The deal catapulted him into the upper echelons of the banking world, and makes him one of the few people on our list who has made it big not just as a Latin American star, but a global one.
Mr Verme downplays his success, describing himself as a “low-profile person” and “devoted team player” (“Every deal, every achievement has been the result of my team, and the work of my team,” he tells me at the outset), who sets a lot of store by humility, integrity and “the little things parents teach you at home, like saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.”
He keeps these traditional values in a career experience that in many ways represents the future: a world in which emerging economies play an ever larger role and more and more of the world’s top investment bankers hail from places far from Wall Street or the City of London. When Mr Verme started out in investment banking, anyone who was not from Chicago, Los Angeles or New York was a nobody; these days, almost the opposite is true. “Bankers with international experience are in great demand,” he says.
Mr Verme says he still spends about 20%-25% of his time bringing in Latin American deals for Citi; he reels off a list of some of the region’s highest profile corporate bosses – such as CVRD’s Roger Agnelli or Lorenzo Zambrano of Cemex – as people who are more than just clients to him, but friends. “As my mother always told me, you should never forget your roots,” he says.
