The Bumpy Road to JPMorgan’s Capture of Cazenove
A City of London veteran does some finger pointing in a soon-to-be-published memoir
Bill Winters, then global co-head of JPMorgan's investment bank, left, and Cazenove’s David Mayhew and Robert Pickering, in 2004.
Photographer: Douglas Fry/Cazenove Group PlcCazenove & Co. at the turn of the millennium was still the grand old name of British stock broking and corporate finance. Its partners and staff of former soldiers and old Etonians still dealt shares and advised executives in the same genteel fashion they had for almost 180 years. They didn’t work too much or sell too hard, but they became rich nevertheless.
The Cazenove name carried a mystique and heft in the City of London greater than rivals because of its close links to the biggest UK companies, its discretion and its treasured independence. Yet, a decade later it had been absorbed entirely into JPMorgan Chase & Co. Its metamorphosis was deliberately unhurried, which perhaps in the end helped make it one of the most successful takeovers in the notoriously bloody field of investment-banking deals.