Candor can be tough to take, but Donald Putnam has a tell-it-like-it-is impulse he can’t resist, a trait that’s probably won him more respect than friends.
His Boston-based merchant bank, Grail Partners, is one of the elite mergers and acquisitions advisers in the U.S., with offices in New York and San Francisco. Grail is relatively new, but Putnam has been at the M&A game since the 1980s, and over the years his clients have included heavyweights like Chase Manhattan Bank, Pacific Investment Management Co. and Wellington Management. Among the recent deals Grail has advised on: the 2006 acquisition of $5.5 billion hedge fund firm FrontPoint Partners by Morgan Stanley and State Street Corp.’s 2007 purchase of Palmeri Fund Administrators, a Fair Lawn, New Jersey–based firm that specializes in serving the private equity industry.
Putnam remains one of the go-to guys on big deals....
