Corporate access is a young discipline – in its formal sense just a decade or so old, which is about as old as the corporate access career of Mark Pellegrino.
Pellegrino is the new head of US corporate access for UBS, reporting to Matt Foulds, head of US sales for the bank’s cash equities business. He says that makes him perhaps the only ‘born-and-bred corporate access professional heading up a team right now.’
Pellegrino was formerly head of Americas corporate access at Deutsche Bank and had a stint in the US corporate marketing group at Citi. He began his career as a capital markets consultant at Thomson Financial, where his duties included corporate access analytics for Goldman Sachs.
He insists his primary clients are IROs, not investors. ‘In a world where the focus can be too much on the buy-side clients, the needs of the management team can be lost,’ Pellegrino explains. ‘So we’re developing a platform to use management’s time wisely. It comes down to how we can maximize the return on time for a corporate.’
UBS, he goes on, is distinguished by its global distribution platform, so it can help companies with IR strategy in Europe or Asia versus the US. Plus, considering UBS is run mostly by former research analysts, its commitment to research is greater than most.
Pellegrino wants to work with companies to plan all their outreach, not just the trips they go on with UBS. ‘When an IR team sits down in December or January and says, We can do 20 days on the road this year, we can help that team with its decisions. I don’t expect it to do all its roadshows with us, but as a corporate access team, we need to deliver a higher level of service – a bit like an IR consulting group.’
Looking back at his career so far, Pellegrino marvels over experiences like visiting Panasonic’s CEO in Japan, or meeting the chief of Petrobras in Brazil. ‘I’m one of the few people who has met IROs all over the world,’ he concludes.
