Ruggero Magnoni, Vice-chairman, Lehman Brothers (Europe)
Alex Seippel, Founder, the Roundstone Group
Broadview has quietly been advising on M&A, restructurings and private financings in the IT industry (as well as in telecommunications and media) for more than a quarter of a century. For many years it was no more than a one-man partnership (based just outside New York) but it has spent the past 10 years building a business that it justifiably describes in its brochure as "global".
Victor Basta, the cheerful managing director of Broadview's London-based European practice, joined in 1990, when the company had 50 employees. The figure is now five times that, and Broadview claims to advise on a greater volume of IT transactions worth up to $1 billion than any other investment bank. Recent transactions include advising Sendit on its takeover by Microsoft, Castle Networks on its takeover by Siemens, and Nokia on its purchase of Diamond Lane.
Broadview's core business is deals worth around $100 million. Basta says that a specialist "ought to be smarter [than the bulge-bracket investment banks] as to who the potential partners are. For the bigger deals [those worth over $1 billion] clients are essentially buying someone to bless the deal - ideally a bank whose name is known to all the shareholders; the targets are very well known and the potential for creativity far less.