Goldman Sachs said to hire top saleswoman from BofA

Goldman Sachs has poached a senior salesperson from Bank of America Merrill Lynch as it looks to continue to build out a key group within its electronic trading business. Roxanne Heristchian has joined Goldman’s fast-growing quantitative execution services team in London, sources have told eFinancialCareers.

Heristchian will be a familiar face to many of her new colleagues at Goldman. The quant team is headed up by Michael Steliaros, a fellow Bank of America alum who spent more than seven years at the firm before joining Goldman in November of last year. A Goldman insider previously told us that Steliaros has a “huge mandate” to grow the team, which covers portfolio trading, algorithmic research, the central risk book, quantitative content generation, analytics and everything in between.

Steliaros clearly has a penchant for hiring former colleagues – he recruited senior portfolio strategist Eliad Hochshteadt from Bank of America in February. Stavros Isaiadis, the former global head of equities algo trading technology at BAML, is also said to be joining the team at the end of June. Steliaros has now poached at least four former colleagues from Bank of America while hiring additional quant researchers without BAML ties.

"He's building an exceptional team," the Goldman insider told us earlier this week.

Before joining Bank of America in 2015, Heristchian spent five years as an executive director within J.P. Morgan’s global program trading sales team in London, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also had stints at Citi and Deutsche Bank in similar roles. Neither Goldman Sachs or Heristchian responded to requests for comment.

The growth of Goldman’s quant execution team underlies the firm’s commitment to rebuilding its sales and trading businesses that struggled for much of the last 18 months before bouncing back during the first quarter. The firm’s strategy will rely heavily on engineering talent and the quant and strat teams like the one being led by Steliaros, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein stressed in February.

Goldman said goodbye to two of the three heads of its securities division on Tuesday, leaving the business in the sole hands of Ashok Varadhan, a former swaps trader who made partner at age 29. The firm is taking an aggressive approach to remedy its recent trading slump.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: btuttle@efinancialcareers.com

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by actual human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t).