When former Bank of America CFO Alvaro G. de Molina moves to private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management next week, there will be plenty of financial services businesses for him to help manage.
His jump to the private equity world, first reported on Monday, might have been predicted for an executive who — when he left the nation’s second-largest bank in December — told the press that he had found the work at B of A “a little less fun” because of the restrictions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Cerberus told CFO.com that with “his extensive experience in financial services and investment banking, Mr. de Molino is ideally suited to provide guidance and counsel across the broad range of financial services investments in the Cerberus portfolio.” In addition to a 51-percent holding in GMAC Financial Services, purchased from General Motors, the 15-year-old New York-based firm it has major banking interests in Austria, Japan, and elsewhere.
After his surprising resignation from Bank of America, where de Molina served as CFO a mere 18 months after a 17-year career at the bank, the executive said: “While I have enjoyed many aspects of being CFO, I also am very interested in other business opportunities, and I have decided that now is the right time for me to make a move.” He also told the New York Times he was interested in becoming a public-company CEO or running a hedge fund or private equity firm. “I had a long track record in trading and managing money,” he told the paper at the time. “I could do something like that.”
It was, however, his blast at Sarbox that got the most attention.
De Molina moved to the top finance spot at Bank of America in September 2005, replacing then-CFO Marc Oken, who himself had resigned after only 17 months in the post. De Molina, now 49, previously had been CEO of Banc of America Securities, the bank’s investment banking subsidiary. De Molina was succeeded as CFO by Joe Price, who had been B of A’s risk management executive for Global Corporate and Investment Banking.