Centerview has poached one of Bank of America's most senior dealmakers as it continues to steal megadeals away from Wall Street's biggest banks
- Boutique investment bank Centerview Partners has poached senior Bank of America Merrill Lynch dealmaker Todd Kaplan.
- Kaplan, formerly an executive vice chairman at BAML, is the latest veteran bulge-bracket dealmaker to leave for independent Centerview, which has landed a slew of megadeals this year.
- For BAML, Kaplan is the latest in a string of senior departures in its struggling investment bank, which has lost market share to its top rivals and dropped in the league tables this year.
Boutique investment bank Centerview Partners has poached one of Bank of America Merrill Lynch's most senior dealmakers, adding to the hefty churn the bulge-bracket investment bank has experienced amid a tough year for the division.
Todd Kaplan, formerly an executive vice-chairman in global banking at Bank of America, has left his old firm and is set to join Centerview sometime this fall, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bank of America declined to comment and Centerview did not respond to requests for comment.
Kaplan, 54, has spent most of career at Merrill Lynch, aside from a brief dalliance with Citadel Securities in 2009 following the financial crisis merger of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. He returned to the combined firm in 2010, at the time reporting directly to division head Tom Montag, who is now Bank of America's COO.
Kaplan has a stellar reputation in the industry and is known for working on large, complex deals, according to a Wall Street headhunter who specializes in the space.
Centerview, the independent founded by Blair Effron and Robert Pruzan known for punching above its weight in orchestrating megadeals, adds yet another veteran bulge-bracket dealmaker to a roster already chock full of them.
In a record year thus far for mergers-and-acquisitions, Centerview sits 9th on the league tables in announced volume, according to Bloomberg data, and has landed mandates on megadeals like the $67 billion Cigna-Express Scripts merger, the massive Sprint and T-Mobile tie-up, and Comcast's more than $40 billion acquisition of British broadcaster Sky.
For Bank of America, Kaplan is the latest in a string of senior departures in its struggling investment bank, which has lost market share to its top rivals and dropped in the league tables. Fees in the firm's global banking division have fallen 20% to $2.1 billion in the first nine months of the year, the company said last week in its third-quarter earnings report.
The bank has lost more than 30 managing directors in investment banking to other banks in 2017 and 2018, according to data from a Wall Street headhunting firms.
Other senior departures this year include: corporate and investment banking chief Christian Meissner, who announced his departure last month; capital markets chief A.J. Murphy, who left in May to private-equity firm Silver Lake; and Anwar Zakkour, the global head of technology banking, who departed in January.
But amid the churn, Bank of America has also been adding talent: The investment bank says it has brought in 49 MDs since 2017, including hires like Jill Schwartz, a 25-year leveraged finance vet from Barclays; Marco Chisari, who left Credit Suisse last month to co-head global semiconductor banking at Bank of America; and Sam Powers, who was hired from UBS this summer to run media and telecom banking in the Americas.