European Jobs Roundup: Bank of America keeps on hiring
Summer holidays did nothing to dampen activity in the European jobs market last week. There was plenty of hiring in debt and equity derivatives, as well as unexpected departures in the fund management sector.
Bank of America recruited five bankers for its European debt business, bringing the total number of bankers hired this year to more than 50. The new hires include Andrew McCourt, from SG, who joins as head of financial institutions credit trading for Europe and Chris de Sibert from Royal Bank of Scotland, who joins as head of Southern European FX sales. Michele Ransley from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein joins as head of high yield bond sales. Yasser Benjelloun from BNP Paribas, joins the structured credit trading team to develop credit volatility trading strategies. Nik Dhanani joins from Citigroup to structure and advise on bank and insurance sector hybrid capital deals.
Merrill Lynch hired 17 new equity derivatives staff, some of them to replace the 13 members of its equity derivatives team poached by Nomura in July. Six of the new hires came from Goldman Sachs, three from UBS, two from Lehman Brothers, one from Commerzbank, one from Banco Santander, one from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, and one from Prime Financial Services, a factoring company.
The Goldman Sachs hires are: Tobias Gehrke as head of institutional derivative sales in the UK; Andrew Song as head of the index vanilla trading desk; Daniel Cangemi for the index exotics desk, as well as Geir Espeskog, Matt Renirie and Michael Ebert for derivatives sales. The UBS hires are: Tobias Hupfauer, to sell equity derivatives to German and Austrian institutions; Gene Linetsky to sell structured equity products; and Elias Jaeggi to work on the warrant trading team.
There were shock departures at Hermes Focus Asset Management, a subsidiary of Hermes Pension Management. Founding partners Peter Butler and Steve Brown both resigned following a boardroom row. The fund announced a management reshuffle and said that David Pitt-Watson, managing director of Hermes' large cap UK focus fund, will replace Butler in November, when the resignations take effect.
Jaarkko Karki, chief investment officer at Key Asset Management, a UK fund of hedge funds, left after just nine months.
Europe's fund managers were also engaged in recruitment activity last week. Fidelity Investments hired Julian Webb from Friends Provident as executive director and head of business development for the UK defined contribution business. Baring Asset Management hired Gianluca Giardina from Fidelity Investments as a fund manager responsible for analysing European stocks.
Morley Fund Management hired two people for its fixed income team. Stephen Lee joined from UBS Global Asset Management as a credit portfolio manager. Miles Tym joined from Alliance Capital as a manager of UK government debt funds.
HSBC Asset Management hired Gregg Diliberto from Citigroup Asset Management as head of its global fixed income group.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management made three hires for its client coverage teams in the UK and Germany. Richard Lockwood joins from ABN Amro as an executive director and head of the UK coverage team. Simone Bouche joins from Henderson Global Investors as a vice president responsible for UK institutional client coverage. Christian Zeiter joins from Insight Investment in London as a vice president responsible for German institutional coverage.
Barclays Capital was among the banks hiring last week. It poached Domenico Azzollini from JP Morgan as global head of its interest rate exotics business. Xion Wu also joined from JP Morgan as a senior exotics trader. The new hires are part of an expansion plan, in which Barclays Capital plans to hire up to three thousand staff during the next three years. So far, it has hired over 1,100 of them.
ING Financial Markets hired Richard Morgan from HSBC as a sales trader.
Goldman Sachs hired Jo Leach from the corporate finance team at BskyB as a marketing analyst for its media research team. Goldman lost three of its six-member media team to Citigroup three months ago.
The Carlyle Group, the US private equity firm, hired Mike Ramsey, former leveraged finance head at Prudential M&G, to head its new European leveraged finance business.
