Looking after others was in his blood. Even after he was diagnosed in late 2009 with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, thinking of himself hardly came naturally. Friends arriving at his Brooklyn home to offer support and sympathy could be disarmed by him. Up would pop the human dynamo, busying himself with rustling up food for his guests. Paul Calello was no typical invalid.
And he was no typical banker either. A modern professional but with old-fashioned values, he could be decisive when needed, but caring too. When it came to steering Credit Suisse’s investment bank through the crisis, as he did in his last main role, that mix was essential. He fired people when he had to, but took the time to help them where he could.
"With Paul, the personal and professional sides were linked," says Wilson Ervin, a senior adviser at Credit Suisse and one of those who knew Calello best. "He was totally familiar with the technicalities of trading, but at his core he was much more of a people person. His ability to build relationships meant that he had built up a lot of trust when it came to taking the firm through the crisis."
He was able to cut risk when he needed to, and quickly. But he was not afraid of risk — he understood it, and enough to realise that when the world changed, attitudes to risk had to change also. He cut his teeth in trading, at Bankers Trust in Tokyo and New York. In 1990, he became one of the founders of Credit Suisse’s Financial Products division, where he built up the equity derivatives capability of what was then Credit Suisse First
Boston.
That was the start of a career at Credit Suisse that would pack an extraordinary amount of activity into a short time. No surprise, then, that the abiding memory colleagues have of him is one of energy.
Not a minute was wasted. Finding some time on his hands after touching down for a client pitch, he would be lacing up his running shoes or commandeering a bicycle. At other times, it might be skiing or windsurfing — anything to keep from standing still.
His quick movements were matched by a quick mind. When he took over Credit Suisse’s investment bank in 2007, having spent the previous five years building up first Asian investment banking and then the entire firm in that region, he was faced with some tough decisions.
Together with Brady Dougan, CEO of the bank, Calello set about dealing with the financial storm that blew up just weeks after he took the new job. But he wanted to do more than just put in place the right tactic for that moment. A deeper change was needed, and he helped develop a new model for the firm, partly driven by the crisis, but mostly stemming from a belief that the client-focused capital-efficient model that the firm now espouses was simply the right way to do business.
His ethical approach to banking meant that some decisions came easily to him. Proposals by others that would cut corners were quickly ruled out. For a firm that was trying to move into the top tier, this was essential.
This same integrity would later drive his passion to reform the industry in the wake of the crisis. To lecture was not his style, but he approached the thorny topic of banking regulation with all the rigour of an academic. The paper he wrote with Ervin early this year proposing the concept of bail-ins was a landmark contribution to the debate of how best to deal with banks that fail.
In the face of so much criticism, banking has needed its champions through the crisis. And none was better placed to play that role than Calello. Driven by an obviously principled sense of mission, when he made suggestions to regulators and politicians, they listened. If someone in his position had something to offer, he felt it his duty to do so.
But he didn’t share the bravado of some of his peers, and shied away from brazen comments in the media. Such things were not needed, for the simple reason that he was liked and respected. And like most truly popular people, he never courted popularity.
But the esteem in which he was held was obvious. Shortly before he died, colleagues endowed a professorship in his name at Columbia Business School, the Calello Professorship of Leadership and Business Ethics.
Since his diagnosis, he had stepped back from the intense pressure of the day-to-day running of the investment bank, which allowed him to spend more time with his wife and four children. But he nonetheless stayed engaged with the business right up to his death this week at the age of 49.
Still attending the office until just a few weeks ago, he would occasionally remark to colleagues that committee meetings were a welcome distraction from his other troubles. But such comments were rare: introspection was not his thing.
Nor was idealism: he had little time for fretting over what he could not achieve himself. He was a doer, not a dreamer. At Credit Suisse, he did not talk of far-off vague and lofty goals but rather of what could be done here and now.
That also came across in his love of music, perhaps the one thing that could slow him down, whether at the opera or in supporting his beloved New York Philharmonic. There he could settle down, a different man from the incessant fidget who would struggle to sit through a drawn-out baseball game with clients.
Driving to Beaverkill at weekends to better think about a tough problem, he and colleagues would flick through stations on the radio, his colleagues often looking for loud and fast rock.
But once in a while they might stumble across a station playing a slower, more reflective acoustic track. And then he might linger, thinking of the next time he could be bent over his guitar, picking out the tune.