GlobalCapital swarmed en masse to meet Barclays at a tapas bar last Wednesday to do what journalists and bankers do best: drink and gossip.
Although sadly for the Ranger, Barclays’ loans honcho Keith Taylor is not known for being loose lipped, even with a drink in hand.
Nevertheless, the Ranger enjoyed a pleasant evening with Taylor and his colleagues. The cool headed banker did share one small morsel of gossip, he told the Ranger about the loan market elite's grad trainee days.
Taylor himself started in the industry as a grad trainee at Royal Bank of Scotland, the same programme which Société Générales Richard Hill also trained in apparently.
Meanwhile Lloyds’s Stuart Moon and BNP Paribas’s Charlotte Conlan both went through the NatWest training scheme, the Ranger learned.
Another banker has had an especially colourful career, he started out as a professional football player before he came to the City.
The banker in question is Barclays’ levfin wiz, Mike Masters who was the first American to score a goal at Wembley.
Quite how one finds oneself moving from professional football to selling corporate bonds is anyone’s guess. Regardless, Masters had a few class anecdotes to impress Tonto and Silver with.
Especially entertaining were Masters’ experience working at Lehman’s in the bank's calamitous final days. The tales of the "lively" characters at the American bank were perhaps more entertaining than even his football tales, shockingly enough.
