Jefferies Adds Investment-Banking Staff as Rivals Pull Back

(Bloomberg) -- Jefferies Financial Group Inc. is on a hiring spree.

The company’s investment bank has added 350 people this year, a 10% increase to its headcount at the end of 2018, according to a quarterly newsletter to clients and employees. Jefferies said it has added to its research department even as competitors pare back, and is building out its operations in Europe and Asia.

The most recent hires include two managing directors and a senior vice president who joined Jefferies from BB&T Corp., which is merging with SunTrust Banks Inc., according to a person with knowledge of the situation. The three will join Jefferies’s logistics and transportation investment-banking division, part of a continued expansion of the company’s global industrials group.

CLSA has also lost staff to Jefferies, which poached 27 employees including top banking analyst Brian Johnson from the brokerage, amid a buildup of operations in Australia, the person said.

“We are committed to constantly invest throughout the Jefferies platform so we can best support our clients in an ever-changing world,” Chief Executive Officer Rich Handler and President Brian Friedman said in the newsletter.

Jefferies, a trading firm that’s been building up its investment-banking operations, is on track to have almost $2 billion in revenue from that business this year, it said in the newsletter. That would be up from $1.91 billion last year.

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