Saxo Bank appoints Global Head of Equity Products

Advances its ‘one platform’ strategy by further bolstering cross-asset capabilities

Alessandro will be based in London where he will also assume responsibility for UK sales covering European clients as well, reporting to Dennis Malamatinas, Global Head of Regions and Global Marketing. He joins Saxo Bank with more than 15 years’ experience in equity sales and trading, most recently at Deutsche Bank where he was Global Head of dbIntegrate Sales, a front to back office solution for equity execution, settlement and custody. Prior to Deutsche Bank, Alessandro spent almost eight years at Morgan Stanley where he worked on the equities electronic trading desk, covering clients trading equities, futures and options, as well as swaps. Latterly, he also held a cross-divisional role in prime brokerage sales and electronic trading, leveraging the synergies of the two businesses to provide an integrated service to hedge funds.

Saxo Bank, which has offices in 25 countries, including major financial centres around the world, already provides access to trading opportunities across multiple asset classes, including cash equities and equity derivatives. Alessandro’s appointment follows that of Peter Plester, who joined Saxo Bank in April from Rabobank as Head of FX Prime Broker Services.

Commenting on the appointment, Matteo Cassina, Head of Business Lines, Saxo Bank said:
“With liquidity increasingly fragmented, and the number and variety of market participants on the increase, our sophisticated global and multi-asset trading platform is uniquely placed to aggregate these liquidity pools together for the benefit of individual and institutional clients looking to consolidate their trading with a single platform. By doing so, clients not only benefit from cross asset margining, competitive pricing and customised liquidity, but they are also better placed to trade in any economic cycle.

“At the same time, Alessandro’s addition to the team and our strategy to enhancing our asset class and product excellence presents opportunities for us to further extend and grow our white label solutions which are currently used by over 100 financial institutions worldwide.”

Adding to this, Alessandro said, “There are significant opportunities with small and medium sized hedge funds that in the last few years, due to both resource constraints and high on-boarding/maintenance costs are no longer being served by the largest Prime Brokers. Smaller managers often achieve better performance than their larger peers, but they struggle to find providers who can support them across multiple asset classes with a single margin. This presents an opportunity for Saxo Bank which further provides these clients with the added assurance of being a regulated entity holding bank licenses in a number of jurisdictions.

“We are also planning to fill an important gap for those institutional clients who are looking to outsource their trading infrastructure and post trade services to enable them to focus exclusively on their core businesses.”