Barbara Mariniello has driven some of the largest debt offerings in recent history. This includes a deal that helped bring Discovery to the finish line in their merger with Warner Bros.
Last March, Mariniello's Barclays' team was the book runner in Discovery's $30 billion bond issuance, which Mariniello called the largest offering ever for a U.S. company with a BBB credit rating.
According to the banker, Discovery's middling credit rating made investors a bit wary to participate. An even bigger fear for investors was overall market volatility following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Mariniello said she put together a "full marketing effort, two days of calls" to an estimated 240 accounts.
The result was one of the most complex deals Mariniello has ever done, the banker said. There were 11 debt tranches, maturity durations that ranged between two and 40 years and a mix of deal terms that included callable and floating rate notes.
Mariniello's track record also includes $46 billion raised by Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2016 and CVS Health's $40 billion issuance in 2018.
Mariniello became global co-head of debt capital markets for London-based Barclays this April, a promotion from heading the bank's debt capital markets for the Americas. Mariniello is co-head of the division with Meghan Graper, whom she has known since 2004 when both worked together at Lehman Brothers. (Back then, Graper worked in the equity capital markets division and Mariniello in debt capital markets.)
Both are based out of New York, and have so far divided up which co-head goes to what market, with one leader, say, going to Paris and Melbourne and the other hitting up Frankfurt and Tokyo. In meeting with these clients, Mariniello has recently advised a shift in strategies for some due to uncertainty with global interest rates. For example, Barclays has increasingly bought back higher coupon U.S. dollar bonds and then refinanced with lower coupon Euro bonds.
"When [interest] rates were low, companies had full confidence that they could fund their capital expenditures," Mariniello said. "Now size and cost are more of a question mark."
One of Mariniello's leadership strategies is moving people to different company divisions as a way to provide a wider breadth of experience. Mariniello said that moving between different desks, like from leveraged finance to consumer and retail, benefited her early in her career, and that this can benefit her colleagues — even if some permanently change their jobs.
"My view is that maybe around half of them will switch desks, which is good for the firm," Mariniello said. "And the half that come back to the group are going to be better at their job, and more loyal and comfortable after having tried something new."
Outside of work, Mariniello and her family live in Hoboken, New Jersey, and together they cook meals for the city's homeless shelter. The banker described her children and their friends preparing meals in the kitchen like grilled chicken sandwiches, usually one weekend a month, and delivering lunch bags to the shelter.
