By DAVID ORLOFF

    Fred Jager is expanding his eight-month-old Newport Beach investment banking firm, Hunter Wise Financial Group LLC, across the country and the globe.
    The firm is entering into a 13-nation network, the International Corporate Finance Group, which is being incorporated in Geneva, Switzerland. The alliance will have a middle-market financial intermediary in each country, with Hunter Wise one of the two U.S. representatives. Jager, a long-time financial specialist and former president of Geneva Corporate Finance, a large unit of the Irvine-based Geneva Cos., will serve as the group's vice chairman.
    "It gives Hunter Wise a unique outreach," Jager said.
    Jager said the alliance was formed through a series of contacts that he has made over 30 years. He said the foreign firms in the group are headed by natives who were educated at U.S. schools, including Berkeley and Stanford. The firms in the alliance are in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.
    Hunter Wise and the French firm are already working with a French company that wants to buy some American companies, Jager said.
    Closer to home, Jager has embarked on a five-year plan to expand Hunter Wise across the country.

    The company is looking at buying investment firms in Chicago, Atlanta, and Tampa Bay, he said. Hunter Wise has opened an office, its second, in Scottsdale, Ariz., and is planning to open offices in Denver and San Francisco in the next six months. Nevada is on the "to do" list also.
    "We want to be dominant in the Southwest and then roll out in 1,000-mile increments," Jager said.
    "We will go into New York last because there are so many opportunities in other areas." It will also be the hardest market for the firm to crack since the majority of financial service institutions are located there.
    "All told," Jager said, "Hunter Wise so far has six contracts to provide financial services, expects 12 more in the next 60 days and "we're chasing 17 more behind that."
    Hunter Wise has eight employees in the Newport Beach office and four in Scottsdale.
    Jager said his firm's efforts are targeted at small and micro-cap companies.
    He said many of these companies have been abandoned by investment bankers and they're being ignored by analysts. The market is more interested in bigger companies or exciting high-technology plays.
    "Small caps are getting starved out from the capital market," Jager said. "This leaves thousands of orphans and a market for an investment banking firm that focuses on smaller companies."
    Jager defined these smaller companies as ones with market caps under $250 million. And one of the options that Jager said he will help companies explore is getting themselves out of the public arena, such as through a sale or simply going private.