People moves: Piterbarg joins NatWest Markets, Le Brusq leaves Natixis, and more

Vladimir Piterbarg: joining NatWest Capital Markets

NatWest Markets has appointed Vladimir Piterbarg as head of quantitative analytics and quantitative development. Piterbarg is based in London and reports to Oliver Cooke, head of trading.

Piterbarg is a high-profile hire. He has won the Risk quant of the year award twice for his work on stochastic volatility models and funding issues associated with derivatives pricing, and published numerous research papers and a number of books. Before joining NatWest Markets, he was head of quantitative analytics at family office Rokos Capital Management and, prior to that, held the same position at Barclays Capital. 

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HSBC has hired Olivier Herregods as head of flow rates for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (Emea), a spokesperson confirms. Herregods started on October 15. Based in London, he reports to Elie El Hayek, global head of fixed income at HSBC.

Herregods joined from Credit Suisse, where he was European head of rates trading. Herregods also served as a director of OTCDerivNet from August 2013 until July this year.

HSBC has also appointed Allegra Berman and Richard Godfrey as global co-heads of its securities services business. The pair report to Samir Assaf, chief executive of the lender’s global banking and markets unit.

Most recently, Berman had a dual role as head of the financial institutions group for Emea and global head of public sector banking.

Godfrey has been the acting head of securities services since the sudden death of Cian Burke in May, alongside his position as global chief operating officer (COO) for the business.

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Eric Le Brusq

Eric Le Brusq, global head of equity derivatives at Natixis, left in May after four years with the bank. He handed over to Selim Mehrez, who took on the new role alongside his existing position as global head of fixed income. Elie Bitton was also appointed head of equity derivatives sales and financial engineering, in addition to his existing role as head of sales for Emea and financial engineering of fixed income. Bitton reports to Mehrez.

The moves have not been reported elsewhere, and Risk.net has confirmed them with the bank. Natixis says the appointments of Mehrez and Bitton are part of an ongoing effort to enhance the integration of the sales and financial engineering functions within the global markets division.

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Julian Pomfret-Pudelski is the new head of credit algorithmic trading at Credit Suisse. He joined the firm in 2013 in London and two years later moved to New York, where he has been developing the bank’s credit algo trading platform, the bank said in a statement.

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Piero Novelli and Robert Karofsky have been named co-presidents of UBS’s investment bank, following the departure of Andrea Orcel. They have also joined the executive board of UBS Group.

Novelli was previously executive chairman of corporate client solutions at the bank, while Karofsky was global head of equities.

Orcel, who had run UBS’s investment bank since 2012, will join Santander as chief executive in early 2019, following regulatory approval. He will succeed José Antonio Álvarez who will become vice-chairman of the group, working alongside the other vice-chairman, Bruce Carnegie-Brown, but in an executive role.

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Yann Gérardin

Yann Gérardin became deputy COO at BNP Paribas on October 1, adding to his existing role of head of corporate and institutional banking (CIB). Gérardin won the Risk lifetime achievement award in 2017 for two defining successes of his career: a long-sighted overhaul of the CIB division after the financial crisis, and seamless integration of an equity derivatives portfolio from Credit Agricole and a structured products portfolio from Royal Bank of Scotland a few years later.

Alain Papiasse has also been named CIB chairman. Alongside this role, he will continue to oversee the business of the whole group in North America and the UK.

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Commonwealth Bank has promoted Alan Docherty to chief financial officer (CFO). The appointment follows the abrupt departure of his predecessor in May amid allegations of law breaking by the bank. Interim findings from a months-long government investigation into Australia’s financial industry later revealed widespread misconduct in the sector, including at Commonwealth Bank. 

Docherty has been acting CFO since May. Before this, he was CFO for institutional banking and markets.

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Nomura Asset Management

Go Hiramatsu

Go Hiramatsu has been appointed the new chief executive of Nomura’s asset management arm in the UK, effective from October 1. He was previously general manager of the business. He is based in London and reports to Minoru Tanabe, a senior managing director at Nomura Asset Management in Tokyo.

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Thomas Borgen resigned as chief executive of Danske Bank in September, leaving the position on October 1. His departure follows a money laundering scandal involving a Danske branch in Estonia. Norwegian-born Borgen joined the bank in 1997 and took over as chief executive in 2013.

Jesper Nielsen, head of banking for Denmark, has taken on the additional role of interim chief executive while the bank is looking for a permanent replacement. Danske wanted to appoint Jacob Aarup-Andersen, head of wealth management, to the top position but the Danish regulator rejected the proposal in mid-October, saying he does not have enough experience. Aarup-Andersen remains the head of wealth management and Danske is talking to other potential candidates.

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UniCredit has recruited Guido Filippa as head of markets for Italy within its CIB division. The appointment was effective from October 15. Filippa is based in Milan and reports to Alfredo Maria De Falco, UniCredit’s head of CIB for Italy, and Guy Laffineur, head of global markets. Filippa replaces Francesco Salvatori, who was named head of CIB for the Americas earlier this year.

Filippa has joined the bank from Tages Group, an alternative investment firm, where he headed business development. Before that, he was head of securities sales for Italy at Goldman Sachs.  

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Mizuho International has appointed Suneel Bakhshi as its new president and chief executive, based in London. The bank expects Bakhshi to join by January after a handover from Michiel de Jong, who has been at the helm for six years. Bakhshi’s last position was chief executive of LCH Group, which he left in October 2017. He will continue to serve as honorary chairman of international advisory groups at London Stock Exchange Group.

Before LCH, Bakhshi worked at Citigroup for more than three decades in a number of senior roles.

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LSEG

Marshall Bailey

LCH has appointed Marshall Bailey as its new chairman, effective immediately. He replaces Lex Hoogduin, who has stepped down but remains chairman of LCH’s arms in the UK and continental Europe. Bailey is the chair of the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme. His previous positions included senior roles at State Street Global Markets and RBC Capital Markets.

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Peter Hetherington has resigned as chief executive of IG Group, a multi-platform trading company. While the firm is seeking a replacement, Paul Mainwaring, IG’s CFO, is also serving as the interim chief executive.

Hetherington will stay with the company until March 2019 to help with the transition to his successor. He joined the company as a graduate trainee in 1994, eventually rising to the top role in 2015.

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Fannie Mae has named Hugh Frater as interim chief executive, following the resignation of Timothy Mayopoulos, who departed in mid-October. Frater remains on Fannie Mae’s board of directors, where he has served since 2016, but is no longer a member of the board’s audit committee and the risk policy and capital committee. The company continues looking for a permanent chief executive.

Frater is also non-executive chairman of the board of Vereit, a real estate operating company, and a director of ABR Reinsurance Capital Holdings. Previously he led Berkadia, a commercial real estate company, as chairman and, earlier, as chief executive.

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Dan Watkins has been named as the new chief executive of JP Morgan’s asset management arm in Asia-Pacific. He will move from London to Hong Kong later this year and report to George Gatch, who leads the global funds and global institutional businesses of JPMorgan Asset Management.

Most recently, Watkins was global head of client services at JPMAM and deputy chief of JPMAM Europe. 

Watkins succeeds Michael Falcon, who is joining Jackson National Life Insurance Company, an indirect US subsidiary of the UK’s Prudential, as chief executive. Subject to regulatory approval, Falcon will assume his new role on January 7. 

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Gary Cohn, former chief economic adviser to President Donald Trump and ex-president of Goldman Sachs, has joined Spring Labs as an adviser. The US start-up is building a blockchain-based network to enable participants to exchange information securely. Its initial aim is to help financial firms share identity, fraud and risk data. 

“I have been very interested in blockchain technology for a number of years, and Spring Labs is developing a network that could have profound implications for the financial services sector, among others,” Cohn said in a statement.

Cohn resigned from his role at the White House in March after Trump announced the US would impose aluminium and steel tariffs on several countries.

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John Plansky, head of State Street’s Global Exchange trading services, has been named chief executive of Charles River Development, a technology firm acquired by the custodian bank on October 1. 

“The combination of State Street and Charles River Development will enable the industry’s first-ever global interoperable platform connecting the front, middle and back office with one provider,” the bank said in a statement. “

Before joining State Street in January 2017, Plansky was a partner at PwC. He succeeds the founder of Charles River Development, Peter Lambertus, who will move into a planned new role as a strategic consultant to the firm.

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Trade Informatics, a New York-based provider of quantitative analytics and trading services, has hired Thomas Jardine as head of data analytics. Jardine comes from JP Morgan, where he most recently managed the central risk desk. He is also an adjunct professor of data analytics at Columbia University.

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Bloomberg

Mary Schapiro

Mary Schapiro has resigned from the board of London Stock Exchange Group to join Bloomberg as vice-chair for public policy and special adviser to the founder and the chairman. In her new role, effective as of October 15, she oversees the company’s public policy and regulatory priorities globally. 

Earlier in her career, Schapiro served as chair of both the Securities and Exchanges Commission and of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

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Sifma has a new COO: Joseph Seidel, starting on November 19. Seidel comes from Credit Suisse, where he was head of public policy in the Americas. He will report to Sifma president and chief executive Kenneth Bentsen and will manage the daily operations of the association.

Before joining Credit Suisse in 2001, Seidel was co-head of the financial institutions practice at Washington law firm Williams & Jensen.

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Swift has poached Dave Scola from Barclays to lead its North American business. Based in New York, Scola is in charge of the firm’s innovation and growth strategy in the US and Canada.

At Barclays, Scola headed financial institutions, leading a team of relationship managers to service banks and broker-dealers. He was also a member of the bank’s global transaction banking management committee. Prior to Barclays, Scola worked at Deutsche Bank as head of its strategic development group.

Swift has also tapped Google for another senior hire: Julien Blanchez took up a newly created role of head of data analytics in September. Blanchez, based in Belgium, is also an advisory member of the European Agency for Network and Information Security.

Additional reporting by Helen Bartholomew and Natasha Rega-Jones

Editing by Olesya Dmitracova