It’s finally happened. After multiple false starts and months of rumours, Aloke Gupte is leaving JPMorgan and joining Citi. So is Alex Watkins. Bloomberg reported today that the two men will be Citi’s co-head of global equity capital markets and head of technology financing, respectively.
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Here at eFinancialCareers, we’ve been flagging Gupte’s departure to Citi for a long time. JPMorgan insiders initially forecast Gupte’s exit in April 2024, before telling that he’d disappeared and was joining Citi last November. In April, they said he’d surely gone. Citi and JPMorgan said this wasn’t the case. Now, though, it is.
Gupte’s arrival at Citi comes after the bank lost Paul Abrahimzadeh and Russell Chong, the heads of its North American ECM business, in February. Neither departure seems to have been desired. Last year Citi also said goodbye to Suneel Hargunani, its long-serving co-head of EMEA ECM, leaving a leadership gap at the top of the ECM business in Europe. It’s that gap that Gupte is going to fill.
Sources say that Gupte is close to Achintya Mangla, Citi’s head of financing, who rules both ECM and DCM. The two men worked together at JPMorgan, along with Vis Raghavan, who now runs Citi’s entire investment bank. Mangla and Gupte are understood to have been colleagues at JPMorgan in Asia before moving to London.
There are complaints at Citi that Raghavan is giving big jobs to his JPMorgan colleagues. However, there are also suggestions that Raghavan is the right man to shake things up there. Citi’s M&A bankers turned in an excellent second quarter; DCM bankers, however, did not.
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