Bear Stearns poaches five from Commerz to boost Asian securitisation

US investment bank Bear Stearns has poached a five-strong asset-backed securitisation team from Commerz Securities in Tokyo. The raid on the investment banking arm of Germany's Commerzbank will take the number working in Bear Stearns’ Japanese securitisation team to seven.

Tokyo-based head of trading for Bear Stearns in Asia, Lenny Feder, said the move is part of an effort to boost the US bank’s derivatives business in Asia, although Bear Stearns has lost securitisation staff in the past few months, notably to Credit Lyonnais.

Ross Antoci joins Bear Stearns as a senior managing director and will head up the new ABS team. Other ex-Commerzbank staff will include: Ricky May, Robert Ryan, Yoshiharu Horikawa and Seiichiro Ikeno. Soichi Fuji and Hiroyasu Kaida are the other members of the team. Antoci will jointly report to Feder and Fumio Nashiro, senior managing director and head of distribution at Bear Stearns.

The team will work on synthetic collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and focus on originating and structuring consumer finance, residential and commercial real-estate securitisations.

Meanwhile, Wee Siang Lee, associate director of credit derivatives at Bear Stearns in London, has transferred to Tokyo to focus on structured transactions such as first-to-default baskets and synthetic CDOs for Asia, including Japan. He will report to Ralph Orciouli, head of credit trading in Japan. Orciouli joined the bank in April this year from Bank of America, where he was a senior credit derivatives manager.

Feder said more hires are planned for Tokyo over the next three to six months, but said there were no plans for a large-scale hiring spree. "There are certain areas that we think we're strong in, and we need to opportunistically hire some people to solidify them." He added that the bank is currently focusing on equity and credit derivatives as well as structured products.

Feder transferred to Tokyo last January to head the bank’s fixed-income trading and derivatives activities. Prior to his move, he was a senior managing director and co-head of Bear Stearns’ municipal derivatives group in New York.