Barclays performed promotions to stop macro salespeople joining their friend
As we reported last week, Barclays' popular macro sales master, Filippo Zorzoli, is at Nomura, where he's thought to keep a long list of former colleagues he might like to hire. Barclays is taking action to prevent them from leaving.
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The bank isn't commenting, but we understand that a range of people in the London macro sales team have been promoted.
They include Ben Mabley, a Barclays managing director who joined from Goldman Sachs last year as head of rates and solutions sales and who's thought to have been elevated to run both EMEA and UK sales; Punitha Rajah, a director in rates sales who's been made head of UK real money sales; and Rumit Sawjani, who's thought to have been promoted as co-head of hedge fund and systematic sales with Gwen Jing.
The promotions are expected to help lock people in if Zorzoli attempts to hire them for his new team at Nomura.
Sawjani in particular is seen as a rising star on Barclays' macro sales desk. He joined Barclays in 2007 after graduating from Warwick Business School. His promotion follows what insiders say was an impressive speech at a Barclays hedge fund event last week. He didn't respond to a request to comment for this article.
As we've reported, Barclays has already suffered numerous losses from its macro trading team, including Noel Cochrane, who's gone to Deutsche Bank; James Armstrong, who's gone to Balyasny; Nico Huss, who's gone to Citi; Ankur Aneja, whose destination remains a mystery; Justin Firmino, who's also AWOL; and Nishant Singh who's gone to BlueCrest.
Barclays has been hiring, too. Bloomberg reports today that "more than two dozen" "senior" macro traders have arrived at the British bank. They include: Lucile Medori and Laura Brown, whose arrivals we reported last week; Tom Brennan, an MD from Nomura; Kin Hoe Yau, a mid-ranking trader from Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong and Bob Xu, an options trader who joined in June in Singapore. Further trading hires are expected.
The bank will need to hope that the recent promotions will be enough to keep existing staff happy amidst the flood of new arrivals. Improved bonuses might help as well.
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