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How to safeguard the value of risk capital.

Private equity in Latin America and Eduardo Elejalde need each other. Elejalde is chairman of the Latin American Venture Capital Association (Lavca) as well as the chief executive of three funds in Colombia that are on track to report internal rates of return of 35%. Having transformed himself from a regional fund manager in the 1990s to a Colombian manager in the past decade, Elejalde now hopes to continue his private equity crusade in Latin America and open up niche funds in Peru and possibly Mexico. To each new fund and country, Elejalde brings expertise and experience. His ideas on regulation and legal framework are often seen as indisputable and his reputation as a manager who can produce returns is justified.

Unlike many of the 100-odd new Saudi investment firms, Jadwa is not just a brokerage or an under-employed Saudi equivalent of an international firm. Created three years ago by Prince Faisal Bin Salman and other Saudi investors, Jadwa is Shariah compliant and has the sixth-largest asset management portfolio in the Kingdom.

Innovation in finance is likely to be driven as much from emerging markets as the developed world. Some of the biggest names in banking, asset management and private equity will spring from the markets of Latin America, Asia and EEMEA.

These are the people and businesses that will help shape the financial markets in the years to come: from firms old and new that will lead the field in restructuring, to growing forces to be reckoned with in capital markets, wealth management, securities trading and research.

The 2009 guide to Technology in Treasury Management (PDF)

The Japanese M&A boutique GCA won mainstream attention – and third place on the year’s league table – in 2007 when it advised on two of the biggest deals Japan’s financial sector had ever seen, Citi’s acquisition of Nikko Cordial and Mizuho’s merger with Shino Securities. While both deals had their subsequent problems, it was the fact that this small boutique, founded by Nobuo Sayama and Aki Watanabe in 2004, had beaten much more established players to the mandate that caught the industry’s attention. In 2007, GCA went a step further by buying – they say merging with – US peer Savvian. Critics at the big foreign M&A franchises in Tokyo sniped that the plan wouldn’t work, that GCA had only won the big financial sector mandates because their clients didn’t want to hand sensitive business to their real rivals, that the boutique’s value is in its partners and that the deals would dry up.

With the launch of Primus Financial, former Salomon and Citigroup veterans Bob Morse, Huan Guocang and Wing-Fai Ng are hoping to build a "multi-billion global financial services firm based in Asia". They plan to use their $1 billion of start-up capital – all from a single wealthy family in Asia – to move into banking, insurance and asset management, with a focus on providing services to corporations and rich individuals. They have pedigree in the region: Morse was for 25 years a chief executive of Citi Asia, Ng was a managing director at Taiwan’s Fubon Financial responsible for the group’s overall strategy and acquisitions, and Huan was head of investment banking Asia-Pacific at HSBC from 2001 to 2005 before founding the private equity fund that was the precursor of his present venture. The plan is hugely ambitious: the trio aim to create a region-wide financial services platform through strategic acquisitions and selective hiring, beginning with the purchase of a banking platform. The business model may not sound revolutionary, and some industry insiders privately question whether the plan to become "the world’s leading Asia-based financial services holding company" might not be too ambitious and broad. The founders are veteran bankers with deep contacts, however, and if they can target and acquire appropriate banking assets to give them the platform they need there is every chance of success (see Morse signals grand plans for post-Citi bank for more on Primus).

The Commonwealth of Independent States is hardly renowned as a hotbed of investment banking talent but Tbilisi-headquartered Galt & Taggart Securities is helping to change that perception. Since 2000, GTS has expanded beyond its home market in Georgia to encompass offices in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine as well. GTS chief executive Nick Piazza says that the firm’s key strength is the fact that it is owned by London Stock Exchange-listed Bank of Georgia, which numbers emerging market funds such as East Capital and Firebird Asset Management among its shareholders. "We pride ourselves on servicing Bank of Georgia shareholders’ needs in the region. Their faith in our reliability and market knowledge has helped us to weather this year’s tougher market conditions," Piazza says. He adds that as one of the few full-service investment banks in the CIS, GTS can offer international investors access to frontier markets that until recently had been bereft of world-class research and trading capabilities. At the same time it offers local investors access to more than 180 stock exchanges. Alongside equity and fixed-income brokerage and asset management services, GTS has executed more than 50 investment banking transactions worth more than $1 billion.

Since BTG’s inception in September 2008, its founding partners, Andre Esteves, former global head of UBS fixed income, and Persio Arida, former central bank governor of Brazil, have made clear their ambitions. Within six months, the investment group had acquired Via Brasil, a distressed gas station chain, London asset management firm Lentikia Capital and signed a partnership deal with Estapar, Brazil’s largest parking facility managers. The group also took a profit when it bought, stripped and sold Lehman Brothers’ Brazilian operations.

Carl Im believes he has spotted a niche in the market. "There is a gap," he says, "between the coverage model of the bulge-bracket banks and the demand space." Im, a former Goldman Sachs options trader who set up the firm’s Korea business before moving to head the Pacific Rim strategic solutions group at Merrill Lynch, believes he can fill that gap by providing his expertise in complex financial products to small and medium-sized companies, as well as private equity firms that may be looking at those companies. Much of his work so far has been in helping smaller firms with distressed liabilities – including Korean companies caught up in the recent kiko FX derivatives fiasco – find a way out of their situation. He is also working with private equity companies, which might regard these distressed firms as unsalvageable, to see if there is a way he might be able to help them restore their potential purchases to health. For Im, the work is a natural extension of his experience trading and creating complex derivatives contracts from within the investment banks; these firms, he says, often do not find it cost-effective to cater to smaller clients’ risk management needs, and in the present market conditions the demand for such service is only increasing.

Greater economic integration between Gulf states will foster more mergers in the region and more jobs for a quintessential boutique, Gulf Merger. Essentially the creation of one man, Gulf Merger’s focus – middle-market M&A advisory and acquisition finance involving Kuwaiti firms – could hardly be more specialized.