Chase H&Q Head to Run Tech Investment Banking

SAN FRANCISCO - For the last year Chase Manhattan Corp. has proclaimed its intent to join the top tier of companies in investment banking, and particularly in underwriting and advising companies in the New Economy. It often holds up its acquisition of the emerging growth specialist Hambrecht & Quist Group as a key to that strategy.

With J.P. Morgan & Co. and its roster of blue-chip investment banking clients, does the story change? Maybe not.

Morgan's tech-related banking clientele tend to be larger and more established companies than the typical Hambrecht & Quist (and therefore Chase) client. Nevertheless, a new economy specialist has been put in charge of it all.

Daniel H. Case 3d, the head of Chase H&Q, would oversee all tech-related investment banking activities in the combined J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Just last summer Mr. Case was at the helm of Hambrecht & Quist, a niche San Francisco firm that could hardly compare in global stature to the mighty Morgan. In an interview Thursday, Mr. Case sounded a theme like the one repeated Wednesday by executives announcing the deal: that the combined company will bring Chase more products and Morgan more clients.

Mr. Case downplayed fears that merger within a larger wholesale bank would defeat the original entrepreneurial focus of H&Q, which he and his staff have tried to maintain as the group integrated with Chase.

"This makes an entirely new kind of bulge-bracket bank," Mr. Case said. "We have more entrepreneurial clients that are part of our mix, but we also have as many or more Fortune 1,000 relationships."

The appointment was announced in an internal memorandum. Mr. Case will have responsibility for technology, media, and telecommunications investment banking executives, as well as investment banking in the western states.

He also is one of eight senior executives on the senior policy committee of the combined Morgan-Chase.

Chase has built its own telecommunications investment banking group on the strengths of its New York-based leveraged finance platform. Julie Richardson, head of telecommunications and media, used to report to Geoffrey T. Boisi, the head of investment banking at Chase, who will be co-chief executive officer of the business at the new company.

It was not clear Thursday what role Dag Skattum, whom J.P. Morgan named head of its tech and telecommunications investment banking group in May after the reshuffling of its star telecommunications team, will play in the new organization. Chase and J.P. Morgan spokesmen in New York declined to comment on the appointments.

In one way, adding J.P. Morgan's investment banking franchise to the Chase platform - which itself is a product of smaller acquisitions, internal growth, and individual hires - would just speed up a model that Chase was attempting to create with its H&Q division.

After the Hambrecht acquisition "we were spending the great majority of our time building and broadening world's best discovery for industries around the world, and a minority of our time focusing on big companies in the new economy," said Mr. Case.

Still, time spent focusing on the larger companies "was a lot more than Hambrecht & Quist ever did," he said.

He declined to discuss his new role or appointments within the organization.

The one area where competitors expect the most overlap within the combined company is in telecommunications.

But it could be worse. If J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. had linked up instead, the overlap in telecommunications investment banking would have been something like 80%, said one investment banker. With Chase, it's probably more like 20%.


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