David Schwimmer jokes that in more normal times he has no trouble making dinner reservations at the best restaurants.
For the affable and self-deprecating chief executive of the venerable 300-year-old London Stock Exchange, sharing a name with one of the stars of the comedy show Friends is just curious happenstance.
Much of the time when the other Schwimmer was making people laugh, the LSE boss was in Moscow doing deals for his former employer Goldman Sachs in a newly capitalist Russia.
Out of sight: LSE boss David Schwimmer has been strangely anonymous since taking over from his high profile predecessor Xavier Rolet nearly two years ago
Schwimmer has been strangely anonymous since taking over from his high-profile predecessor Xavier Rolet nearly two years ago.
The latter left after a ferocious row over the failed merger with Deutsche Boerse in Frankfurt.
As leader of one of the City’s great pillars, 52-year-old Schwimmer largely has been confined to barracks as he relentlessly pursued a grander and much more alluring global prize in the shape of the trading platform and analytical powerhouse Refinitiv – the markets arm of what used to be Reuters.
The timing of the completion of the £20billion deal on the last trading day of January could not be better as the City goes it alone outside the European Union.
In his first interview since the deal completed, the Yale graduate and Harvard Law School alumnus is enthusiastic.
‘We think it [the transformed LSE] is going to be a terrific outcome for the markets, for market participants and shareholders. It will be a global company with capabilities across multiple asset classes.
‘It will be an international business headquartered in London and we will be able to work with companies, insurers and governments all over the world.
‘We will have a presence in 70 countries and serve customers in twice that number.
‘We’ll have thousands of people in America, thousands of people in Europe, thousands of people in Asia.’
Schwimmer’s palpable excitement about being part of the global Britain project should resonate on Downing Street.
The Refinitiv deal runs counter to the idea that, cut off from the European Union, London’s status as one of the world’s great financial centres will be diminished.
The LSE boss is scornful of the attitude that Brussels is taking towards the City now we are outside the EU.
He finds it baffling that whereas EU regulators ‘have granted equivalence to markets in New York and in Hong Kong and in Australia they have chosen, I think for the politics of Brexit, not to grant equivalence to venues in the UK’.
In his view this is even more bizarre in that at present Britain is ‘more’ equivalent than other trading hubs.
A New Yorker, who moved to London in 2018 to take the LSE job, he spent most of his years at Goldman Sachs on developing market infrastructure around the world.
As with so many overseas newcomers to Britain, he seems more committed to the City and London living than some of the old guard.
He has chosen to base himself, his wife and two sons in the centre of town.
Schwimmer’s first tangible experience of potentially disruptive EU behaviour came last month when trading in some £5billion of euro denominated shares – such as Santander – migrated from the LSE to Continental-based exchanges.
Schwimmer says the LSE was fully prepared for this and had set up a version of its proprietary Turquoise multi-lateral trading platform in Amsterdam to trade stocks in the EU.
The Refinitiv deal runs counter to the idea that, cut off from the European Union, London’s status as one of the world’s great financial centres will be diminished
He suggests the big loser from this tussle is Europe itself since there is a ‘fragmentation of liquidity that is bad for the market’ and it will ‘make trading more expensive for buyers and sellers’.
When the LSE originally announced its ground-breaking deal to buy Refinitiv from New York investment management firm Blackstone, it was widely criticised for handing the private equity colossus an easy profit.
Schwimmer disputes the analysis, arguing that in the first year of ownership the deal should add 30 per cent to earnings.
In his ambition to establish a bigger international presence, Schwimmer wants to make it easier for UK and overseas tech start-ups to go public in London.
The recent queue of buoyantly received City public offerings, including The Hut Group, Dr Martens and Moonpig, has rekindled belief in London as a good place to bring firms to market and create tech unicorns – breakthrough firms valued at more than £1billion.
In particular Schwimmer would like to ease the listing rules so that tech companies could gain premium listings and a potential place in the FTSE 100 share index without having to give up a structure with a dominant founder shareholding.
At present at least 25 per cent of the shares in a new floats must be offered to outside investors.
‘We think it’s important to maintain very high corporate governance standards,’ Schwimmer says. But London needs to be ‘more in line with other jurisdictions’ such as New York and Hong Kong.
The LSE’s idea for bridging the gap is ‘sunset provision’ which places a time limit on two-tier type share structures.
Schwimmer does not hide his frustration at some of the obstacles he is facing as he seeks to bring ‘fantastic companies’ to the market.
He is politely critical of the Investment Association (IA), representing the UK’s traditional long funds, which has opposed any relaxation in its submission to former EU commissioner Lord Hill’s official review of London listing requirements in the post-Brexit era.
He says: ‘Many members of the IA do acquire shares in dual class companies in other markets around the world including New York, Hong Kong and elsewhere. So we have concerns about being constrained in our own market by people taking an ideological approach to corporate governance.’
Much of the last year for Schwimmer has been spent persuading investors of the wisdom of the Refinitiv deal and guiding it through some formidable regulatory obstacles, from Beijing to Brussels.
Most of this has been done from home in the Covid-19 era.
Schwimmer has only been in the Stock Exchange’s offices at Paternoster Square in the heart of the City for four days – all in September – since the first lockdown began in March 2020.
The business ‘is working well remotely’ he says.
But he can’t wait to be back in the thick of things as the 17th century exchange rediscovers its global mojo.
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