Business Insider
Climbing Wall Street’s ranks as a dealmaker is no easy feat.
Yes, you need math chops and spreadsheet-modeling wizardry. You also need to tolerate, if not relish, working long hours to close the job. Second place is a set of steak knives, remember.
But that alone won’t get you far.
The business is all about building relationships and navigating personalities — those of your clients and of your firm. These skills are more nebulous and can take many years to cultivate. That’s why it’s such an impressive feat to be sourcing and executing serious investment-banking transactions in your early 30s.
We’ve rounded up some of the rising rainmakers from firms across Wall Street, culled from more than 200 nominations by peers, clients, and financial institutions themselves. Each has made outsized contributions and distinguished themselves at an early age, earning accolades from superiors and clients alike.
Titles aren’t everything — some firms have more layers of management than others — but these are your standouts and managing directors of tomorrow. Or, in some cases, today.
Read on for 16 of the most impressive rising stars in Wall Street investment banking, ordered by age.
Glenn Silverstein, 30, Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Glenn Silverstein is a top performer in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s equity capital markets unit, sourcing 15 deals this year across the healthcare sector that pulled in more than $ 27.5 million in fees for the firm.
The George Washington University grad joined BAML in 2013 after several years at RBS. Silverstein, a vice president, focuses on leading originations for high-growth healthcare companies to fund product development and commercialization. He’s part of a healthcare team that has sourced equity for biotech firms like: Bluebird Bio ($ 400 million follow-on) — a cancer immunotherapy company that rivals Kite Pharma — and gene therapy firms Audentes (a $ 75 million IPO) and Regenx (a $ 139 million IPO).
Moritz Baier, 31, Goldman Sachs
Moritz Baier
While a teenager in Germany, Moritz Baier was earning thousands of euros dominating millions of competitors in the popular computer game “Diablo II” (yes, he skipped classes; no, the parents of the first-generation high-school graduate didn’t mind). He used some of his winnings to pay for business school at Stanford, and today he’s a senior associate in Goldman Sachs’ burgeoning technology investment-banking business, where he helped build and co-leads the digital gaming and e-sports practice.
Along the way, Baier has worked for and advised some of the world’s most influential people. At Stanford, he was a teaching assistant for Condoleeza Rice. In nearly seven years at IBM (18 countries and five continents), he advised CEO Ginni Rometty and other top executives. Since joining Goldman in 2015, he’s advised Elon Musk and Michael Dell — including on the largest tech buyout of all time: Dell’s $ 67 billion acquisition of IT titan EMC. All told, Baier has done more than 20 transactions worth north of $ 100 billion in two years.
Christine Ferris, 31, JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan
Christine Ferris is the global cohead of the CLO primary business at JPMorgan Chase, where as executive director she oversees a team of 15 that has completed more than 50 transactions this year totaling $ 24.2 billion of capital raised to purchase leveraged loans.
Ferris joined the country’s largest bank in 2007 after graduating from Yale with a degree in psychology. She ascended the ranks at JPMorgan in sales and trading, initially focusing on structured credit sales. She was named global head of CLO syndicate in 2013 and promoted to cohead of the primary business in 2016.
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