JPMorgan Adds Goldman Dealmaker to Strategic Investors Team

(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. is hiring Haidee Lee from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. as head of mergers and acquisitions within a new coverage group providing advice to strategic investors such as private equity firms and family offices.

Lee, who most recently worked in Goldman's cross markets group focused on sell-side M&A, will be head of M&A for JPMorgan's North America Strategic Investors Group, or SIG, according to a memo Wednesday. Created two weeks ago, the team consolidates investment-banking coverage teams such as financial sponsors, family coverage and a new special purpose acquisition company -- or SPAC -- coverage team under one umbrella, led by Avery Whidden, mirroring a similar effort rolled out in London in 2016.

JPMorgan created the new SPAC coverage team, led by Ariel Granoff, last month as part of a growing push to cover blank-check firms amid a surge in fundraising and dealmaking, according to a separate memo. Almost 300 SPACs have announced plans to go public in the U.S. this year, seeking a combined $90 billion, figures compiled by Bloomberg show. JPMorgan already had bankers focusing on SPACs on other teams.

“Financial sponsors, family offices, infrastructure funds and SPACs are an increasingly important presence in the middle-market ecosystem, where sponsor ownership has grown from 1,000 companies to more than 8,000 companies in the last 10 years,” Marco Caggiano and Chris Roop, JPMorgan's co-heads of North America M&A, wrote in one of the memos. “Haidee's appointment will strengthen our M&A dialog with this SIG client base by augmenting our sell-side capabilities in partnership with colleagues in the industry verticals, regional investment banking and commercial banking.”

In a separate memo Wednesday, the bank said it hired Greenhill & Co.'s Alfredo Porretti as head of shareholder engagement and M&A capital markets for North America. He replaces Benjamin Wilson, who left the bank last month for a senior M&A role at Guggenheim Partners, according to people briefed on the change.

At Greenhill, Porretti built out the bank's shareholder advisory and activist defense practice across technology, media, telecommunications, health care, consumer products, financial institutions and industrials as head of shareholder advisory. He previously worked at Morgan Stanley and also spent time as a corporate lawyer at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.

Lee and Porretti will report to Caggiano and Roop. Porretti will also work under David Freedman, the global head of shareholder engagement and M&A capital markets.

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