Greenhill Brand Guidelines: Robert Greenhill’s 1996 Boutique, Now Mizuho | Greenhill

A Morgan Stanley veteran’s 1996 boutique.

Greenhill was an independent investment bank founded in New York in 1996 by Robert F. Greenhill. English Wikipedia describes him as a former president of Morgan Stanley and a former chairman and chief executive of Smith Barney, and says that while at Morgan Stanley he founded the first mergers-and-acquisitions group on Wall Street. The firm he started, Greenhill & Co., advised corporations, partnerships, institutions and governments on mergers, acquisitions, restructurings, financings and capital raising, and Wikipedia calls it an advisory firm “entirely focused on complex financial transactions.”

The firm grew, Wikipedia says, much as other independent investment banks did: by recruiting managing directors from large investment banks, and senior people from other institutions, and by opening offices abroad. In May 2004 it completed an initial public offering of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

Expansion followed across several continents, and Mizuho, its later owner, dates each step. Greenhill opened in the United Kingdom in January 1998, in Frankfurt in November 2000, and in Canada in June 2006 by acquiring Beaufort Partners of Toronto. It established its presence in Australia in April 2010 by acquiring Caliburn, an independent investment bank in the region, opened a Stockholm office in 2012 for cross-border work involving the Nordic region, and added Madrid in 2017 and Paris in 2020. Wikipedia records an office in São Paulo opened in October 2013, when the firm hired the former head of a rival’s Brazilian investment banking business, and an agreement in January 2015 to buy Cogent Partners, a bank advising on secondary-market sales of private-equity interests. By Wikipedia’s count Greenhill came to work from 17 offices, from Toronto and Houston to Stockholm, Tokyo and Melbourne.

Mandates, not products.

Greenhill’s record was built on large advisory assignments. English Wikipedia lists its role in the 2007 acquisition of ABN AMRO, in the 2008 merger of Northwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines, in Roche’s 2009 purchase of the publicly held shares of Genentech, and in the US Treasury’s sale of its stake in AIG in 2012. It also notes that the firm advised a group of former Morgan Stanley partners in their 2005 campaign for a change of chief executive at that bank.

Later assignments, in the same account, included advising Actavis on its purchase of Forest Laboratories and Safeway on its merger with Albertsons, both in 2014; Teva on its 2015 purchase of the generics business of Allergan; and Tesco on its 2017 acquisition of the wholesaler Booker. In 2019 Greenhill advised International Flavors & Fragrances on its merger with the Nutrition & Biosciences business of DuPont, and Total System Services on its merger with Global Payments. In 2022 it advised Brookfield on its acquisition of control of Westinghouse Electric, which Brookfield went on to own alongside Cameco, Wikipedia says.

Wikipedia’s list of the firm’s recent clients also includes Alcoa, Cigna, GlaxoSmithKline and the London Stock Exchange Group.

How independent banks present themselves.

Independent investment banks sell advice rather than balance sheets, and their public identities tend to reflect that. An advisory firm’s website usually leads with a name, a list of offices and a record of work. Most of the firms in this guide carry the surname of a founder or founding family, and the house name is typically set in a restrained serif or a plain sans with almost no ornament. The office list itself can run to dozens of cities on several continents.

The record of work is the centrepiece. Advisory firms publish transaction lists, the modern form of the printed “tombstone” notice, naming the client, the counterparty, the firm’s role and the year. Evercore’s transactions pages, for example, mark each mandate as pending or closed. In these guides the deals are named without their sums.

Around that record sit a handful of recurring page types: sector and coverage pages describing the industries and kinds of assignment a firm handles, such as mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, capital markets and private capital; team and leadership pages with partner biographies; and, at firms with research or asset management arms, research reports, outlooks and insights. Media pages often consist largely of announcements of senior hires by sector and city.

Careers pages complete the set: they describe training programmes, internships and the idea of partnership; Evercore, for one, calls talent its primary distinguishing asset. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, how its ownership changed and how it presents itself today — and keeps each firm’s own claims attributed to it.

Absorbed by Mizuho in December 2023.

Greenhill’s independence ended in 2023. In May 2023 the Japanese banking group Mizuho Financial Group agreed to buy the firm for cash, and on 1 December 2023 the law firm Paul, Weiss, which advised Mizuho, announced that Mizuho had completed the acquisition. Paul, Weiss described Greenhill at the time as an independent investment bank advising on significant mergers and acquisitions, restructurings and capital raising transactions. The deal, it said, added complementary services to Mizuho’s existing capital markets, banking and private capital advisory capabilities. English Wikipedia says Greenhill was to operate as Mizuho’s independent M&A and restructuring advisory arm.

The name now lives inside the buyer, with the same brief: Mizuho says the unit advises corporations, partnerships, institutions and governments worldwide on significant mergers, acquisitions, financings, restructurings and capital raising. The old greenhill.com address forwards to the banking pages of Mizuho Americas, where the business appears as Mizuho | Greenhill, with a combined logo in the site’s navigation. Mizuho’s page for the unit says that “in 2023, Greenhill was acquired by Mizuho” and lists senior advisory teams in Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Madrid, Melbourne, Paris, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney and Toronto, in addition to its United States headquarters. Greenhill & Co. no longer trades as an independent firm; the Greenhill name continues as part of Mizuho’s investment banking business.

The unit’s pages present its record the way the old firm did, through named assignments; the notable transactions listed there include advising OZ Minerals on its acquisition by BHP, Cirque du Soleil on its restructuring and sale, and Canopy Growth on an investment by Constellation Brands. Its offices in Paris, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Toronto, Sydney and Melbourne each carry their own recruiting notes for analysts, associates and interns, posted through Mizuho’s careers system.

For a design guide, Greenhill shows how a boutique’s name can be kept as a sub-brand after a takeover, set beside the parent’s name rather than replaced by it. Compare Morgan Stanley, where its founder made his name, and Evercore, another New York independent adviser. For this guide we use a deep green, a pale stone and a soft brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Greenhill’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.