Jason Napier, Matt Spick & team, Deutsche Bank
The buy side says: “Good industry insights and excellent stock selection.”
After spending the past two years in the runner-up position, the 13-member Deutsche Bank crew catapults to the top. Team leaders Jason Napier, 37, and Matt Spick, 39, work out of London and their colleagues are spread across Europe, with analysts in Athens, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan and Stockholm — plus two associates in India. They cover 47 institutions. The “structurally challenged” sector is “shifting toward a utility-type model — providing basic services in a heavily regulated environment with high capital intensity,” Spick explains. The team anticipates “a substantial fiscal drag in Europe that will be compounded by a negative credit impulse,” he adds. Thus the researchers are advising clients to underweight banks as they undergo a multiyear deleveraging process “that will most likely be painful,” Spick says, but will result in a “better capitalized, better funded and more efficient banking sector.” Napier, a graduate of Durban, South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal, holds a master’s degree in commerce and worked at KPMG in Johannesburg before joining Deutsche Bank in that city in 2000; he transferred to London in 2002. Spick, who holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the U.K.’s University of Exeter, joined the firm in 2000 after stints at the Bank of England, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and J.P. Morgan. Clients note that Napier, “although a much celebrated analyst, has remained quite accessible,” while “Spick is key to establishing that ‘partnership’ relationship that you would expect from top brokers.”
