The new career paths of Barclays FX MDs laid off as the bank shrinks

Where do you go if you’re a senior FX trader laid off at a rapidly shrinking investment bank when few firms are hiring for their fixed income teams and even fewer are considering taking on those with a focus on continental Europe? The good news for the FX and rates MDs laid off at Barclays soon after its huge restructuring announcement is that most have found new employment – even if not all are ending up in obvious places.

Senior employees in Barclays’ fixed income teams – traditionally its engine room of profits, but now a prime target for cuts – were never going to come off well when the bank announced plans to make 7,000 redundancies and refocus its investment bank on less capital intensive business areas earlier this year.

Sure enough, by June four managing directors in Barclays FX and rates sales team were told that their jobs were being cut. Iskandar Vanblarcum, managing director and head of Northern Europe foreign exchange sales; Christian Ahrling, managing director in Scandinavian rates sales; Christophe Gioffredo, managing director and head of France FX sales, and Andrea Anselmetti, head of EMEA FX sales, all left. Five months later, they’ve found new employment.

Vanblarcum has moved away from investment banking, making a lateral move to Thomson Reuters, where he took the role of head of EMEA sales in FX transactions. However, more interestingly, over the past eight months he’s also launched his own CrossFit business – Chalkbox – where is co-owner and ‘coach’. Presumably his new role also allows him the time to teach cardio.

Gioffredo also hasn’t stuck rigidly to his career history of FX sales in investment banking (he was in a similar role at Goldman Sachs for three years until joining Barclays in 2004). He started earlier this month in hedge fund FX sales at UBS.

And again, Anselmetti hasn’t made an obvious career move – he stuck with investment banking and moved to Unicredit in September. However, he has the slightly vague title of ‘advisor’ to the bank's institutional and large corporate FX sales team.

The conclusion from this is that if you’re a senior salesman cast out by a cost-cutting bank, you need to be adaptable and apply your expertise in a related, if not equivalent, position.

Christian Ahrling, meanwhile, as we reported in September, has joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a managing director in rates sales.

Barclays has not been swinging the axe entirely in its FX and rates sales team. Marcello Cavalcanti, managing director and head of FX banks sales in Europe, is still employed at the bank.