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People
President, Bank of America Europe
William Fall wants to get one thing clear at the start of our interview. "This must come across as the William Fall show. I have a very strong belief in teamwork." That may be so, but this is the People page and some biographical probing is in order. It soon becomes apparent that Fall's stress on collective endeavour is not for want of things to say about his own career, which has had intriguing twists and turns.
Born in 1957, Fall grew up in England on a farm outside Tunbridge Wells, Kent. His father was a farmer, his mother a doctor. "I had absolutely no interest in finance," he recalls. "I barely knew what a L5 note looked like." After school at Tonbridge, he went to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, to read veterinary medicine, and then spent 18 months working as a surgeon in a practice in Aylesbury. Each morning and evening, he would do the rounds of farms, performing such operations as sewing cows' teats back on after they had become detached during milking. "I look back on it as one of the happiest periods of my life," he says. "But at the same time I knew there must be more to life. I wanted to try something different."
De Deciding to make the switch into merchant banking, he was recruited in 1981 by Kleinwort Benson after an interview with David Clementi (now of the Bank of England). He began in the corporate finance group, working on high-grade bonds and M&A under Simon Robertson and John Nelson.
Despite the quality of the people, and the fact that merchant banks were obviously good at what they did, it was, he recalls, already becoming clear that...