People: StanChart’s new risk chief, Citi hires for FX, and more

Latest job changes across the industry

Standard Chartered has named Simon Wilson, a former risk manager from UBS and Credit Suisse, as global head of automated risk. He will oversee investment banking market intelligence and AI in London.

In the newly created role, Wilson joins the foreign exchange and rates management team as a managing director and will focus on digitising the bank’s FX and rates trading platforms, as well as artificial intelligence across its markets business. He reports to John Newman, global head of rates and FX trading. 

Most recently, Wilson was head of market risk for the non-core and legacy division at UBS, where he oversaw Credit Suisse’s former assets following the scandal-plagued bank’s acquisition by UBS in 2023. Before that, he spent four years as chief risk officer and head of market risk for Credit Suisse’s investment banking division. 

He started his career 18 years ago as a swaps trader at Goldman Sachs and then spent 15 years at Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest Markets, where he served as global head of algorithmic rates trading and deputy head of delta trading for Europe, Middle East and Africa. During his tenure at NatWest, he led strategic investments in MTS, LCH, i-Swap and Trad-X, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

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Management company QVR, owned by Benn Eifert, is winding down its flagship multi-strategy fund and seeking a buyer.

The decision follows a run of several months of poor performance and redemptions by key investors. The fund, which returned around 10% net of fees from April to December 2025 after an expansion in its number of strategies and managers last year, lost close to 30% in the early months of 2026.

The fund, which prior to the changes targeted lower risk, returned more than 77% in 2020. But Eifert told Risk.net the market environment for volatility strategies this year has been as challenging as at any time in his career. 

No single strategy explained the decline in performance, said Eifert, who founded QVR in 2017 and is its chief investment officer. 

But strategies that rely on realised and implied volatility moving broadly together, such as calendar spreads and hedged equity volatility selling, have struggled. Implied US equity correlation has also traded at historically low levels. 

The decoupling of implied and realised volatility underscores the influence in today’s markets of dip buyers, especially retail investors, Eifert says. Retail buying arguably has dampened realised volatility at times when institutions have been nervous.

In calendar spread trades, funds might go long oversold short-dated options and hedge with longer-dated options. At the outbreak of the Iran war, institutional hedging pushed implied volatility higher at longer maturities, but equity markets remained largely impassive, reducing the performance of the short-dated leg of the trade. In hedged short volatility trades, firms sell volatility to harvest a premium and hold a short position in equities to hedge.

Here, short equities positions failed to cover losses in short volatility positions.

QVR, which reached $1.6 billion in assets under management at its peak, is in talks with possible buyers.

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Citi has hired a senior FX exec, tapping James Carolan as global head of FX structuring and solutions. Carolan will join Citi in New York in July and report to Flavio Figueiredo, global head of FX at Citi. 

Carolan previously worked at Deutsche Bank as head of North America corporate macro structuring, global head of deal contingent structuring, and global head of FX structuring. He began his career at Goldman Sachs in 2011 and moved into a markets role there in 2013. 

Citi has also added Aditya Bhalla as a director on the rates team in London and Victor Caen as an inflation trader in Paris, according to a spokesperson. 

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Patrick du Plessis

Photo: Norges Bank Investment Management

Norges Bank Investment Management promoted Patrick du Plessis to chief risk officer in April. He will oversee analysis, monitoring, measurement and reporting of investment risk and return. Du Plessis has spent 25 years at the Norwegian investment firm, holding a series of roles across financial analysis, benchmarks and valuations, performance analytics and mandate management. He spent 10 years as global head of risk monitoring before taking on his new role. 

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Michael Voris

Goldman Sachs has promoted Michael Voris to head of equity derivatives for the Americas in New York. Voris will keep his existing position as co-head of equity capital markets in the Americas, a role he took on last year alongside William Connolly. Voris also serves as global head of convertible bond financing and manages alternative capital solutions. He joined Goldman in 2010 as a vice-president and was named partner in 2020. 

Akila Raman has been promoted to global head of the private and alternative capital markets business. She was most recently chief commercial and strategy officer of transaction banking, and has worked at Goldman since 2004, becoming partner in 2018. Both Raman and Voris are part of the bank’s capital solutions group, created last year to provide large financing deals and loans to corporate clients. 

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Jeremie Ouaki

Photo: Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley has hired a new head of European credit trading. Jeremie Ouaki joined the US bank’s Paris office in May following a 20-year stint at Societe Generale, where he departed as global co-head of credit trading. He had also been head of fixed income index trading.

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UBS’s global head of fixed income structuring, Adrian Bracher, has left the bank, Risk.net reported. He moved across from Credit Suisse after its 2023 acquisition by UBS. He served as global head of macro structuring and worked in other rates structuring roles at Credit Suisse. Bracher was also part of the UBS team that won Risk.net’s 2025 structured products house of the year award.

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Royal Bank of Canada has beefed up its credit trading business in New York with three new hires. Jackson Graham will join in June as head of single-name credit default swap trading. He previously spent two years at Squarepoint Capital in London, following a five-year stint at Morgan Stanley, where he served as head of credit default swap trading for Europe, Middle East and Africa. He will report to Santosh Sateesh, global head of credit derivatives trading. 

John Perkins will also join in June as a director in high-yield trading, reporting to Raegan Knox, head of US high-yield trading. He comes from Bank of Montreal, where he worked for just over a year with the same title, following a two-year stint in credit trading at Citadel. 

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Vincent Boccio joined RBC as US head of electronic credit trading strategy in April, following a brief stint in credit sales at BBVA and nearly two years at SMBC Group. He reports to Justin Snyder, head of US investment-grade trading. 

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Jay Moore

Eighteen months after exchange LMAX acquired all-to-all swaps matching platform FX HedgePool, several former employees and executives from the platform have left, Risk.net reported in April. Jay Moore, co-founder and former chief executive of FX HedgePool, left in March along with former chief financial officer, Townsend Smith. Other departures over the past few months include Emin Tatosian, head of technology for swaps and derivatives, head of integration Michael Buchsbaum, principal software engineer Abhijit Rao, along with at least five others. Tatosian was a co-founder of FX HedgePool and served as its chief technology officer before the LMAX buyout. 

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Australian exchange ASX has appointed longtime Euronext executive Anthony Attia as its new chief executive officer, effective September 1. Attia will replace current CEO Helen Lofthouse, who will leave at the end of May. Darren Yip, who oversees the markets and listings group, will serve as interim CEO over the summer. 

Attia has spent much of the last 25 years working for Euronext and its related companies, after joining Euronext predecessor Paris Bourse in 1997. He became head of operations at Euronext, then moved to NYSE as senior vice-president, following NYSE and Euronext’s merger. He later became chief of staff to NYSE’s CEO. He also spent seven years as CEO of Euronext in Paris, and most recently served as global head of derivatives and post-trade.

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Clearing and custody provider Clear Street has announced a new UK chief executive officer, Alex Lawton. He joined the UK management team in December, then the Financial Conduct Authority greenlit his appointment. 

Lawton most recently worked as a strategic adviser at private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe and at Tradeweb. Before that, he was head of global markets and head of the London branch for State Street Bank International, where he worked across securities finance, FX and electronic trading platforms. He also served as a member of the Bank of England’s money markets committee. 

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EquiLend, a financial technology firm focused on the securities finance industry, has hired Simon Heath as chief strategy officer. He joins after seven years at JP Morgan, where he was most recently global head of agency securities finance. Before that, he was head of agency securities finance trading for Europe, Middle East and Africa at State Street. Heath will be based in London and report to CEO Rich Grossi. 

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The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has appointed Raagnee Beri as director of the whistleblower office and DJ Hennes as director of the market participants division.

Beri was previously a trial attorney in the agency’s enforcement division and a senior assistant general counsel in the litigation branch of the agency’s general counsel office. Before the CFTC, Beri was a trial attorney in the Department of Justice’s tax division. 

Hennes joins from professional services giant KPMG, where he was a managing director in the financial services risk and compliance advisory practice. Before that, he spent 15 years at Promontory Financial Group, a financial services consulting outfit now owned by IBM.

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Simon Walls

Photo: FCA

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has added two members to its executive team – Simon Walls and Johan Sekora. Walls becomes executive director of markets, a role he has had on a temporary basis since 2024. He joined the FCA in 2006 and has held senior markets roles in policy, asset management and banking supervision. 

Sekora joins as chief operating officer from Swedish bank SEB, where he served as global head of financial crime prevention. He also chaired Samlit, the Swedish banking sector’s financial crime partnership with the Swedish police. 

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The International Capital Market Association has named Deutsche Bank’s Stephen Fisher as chair of its board of directors. Fisher has been global head of government and regulatory affairs at Deutsche for three years, following a 13-year stint at BlackRock, where he departed as co-head of its global public policy group for Europe, Middle East and Africa. He joined the board of Icma in 2022. 

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Fabio Panetta

Photo: Banca d’Italia

The Bank for International Settlements has elected a new chair, Fabio Panetta, governor of the Bank of Italy. He will begin a three-year term in June succeeding François Villeroy de Galhau, governor of the Bank of France, who is stepping down in early June. The board is responsible for determining the policy direction and supervising management of the BIS.

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Jean-Paul Servais

The International Organization of Securities Commissions  has elected new board leadership. Jean-Paul Servais, chairman of the Belgian Financial Services and Markets Authority, was re-elected chair of the board for a third term. Other new board members are: Toshiyuki Miyoshi, vice-minister for international affairs at the Japan Financial Services Agency; Mark Uyeda, commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission; Islam Azzam, executive chairman of the Financial Regulatory Authority in Egypt; Waleed Saeed Al Awadhi, chief executive officer of the Capital Market Authority in the United Arab Emirates; Julia Leung, chief executive officer of Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission; and Christina Rolle, executive director of the Securities Commission of the Bahamas. 

Additional reporting by Lukas Becker, Cole Lipsky and Rob Mannix; editing by Alex Krohn