The last of the City’s frequent flyers

When Win Bischoff and his colleagues Robert Swannell and David Challen threw a party last month to celebrate 100 years of working together at Schroders and Citigroup, it was quite a bash. Not only did it draw the cream of FTSE-100 chiefs — Sir Chris Gent, Sir Nigel Rudd and Stuart Rose, to name just three — but the throng in the Victoria and Albert Museum included a fair scattering of rival investment bankers. ‘You only have to play golf with Win to know how competitive he is, but he’s always worked well with other bankers,’ said one guest.

Seven years earlier to the day, the tall, stylish Bischoff had sealed the sale of the family-controlled Schroders investment banking arm to the vast American Citigroup — a ‘bulge bracket’ bank that had already gobbled up Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney. Eighteen key people at Schroders had committed themselves to stay with the merged group and, thanks to Bischoff’s charisma, most of them are still there today. ‘Win is a fantastic motivator,’ says Swannell. ‘His instincts are always spot on.’

For Bischoff, the four days between secretly agreeing the merger with Citigroup in principle and persuading those 18 people to stay — or lose the deal — were the worst in his business life. ‘Horrible,’ he says, visibly shuddering. But the suffering was worth it. Today Sir Winfried Bischoff — he was knighted in 2000 — is the only London-based investment banker of his generation still operating at the top of his game. As chairman of Citigroup Europe and a member of the group’s top management committee in New York, he heads an investment bank nobody can ignore. ‘When there’s something large going on, this firm will be approached. So we see an enormous range of activity.’

From his airy 16th-floor corner office in Canary Wharf, Bischoff can gaze over to the City of London where he started his career at J.