Goldman Names Estrada to Co-Head Brazil Investment Banking

Cristiane Lucchesi, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. named Cristina Estrada co-head of the investment-banking division in Brazil.

Estrada, who is currently chief operating officer of the Latin America financing group, will continue to head the region’s investment-banking derivatives business, the New York-based company said in an internal memo Friday. She’ll relocate to Brazil from New York and co-lead the division with Ricardo Bellissi. She’s replacing Rodolfo Soares, who left the firm earlier this year.

Goldman doesn’t have a chief executive officer in Brazil, and is instead managed by a committee that Estrada will join. The other committee members are Bellissi, Paula Moreira, head of the fixed-income, exchange rates and commodities sales and trading desk; Juliano Arruda, responsible for equities sales and trading; and Ricardo Mourao, the local chief operating officer.

“To have a committee heading the bank in Brazil helps Goldman to better achieve one of its main goals -- to really create a connection between divisions,” Estrada, who joined Goldman in 2001 and was named a managing director in 2015, said in a phone interview from New York.

The firm’s strategy is to keep searching for deal opportunities and help clients hedge them, such as by swapping local inflation-linked bonds to floating bonds linked to the interbank interest rate DI, she said. It also is providing exchange-rate hedges for companies doing cross-border mergers and acquisitions, according to Estrada.

Bellissi said in the same phone interview that, although this has been a difficult year for investment-banking globally, Goldman participated on some iconic transactions in Brazil. They include the 33.7 billion-real ($6.5 billion) share offering that privatized the giant power utility Eletrobras, this year’s second-biggest such transaction globally.

Estrada and Bellissi “will continue to focus on growing our leading franchise in the region by driving commercial opportunities, advising on important strategic initiatives and working to further enhance our client footprint in this important and growing market,” Aasem Khalil, Goldman’s co-head of Latin America, said in the memo.

(Updates with Estrada’s comments in fourth paragraph and Bellissi’s in sixth.)