Top Fifty Under Fifty: Euromoney’s Rising Stars  

David Pullman
Age 34
Managing Director
Fahnestock & Co, New York

Regardless of the other stellar deals he created this year, David Pullman will be remembered first and foremost for Bowie bonds.  With the celebrity cachet of rock star David Bowie, Pullman crossed from the esoteric world of structured finance into the spotlight of celebrity news.

Pullman devised the Bowie deal when he was the managing director of Gruntal & Co’s structured asset sales group.  When Fahnestock & Co bought the group earlier this year, Pullman brought the Bowie deal with him.

These royalty-secured bonds highlighted Pullman’s efforts to develop exotic asset-backed securitizations.  The deal attracted queries from borrowers as diverse as literary authors, soccer teams and software companies.

Plain vanilla is simply not part of Pullman’s palate.  He proudly claims that in his early days as a Mortgaged-based trader in the mid-1980’s he “only traded the exotics, even then.”

After graduating from the Wharton Graduate School of Finance, Pullman worked at such primary dealing firms as Pollack, Prudential Bache and Cantor Fitzgerald before he took the helm in the asset-backed department at Gruntal.

At Gruntal, Pullman helped shape the firms reputation as an asset-backed specialist.  Pullman’s team arranged the securitization of $100 million health-care receivables for National Century Enterprises as well as a two-tranche structured loan deal for $275 million for Natwest US.

As senior vice-president and head of a new structured asset sales group, Pullman, 34, is reveling in the publicity and new business.  The Bowie limelight almost transformed him into a star. With more than 2,000 articles, written about the Bowie deal, Pullman must be the most media-friendly banker in the business.  Given the Hollywood-style coverage.  Pullman has single-handedly created a new hybrid of investing; glam banking

EUROMONEY January 1998 – Page 45