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FT Partners’ Steve McLaughlin Named to The Information’s Inaugural “New Financial Power Brokers” List
The Information's New Financial Power Brokers
March 30, 2023 – by Lauren Tara LaCapra, Cory Weinberg, Michael Roddan, Rachel Graf, Maria Heeter, Kate Clark and Nate Becker
Jamie Dimon won’t run JPMorgan Chase forever, and Marc Andreessen will one day give way to the next generation of investors. The Information has identified the bankers, executives and investors who could replace them by stepping into the upper echelons of the finance industry in the years to come. They are The Information’s New Financial Power Brokers: the people who will run finance—either by standing in the spotlight or by pulling the strings behind the scenes—over the next couple of decades.
The list includes the people who will likely run major banks, such as the head of Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Securities group, Ted Pick, and leaders at some of the biggest venture capital and private equity fi rms, including Jon Korngold, head of Blackstone Growth, and Roel of Botha, who took the helm at Sequoia Capital less than a year ago.
As the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank recently underscored, the financial industry can be unpredictable and this list will certainly leave off some prominent and rising star dealmakers who will make their mark in the years ahead. That said, we spoke with our sources on Wall Street and Sand Hill Road and drew on our combined decades of finance industry knowledge to identify the movers and shakers behind the biggest deals—and institutions—in the years ahead.
Several themes and common threads jumped out at us while we debated who should be on this list:
Many of them are taking on new challenges at seminal moments. Several members of the list have recently been promoted into roles where they’re quickly facing tough conditions. Diana Doyle and Lauren Garcia Belmonte took over as co-heads of tech equity capital markets at Morgan Stanley late last year as they steered the company through a dry spell for initial public offerings. Both a, prolific investor for decades, took the reins at Sequoia just before cryptocurrency exchange FTX—and its big investment in the firm—blew up.
A background in building leads to success. A common link among many of the pros on our list is that they’ve built businesses, platforms or strategies themselves. Elliott Management’s Jesse Cohn was a chief architect of the firm’s activist investing arm, which eventually grew to take on some of the biggest companies in America. Citi’s Dhiren Shah founded Morgan Stanley’s European technology operations. Steve McLaughlin left Goldman Sachs two decades ago to start an investment bank of his own.
Those who handle the biggest tech deals wield immense power. These people naturally came up in conversations about heavy hitters who have been on the most prominent deals we cover. They include investment bankers at JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and FT Partners who are clutch for those banks in handling tech deals. (This might be stating the obvious, but tech clients have been VIP customers for Wall Street in terms of revenue and activity for many years.)
The tech-finance revolution is coming. Or maybe it’s already here. Chris Churchman runs Marquee, a key part of Goldman Sachs’ trading operation that focuses on the intersection of technology and finance. The bank has been talking about Marquee since before its former CEO said Goldman was actually a tech platform in 2018. Meanwhile, Sudhir Nair runs Aladdin, BlackRock’s gargantuan tech platform, which helps investors analyze their trades for risk management and other purposes. Churchman has an interesting take you might not hear in other corners of the financial world: “The future of finance is who builds the best platform in the next 10 to 20 years,” he said.
These are the names and faces that stood out to us, and we expect them to be running the financial world in one way or another for years to come.
Rising Star Bankers:
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Steve McLaughlin |
FT Partners, the investment bank servicing startups that seek to disrupt traditional finance, printed money during the FinTech boom. Now its founder and CEO, Steve McLaughlin, is also set to benefit as startups look to sell themselves.
McLaughlin, 54, left his position as head of Goldman’s financial technology group in2002 to found an investment bank specializing in FinTech. Since then, he’s earned a reputation for getting big exits for clients—and raking in big fees along the way.
Besides running sales processes for startups like Divvy—leading to its $2.5 billion sale toBill.com in 2021—FT Partners also delivered on capital raises of $800 million each to neobank Revolut and payments startup Mollie in the same year, at multibillion-dollar valuations. As bankers, lawyers and investors predict an uptick in M&A, FT Partners stands to benefit from its specialty: the sell-side.