Credit Suisse has just poached a top quant in this hot area from Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley has been losing senior quants over the past year through a combination of redundancies and exits, and another has just jumped to a competitor.

Jon Hill led a team of quants within Morgan Stanley’s Model Review Group, but departed the bank late last year and has just joined Credit Suisse. Hill was an executive director at Morgan Stanley, but has been hired by Credit Suisse as a managing director and global head of model governance in New York.

Hill joined Morgan Stanley in 2010 as a vice president after years working as a consultant in risk analytics. He has a PhD from the University of Utah, where he did statistical analysis of familial clusters of cancers in the Mormon population.

A number of senior quants at Morgan Stanley were laid off after the bank decided to cut 25% of its fixed income currencies and commodities division in November 2015. Pete Eggleston, the former head of the quant solutions and innovations (QSI), has launched his own analytics firm BestX and Jamie Walton, head of quant FX, has also decided to go it alone.

PhDs with experience an understanding of model validation have become increasingly important to investment banks, particularly in Europe. Banks have been hiring quants with non-traditional backgrounds to fill these roles.

Benjamin Telle, who was head of hybrid structuring for EMEA at Citi and a bond option trader, has moved across to J.P. Morgan as an executive director and model risk officer in December, for example.

Much of this increased demand is down to Basel IV regulation, which requires banks to stop using their own risk models for calculations of credit risk. Instead, the regulations are pushing for increased standardisation, meaning that those with the quantitative ability for middle office validation are increasingly in demand.

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Photo: Credit Suisse