(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. has hired Suraj Tolani as a managing director on its regional investment banking team focusing on middle-market, US health-care services companies.

Tolani, who joins from boutique investment bank Moelis & Co., will be based in New York and report to John Richert, head of regional investment banking, according to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg News. 

Tolani spent 15 years at Moelis, where he most recently focused on originating deals involving health-care payers. He also advised private equity firms and founders on sales of companies and worked on corporate carve-out deals, according to the memo.

A representative for JPMorgan confirmed the contents of the memo. 

JPMorgan has been bulking up its regional investment-banking team, stationing bankers in growth cities such as Los Angeles and Dallas, where its legacy commercial bank didn’t have as big of a presence to provide M&A and underwriting advice to smaller companies. The team, with more than 100 bankers, acts as a sort of hybrid of the firm’s corporate and investment bank, which has focused on serving blue-chip companies, and the commercial bank, whose clients are smaller.

The hire will be “instrumental in driving our efforts to gain share in sell-side advisory and the associated financing opportunities with middle market, commercial banking and financial sponsor clients,” Richert and Cory Rapkin, a vice chairman of investment banking with a focus on health care, wrote in the memo.

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