Barrenjoey technology boss David Williams resigns as staff exits mount

The local investment bank is losing its chief technology officer David Williams, as the firm sees broader staff movements during its bonus season.

Barrenjoey’s chief technology officer David Williams has resigned to take a career break. Picture: Barrenjoey

Local investment bank Barrenjoey is losing its chief technology officer David Williams, as the firm sees broader movement among its ranks during its bonus season.

Mr Williams – a founding partner at Barrenjoey – was the firm’s second staff member and resigned on Tuesday to take a career break, according to sources.

He was responsible for technology applications, infrastructure, architecture, site reliability and data security. Prior to joining Barrenjoey Mr Williams was Deutsche Bank Australia’s head of information technology, and had been with the bank for 27 years.

Barrenjoey, led by Brian Benari, has also seen the exits of real estate bankers Edmund Zhang and Sai Naicker this week. Earlier, Barrenjoey and head of equity financing James Jennings parted ways. Mr Jennings was a founding partner and essentially led the firm’s push into prime brokerage.

Mr Williams is said to be taking a career break after getting the bulk of the firm’s businesses up and running and building the technology functions – across the cloud and software-as-a-service strategy – from scratch. The technology operations are now moving to a more operational phase after a build phase was started ahead of Barrenjoey launching in 2020.

Tech sector stalwart Greg Baster will lead the technology function at Barrenjoey on an interim basis, following the departure of Mr Williams.

Movement of employees is not uncommon at investment banks after annual bonuses are paid.

Barrenjoey had a busy financial year for merger and acquisition advisory, but it is still scaling up in other divisions.

Magellan Financial Group’s annual profit results on Wednesday showed Barrenjoey posted a “modest profit” for the fiscal year.

Mr Benari said the profit was ahead of Barrenjoey’s original plan and both its deal advisory and equities businesses were in the black.

“We had very strong performance in our two operating businesses – corporate finance and our equities business throughout the 2022 year,” he added.

“As I sit here today we‘ve now got three of our five businesses operating and I’m expecting by the end of this calendar year we will have at least commenced all of our five businesses.”

The exits at Barrenjoey come as the firm on Monday paid more junior staff their bonuses, but the payments did not extend to all senior bankers, according to sources.

A sizeable group of senior bankers were told bonus payments would not be forthcoming this year as the firm took a longer-term view of performance.

Asked how the firm would approach bonuses and whether a return to paying the bulk of senior staff variable pay would weigh on profit, Mr Benari would only say: “Everyone is a shareholder in the organisation here and we have appropriate remuneration arrangements for all of our staff.”

On the firm’s profit performance, Mr Benari noted the costs of the business units that were getting up and running had offset income of the operating divisions in the last fiscal year, but would start to generate income.

“What you‘ll effectively get is 2023 will be another transitional year where you have some build costs but you also start generating revenue off the last of those three businesses … by the end 2023 financial year you’ll have all five businesses firing.”

Barrenjoey started its bond trading operations in July, while the fixed income derivatives business is scheduled to begin running in the last quarter of the calendar year. Mr Benari said the equity financing division would also start operating by the end of 2022.

Magellan has a 36 per cent economic interest in Barrenjoey and a 5 per cent voting interest. The economic interest declined from 40 per cent as Barclays upped its stake in the local investment bank.

Staff own just shy of 50 per cent of Barrenjoey. Barclays increased its Barrenjoey shareholding to 18.2 per cent by subscribing to $75m of new capital.