A Nomura MD escaped to a very hot fintech firm

Nomura's global head of client ecosystem has vacated the Japanese investment bank and is joining Symphony, the chat platform backed by Goldman Sachs.

Craig Butterworth joined Symphony's London office as the head of global account management earlier this month.

Symphony, a chat and collaboration platform, recently raised $165 million in a fresh funding round, which put its valuation at $1.4 billion. The fintech firm, which has raised funds from Goldman and Google's parent company, Alphabet, was created in 2014 by a group of financial institutions led by Goldman Sachs in an effort to cut costs of market data as well as communications. Based in Palo Alto, California, it competes with Bloomberg messaging and Slack and plans to use the funds to grow its workflow automation business, increase its sales presence in Asia and make acquisitions.

Butterworth will help Symphony's biggest clients and shareholders "get the most from the platform as a core foundational pillar of their respective digital transformation programmes", according to his LinkedIn profile. 

Butterworth, who is a part-time racing driver, spent the past five years at Nomura as an MD, heading client account management, where he 'digitalized'  Nomura's sales process and worked with external fintech providers.

Butterworth began his career at Goldman Sachs in 2001 before moving to Royal Bank of Scotland two and a half years later, where he remained for seven years overseeing the bank's flow rates sales for the UK funds. He's also headed European fixed income sales for State Street as well as RBC Capital.

In an interview with eFinancialCareers last year, Butterworth said he was running 14 different digitalisation projects at Nomura, focused on clients, but touching everything from trading to operations, risk, legal and compliance. At that time, he was working closely with fintech start-ups and established players, like Salesforce.com, Symphony, Fenergo, Cloud9, GreenKey and OpenFin.

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