SocGen poached a credit saleswoman and fashionista from Credit Suisse

SocGen has hired Kaisa Johanna Eskelinen, an experienced credit saleswoman from Credit Suisse with her own line of clothing products.

Eskelinen comes with 10 years of experience in institutional fixed income and credit sales and is based out of London. At SocGen, she is handling structured derivative sales, while focusing on investment grade, high yield, and emerging market. Alongside her day job, Eskelinen runs clothing label Bianca Blu, which purports to offer, "elegant and feminine designs using unique Italian fabrics to a modern woman."

Her arrival at SocGen comes at a time when the French bank's fixed income revenues have been declining along with the rest of the industry's. SocGen’s fixed-income trading revenues were down 28 percent year on year in the third quarter of 2017.

Eskelinen's move also becomes before she receives her bonus from Credit Suisse. It’s likely that SocGen has compensated her for a lost bonus, although the firm didn’t pay very good bonuses to its fixed income people last year despite them doing pretty well.

This is her second stint at SocGen. She had worked at the firm for a year in 2009 handling equity derivative sales in the UK and Northern Europe.  Her other stints include working at Topiary Finance as an asset management analyst and Nordea Markets, where she covered fixed income sales as well as corporate and government bond sale. She earned her Master’s Degree in Finance from Helsinki School of Economics and interned at the commercial sector of the Embassy of Finland in Paris.

In 2016, SocGen had committed to cut a further €220m euros of costs from its investment bank. Although early last year, the firm had said it wanted to maintain its presence in London after Brexit, last year's low bonuses were suspected of being intended to encourage voluntary exits – saving the bank severance pay. In July 2017, SocGen’s Chief Executive Frederic Oudea said Brexit would affect 300-400 investment banking jobs out of 2,000 it has overall in London, with most of them going to Paris. At its November investor day presentation, SocGen said it wanted to increase its global markets presence in the eurozone.

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