Latham & Watkins LLP in New York. Weinberg represents underwriters and issuers in a variety of securities offerings and she has experience...