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We’ll all miss Paul Calello. Most of all, of course, his close colleagues and friends. The people who worked for him at Credit Suisse. His peers in the upper echelons of the global financial community. But his passing is a blow to everyone who works in the banking industry. Paul was a true prince of investment banking. With everything he did, in the way he conducted himself and his business dealings with respect, enthusiasm, fun and intellectual rigour, he was a beacon of honour for a profession that has rightly earned its share of opprobrium in recent years.
At just 49 years of age, his career has been cruelly cut short. But what a huge amount he achieved in the time he had.
He’ll be remembered best for his transformation of Credit Suisse’s investment bank before and during the recent financial crisis. In the first half of 2007, while markets were still booming, Calello and his close friend and colleague Brady Dougan decided it was time to reinvent Credit Suisse’s investment bank towards a client-focused, capital-efficient model. The accepted wisdom at the time was that it was not possible to be sufficiently profitable just by doing business with clients.