Barclays Hires Ex-CIT Chief Jeffrey Peek as Investment Banker
Barclays Hires Ex-CIT Chief Jeffrey Peek
Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
Barclays Plc., headquarters stand in Canary Wharf financial district in London, U.K.
Barclays Plc., headquarters stand in Canary Wharf financial district in London, U.K. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
Barclays Plc hired Jeffrey Peek, whose six years running commercial lender CIT Group Inc. spanned its collapse and emergence from bankruptcy, to be a vice chairman in the Barclays Capital investment-banking unit.
Peek, 63, will focus on advising clients in the financial- services industry, London-based Barclays said in a statement yesterday. Prior to joining CIT in 2003, he was a vice chairman at a Credit Suisse Group AG predecessor and previously spent almost two decades at Merrill Lynch & Co.
Under Peek, CIT’s reliance on the capital markets for funding led to its undoing as it lost at least $5 billion after the start of the financial crisis in 2007. Peek left the New York-based lender in January, a month after it emerged from bankruptcy protection.
“Our clients will benefit from the unique depth and diversity of his experience,” said Hugh “Skip” McGee, head of investment banking, in the statement. McGee formerly was in charge of investment banking at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
Barclays this week named Robert Diamond, 59, the architect of the firm’s investment-banking expansion, as CEO. Diamond, who like Peek is an American, will become deputy CEO next month before John Varley, 54, steps down at the end of March.
Barclays is the sixth-ranked adviser on announced mergers and acquisitions so far this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s up from 11th in 2008, the year it purchased Lehman Brothers’s North American division.
‘Black Eye’
Peek joined CIT in 2003 after being denied the top job at Merrill Lynch in 2001 and spending 19 months as head of the asset-management unit at Zurich-based Credit Suisse.
Under Peek, CIT expanded into subprime mortgages and student loans. When CIT was cut off from commercial paper, or short-term IOUs, last year it got federal approval to convert to a bank-holding company and $2.33 billion as part of the U.S. Troubled Asset Relief Program. The sum was erased when CIT went through bankruptcy.
“A bankruptcy is a black eye, and there’s very little way around that,” said Kevin Starke, an analyst at CRT Capital Group LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “There’s not a tremendously good way of distancing himself from that, but you’re bound to have failures in this business, and you learn from them a lot more than you do your successes.”
Peek was replaced by John Thain, who previously ran Merrill Lynch, leading its sale to Bank of America Corp. during the financial crisis.
Barclays said earlier this week it hired former JPMorgan Chase & Co. banker Helge Weiner-Trapness as head of its financial institutions group for Asia-Pacific. The firm said last month it plans to boost employees as much as 10 percent in the full year.
To contact the reporters on this story: Zachary R. Mider in New York at zmider1@bloomberg.net; Michael J. Moore in New York at mmoore55@bloomberg.net.
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