Venkat (Vinnie) Badinehal is the Head of the Financial Institutions Group within Global Investment Banking based out of New York. Mr. Badinehal specializes in providing strategic, capital markets, balance sheet and M&A advisory services to financial institutions clients. Prior to RBC, he was the Head of the Financial Institutions Group in the Americas at Deutsche Bank leading the investment banking coverage of financial institutions clients in the Americas. Prior to joining Deutsche Bank in 2009, Mr. Badinehal was a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch in the Financial Institutions Investment Banking Group. Badinehal has served as an advisor on some of the industry’s most notable transactions. He has been part of over 200 M&A and capital markets transactions globally with an aggregate transaction value of greater than $500 billion.
Mr. Badinehal has an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he was an Emerging Economies Fellow. At Wharton, he was the founding Chairman of the Wharton-India Economic Forum and currently serves on the advisory board of the forum.
Henry Rodgin "Rodge" Cohen is a prominent corporate lawyer whose practice focuses on commercial banking and financial institutions. He is currently the senior chairman of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. For 40 years, Mr. Cohen has worked on refinancings, capital raising, restructurings and acquisitions both for companies experiencing financial distress and/or regulatory difficulties and for companies providing financing or as acquirors. During the 2008 Financial Crisis, Mr. Cohen and Sullivan & Cromwell represented, among others, Bear Stearns, Lehman, Fannie Mae, AIG, Wachovia, National City, JPMorgan (in its acquisition of WAMU), Barclays (following Lehman’s bankruptcy), MUFG (in its investment in Morgan Stanley) and Banco Popular (in its acquisition of Western and Doral). Similar representations prior to the Financial Crisis included the bank consortium in its interim financing of Franklin National, Continental Illinois, the State of Ohio during the Ohio thrift crisis, First City, First Republic, and, in the period immediately prior to the Financial Crisis, financings by or on behalf of CIC, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp, and Wachovia. Following the Financial Crisis, similar assignments involved CIT and Ally Financial.