First Republic adds a foreign-exchange advisor in Calif

Nick Parmee

7 August 2009

Senior forex professional Smaltz BoA-owned bank's Century City team. San Francisco-based First Republic has added another former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) executive help meet the foreign-exchange needs of its clients -- this time on the U.S. West Coast. Century City, Calif.-based Andrew Smaltz joins a growing team of foreign exchange professionals at the Bank of America-owned private bank.

"Andrew Smaltz is an experienced professional who shares First Republic's commitment to delivering exceptional service," says First Republic's president and COO Katherine August-deWilde. "Andrew strengthens our expanding team of bankers, foreign exchange professionals and wealth managers on both the East and West coasts."

Elephant in the room In June, First Republic hired Former RBS risk manager John Riley as a Boston-based foreign-exchange advisor to work with its clients in New England and New York.

Smaltz has been a foreign-exchange manager for about eight years. Prior to working in RBS' forex and derivatives group, he worked at ABN Amro and FleetBoston Financial (now part of Bank of America).

First Republic, technically a subsidiary of Merrill Lynch, has been tipped for a possible sale since Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America said it would buy Merrill in September 2008.

When Merrill completed its $1.8-billion cash-and-stock acquisition of First Republic about two years ago, it said it was buying it to increase its high-net-worth wallet share and to enhance its existing private-banking capabilities -- areas that Bank of America presumably has covered as a result of its $2.3-billion purchase, also in the summer of 2007, of U.S. Trust.

First Republic's foreign-exchange group serves the bank's business-side clients including middle-market companies, asset managers, professional-service firms, and non-profit institutions.

With so much uncertainty in capital markets lately, institutional and sophisticated private investors are looking to foreign-exchange strategies to eke out better overall returns.

First Republic has branches in and around San Francisco and in the Pacific Northwest, southern California, Nevada, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. -FWR

Purchase reproduction rights to this article.