By Pamela Barbaglia
LONDON (Reuters) - Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) has appointed James Robertson and Peter Luck as co-heads of UK investment banking as part of its push to win business from large corporate clients in Britain.
These latest appointments show the U.S. bank's commitment to build up its business in the country despite Brexit.
The newly created roles, detailed in a memo seen by Reuters, follow departures from the bank in the past few months, including that of Bank of America's head of global investment banking Diego De Giorgi and his boss Christian Meissner.
The Wall Street bank appointed Matthew Koder last year to succeed Meissner and revitalise its corporate and investment banking business after a slide in fees.
De Giorgi was replaced by Jack MacDonald and Thomas Sheehan who are co-heads of global investment banking out of the United States.
Robertson is joining Bank of America from UBS after a 22-year career at the Swiss bank where he recently headed its UK advisory business.
Luck worked closely with Robertson at UBS where he spent 13 years before moving to Bank of America to help to build its corporate broking franchise in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
He is currently heading the bank's corporate broking business and will retain these responsibilities in addition to his new role.
The two bankers also served in the same British Army regiment - the Royal Dragoon Guards - in the mid 1990s, before starting their respective careers in investment banking.
They will report to Matt Cannon and Richard King who are co-heads of UK & Ireland Corporate and Investment Banking and Luigi Rizzo, head of EMEA Investment Banking.
Bank of America has won some lucrative business recently from some of Britain's biggest companies, including Vodafone (LON:VOD) where the bank led a 3.4 billion pound mandatory convertible bond - the largest ever UK equity-linked offering and largest ever European mandatory convertible bond.
It also advised drugs group GSK on its $4.9 billion (3.8 billion pounds) acquisition of Tesaro and helped Unilever (LON:ULVR) with its $4.6 billion purchase of Horlicks India from GSK.
Bank of America has also been expanding its team in Paris ahead of Brexit and transferring London-based executives, including Rizzo to the French capital. On Feb. 8, it named Sanaz Zaimi as head of its new Paris-based European Union broker-dealer unit BofA Securities Europe.
