This week we chat with Kevin Alexander, the deputy chief executive officer, Americas, and Michael Moravec, the head of investment banking, Americas, for Natixis. Natixis is the international corporate and investment banking, asset management, insurance and financial services arm of Groupe BPCE, the 2nd largest banking group in France.
The Lead Left: Kevin and Michael, thanks for joining us. So, full disclosure, Churchill has had a long, excellent relationship with Natixis. You helped get us up and running back in 2006 with a $1.25 billion middle market CLO. But a lot has happened since then. Give us an update.
Kevin Alexander: Thanks Randy. Great to be able to catch up. So yes, we have long been a lender to other lenders utilizing CLO technology, but we haven’t consistently been a final lender. Over the last few years, we’ve been working to develop capital market solutions . Now we’re doing it in three ways. We are set up with three primary divisions.
First, our global markets business, which includes fixed income, equities and commodities to primarily support our primary business. Secondly, our investment bank, which includes all of our private side origination businesses focusing heavily on debt capital markets and our expanding content offering which in large part is underpinned by the controlling interest we bought in Peter J. Solomon. And thirdly, we have strategic sectors that focus on specific industry groups. For example, real assets, which includes real estate, aviation and infrastructure as well as energy & natural resources. All these divisions work in tandem.