Ex-Bank of America MD leaves trading platform after less than a year

Electronic trading platforms are supposed to be the future. Last week's big report from Oliver Wyman and Morgan Stanley forecast that an increasing proportion of flow trading will be pushed through these platforms as banks pull out due to low commissions and margins. But trading platforms employ hardly any people. And what if the jobs there are not all that?

The career perambulations of Robert Grillo, Bank of America's former global head of rates sales and FICC e-sales, suggest this might be the case.

Grillo left Bank of America in April last year. Two months later, he turned up as president at OpenDoor trading, a treasuries trading platform set up by Susan Estes, a former senior mortgage-backed securities trader at Countrywide and Deutsche Bank. Grillo told Bloomberg his task there was to “expand the growing pool of primary dealers, central banks, asset-management firms and other institutional investors supporting the pending launch".

OpenDoor is launching soon. Grillo, however, isn't sticking around. Although he's still cited a member of the team on OpenDoor's website, he's updated his LinkedIn profile to say that he's left and is off to become CEO of a new venture, RMG LLC'. What does RMG do exactly? We don't know, but Grillo says it'll be engaged in RVC, which could conceivably stand for retail venture capital. Watch this space.

Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Photo credit: 090919-40232-LX3 by hopeless128 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.