Moelis & Co has been hiring, and now it’s clear to see why. It’s just produced its Q3 results, and posted 26% year on year revenue gains (and is up 13% for the first nine months), largely thanks to ongoing growth in its M&A business.
Ken Moelis, the company’s founder and CEO, has been in a bullish mood for most of 2017 and said back in April that it could “easily” double its headcount in an interview with Financial News. It currently employs around 650 people but has been adding headcount at the top. It hired five managing directors in Q3 and promoted another eight internally, and now has 115 people at this rank worldwide.
This hiring has come at a cost – it spent $99.6m on compensation for the first nine months of this year, a 13% increase on 2016, at a time when most larger investment banks are cutting back on pay. It generated revenues of $170m for the most recent quarter and $515.4m for the first nine months of 2017.
Moelis has recently made significant senior-level hires, both at its New York headquarters and in other offices across the U.S. That includes former UBS and Citi investment banker Trevor Montano, most recently the chief investment officer of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, who joined Moelis last month as an MD with coverage of regional banks and non-bank lenders in the Financial Institutions Group at the bank’s Washington, D.C. office.
Moelis also hired Boston-based MD Jay Hernandez, who previously worked at middle-market investment bank Harris Williams & Co., where he rose up the ranks to MD over 13-plus years, as well as Fleet Capital and PwC. Not to be left behind in the technology M&A arena, Moelis hired Jonathan Kaufman as an MD in its San Francisco office, who previously worked at GE Capital, UBS and Deutsche Bank before most recently rising to senior MD at the tech-focused boutique investment bank Marlin & Associates.
In addition to all of the hiring it’s been doing for its various U.S. offices, Moelis has also been adding headcount at all levels in London.
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