| Andrew Pisker | ||||||
Investment banks are struggling to reinvent themselves amid dire markets conditions.
One of the more eye-catching of a slew of such changes is the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein decision to merge global debt and global equity into a single, global capital markets business.
Debt and equity are so fundamentally different that merging the two sounds distinctly odd. But the firm insists this is not mere cost-cutting dressed up. It's cut plenty of costs anyway and has no need to disguise it.
Certain core parts of the old bond and equity departments - such as cash and derivatives sales and trading - will remain separate and merely report, under a new structure, to Andrew Pisker, the new global head of capital markets. But Pisker estimates that 60% of staff in the debt and equity divisions will find their work affected by the merger.