Unexpected incident of hiring at RBS's investment bank

RBS's investment bank is supposed to disposing of its people. If you believe a recent report in the Financial Times, up to 90% of people in the corporate and investment bank are in danger of redundancy. Curiously, therefore, RBS has just made a substantial hire.

Reliable sources inform us that the British bank has just recruited Vanessa Bradford, a senior structured credit saleswoman who spent 12 years at Lehman and the past five and a half years at Cantor Fitzgerald. Bradford is a big hire for an investment bank that's retrenching, so what's going on?

RBS wasn't immediately available for comment, but recruiters say the rationale for adding Bradford was simple: the bank is seriously lacking in structured credit sales staff. It helps that structured finance was one of the areas RBS said it wanted to maintain during its recent presentation on the future of its investment bank.