At the end of 2006, UBS bought Brazil’s Banco Pactual for $2.6 billion. The
managing partner of Pactual, Andre Esteves, owned 30% of Pactual,
and so, naturally, he stayed on salary at UBS. (This, by the way, is why articles
about working-class
millionaires are silly: a certain type of person will just continue working
whether he needs the money or not.)
Esteves has now been promoted: while staying in charge of Latin America –
the job he got when his bank got taken over – he’s also now the
new global head of fixed income for UBS. That’s a huge job, which will require
his moving to London, but there’s no reason to think he won’t be very good at
it.
Esteves is now very much a rising star within UBS, and is young and ambitious
enough that he could rise much further still. After all, he clearly knows how
to run a bank.
I also suspect that Esteves might be something of an unexpected upside, as
far as UBS is concerned, from the Pactual acquisition. In 1998, Sandy Weill
merged his Travelers Group with Citicorp – a bancassurance trade which
never really worked out. Nobody minded, however, because it turned out that
Travelers’ investment bank was a good fit with Citi’s commercial bank. Similarly,
the Pactual acquisition was driven largely by Pactual’s strength in Brazilian
equities. But it might turn out that the debt side of the trade – and
the Esteves part in particular – might turn out, in retrospect, to be
even smarter.