— LONDONWhitcomb & Hartfield, the mid-sized investment bank long known in the City of London for its understated style and its outsized footprint in the European mid-market, announced on Friday a sweeping overhaul of its London operations, eliminating 90 positions and refocusing the practice on energy transition and infrastructure advisory.

The bank, founded in the late 1990s by two former partners of a larger firm, said in a brief statement that the changes were intended to "sharpen the franchise around the verticals where we have decisive competitive advantage." In practice, the announcement marks an end to two decades of broad-spectrum coverage that had, in recent years, brought the firm into uneven competition with both the global bulge-bracket banks and the new generation of single-sector boutiques.

Internal memos circulated mid-morning, according to two people who saw them. The cuts will fall disproportionately on the firm's general industrials and consumer-products desks, where mandates have been thin for nearly two years. Staff in the energy transition and infrastructure groups, by contrast, will see modest hiring through the second half of the year.

"This is a bank choosing to be smaller in order to be more," said one analyst who covers the European boutique sector. "It is not a story of distress. It is a story of focus."

The City has watched a steady restructuring of the boutique bank model over the past two years. Several rivals have made similar pivots toward sectors — clean energy, defense, life sciences — where deal flow has held up against the broader slowdown. Whether Whitcomb & Hartfield's bet on infrastructure proves prescient or merely fashionable will, like most such wagers, take a fee cycle to judge.