Return of the structurer as Barclays makes a major hire from Goldman Sachs

After years in the deep freeze, structurers are suddenly basking in the warmth of a preternatural hiring wave: they’re hot all over again.

The latest manifestation of structurers’ desirability is on display at Barclays. The British bank just recruited Dean Galligan, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and the firm’s former head of insurance structuring for EMEA. Galligan is joining Barclays as a managing director after a sixteen year career at GS.

Barclays isn’t the only bank with an interest in hiring structurers. Stacy Selig, the head of Goldman Sachs securities division’s Americas equity structuring group, said last week that the firm is stocking up on structuring talent as clients demand increasingly complex hedging tools based on so-called “factor investing” (eg. size, volatility, value and momentum) as well as on macroeconomic conditions.

Citi’s London office recently hired an equity derivatives structurer from Bank of America in the U.S. and recruiters who work with structurers say they’ve been busy for months.

For Barclays, Galligan is merely the latest in a long line of senior recruits as the British bank seeks to rebuild investment banking revenues. Barclays has hired over 30 managing directors to its global markets business since the start of 2017, prompting a few complaints from some existing staff that too much emphasis is being placed upon outsiders (although these may have been quashed by Barclays’ recent exemplary results).

For its part, Goldman Sachs seems to have been losing more staff than usual last year as it too increases hiring from outside. Galligan’s exit seems curious to the extent that this is a biannual ‘partner year’ at Goldman, when the firm promotes partner managing directors, and he might have been in with a shot. Then again, after being promoted to MD in 2009 and not making partner yet, Galligan probably decided he was better off availing himself of the money on offer at Barclays.

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