Fairwell investment bank, hello boutique
Still in his mid-40s, fixed income doyen TJ Lim decided he was too young to retire, but he was definitely through with big investment bank politics and bloody mergers.
A veteran of UBS, the then-Dresdner Kleinwort Benson and Merrill Lynch, he instead joined former Merrill luminaries Michael Marks and Paul Roy to form New Smith Capital Partners – a play on Smith New Court, the UK stockbroker that Marks ran before its acquisition by Merrill.
TJ bristles when I describe New Smith as a financial institutions group boutique (it also does corporate work, asset management and principle investing), yet the kind of advisory work it does, or aspires to do, is restructuring insurance company and bank balance sheets, assisting hedge funds to find cheaper finance than the standard prime brokerage lines of credit, and helping pension funds with asset liability mismatches.
In each case, New Smith will provide independent advice, uninfluenced by issuance demands that could be the case with an investment bank. Insurance companies that were sold CDOs that blew up, for example, and that now have the same bank trying to buy them back at 40 cents in the dollar, can legitimately raise questions. “I like being on the client side,” says TJ. Does that mean that sometimes investment banks are not?
