Berenberg, the privately owned German bank, has had a busy year. It’s got a new headquarters in Hamburg, it’s worked on three IPOs in London, including Beauty Tech Group, which makes LED facemasks. And it’s been rehiring people who left years ago.
Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.
In the past few years, Berenberg has re-recruited at least five researchers and two salespeople who’ve worked there before.
In sales, they include Rod Ortigao in New York who left for Stifel in January 2023 and just came back, plus Vitor Giesteira in London, who left for Barclays in December 2022 and returned in July 2024.
In research, they include: Michael Filatov, a London autos researcher who left in 2023 and returned in July 2025; Michael Heider, a senior German equity who left in 2010 and who also reappeared in July 2025; Javier Gonzalez Lastra, a beverages researcher who left in 2023 and came back in January 2025; Nick Anderson, who left in 2019 and returned in May 2024; and Anna Patrice, the former head of the Berenberg EU midcap team, who left in 2020 and was back in 2023.
Rehiring ex-employees isn’t unheard of in banking, but Berenberg isn’t HSBC with 212,000 people. It employed fewer than 1,500 at the start of this year. The returnees therefore look like more than mere coincidence.
We haven’t spoken to Ortigao, Giesteira, Filatov, Heider, Lastra, Anderson or Patrice, so we don’t know why they chose to rejoin Berenberg. We can only presume that they like it there. People don’t usually work for the same bank twice if they had a bad time.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected].
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
