When John Hyman joined Moscow-headquartered Renaissance Capital (RenCap) as head of investment banking and financing in October 2011, he already had considerable experience of the country from his time at Morgan Stanley. That had culminated in running the bulge bracket bank’s emerging Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia capital markets businesses.
Since 2003 in particular, he says the emerging markets had loomed large in those geographies in terms of total activity, and Mr Hyman had participated in the Russian initial public offering (IPO) boom during that period, as well as working on ground-breaking deals such as the listing of Kenya’s Safaricom. But while travelling widely, he had always been based in London. Changing that was one of the attractions of the job at RenCap, he says.