Evolution creates chief executive role

Evolution, the London-based financial markets technology consultancy firm, has hired Peter Robin as its chief executive, a newly created role.

Robin joins Evolution from IBM where he was vice-president of global financial markets and business innovation services for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Formed in 1996, Evolution was previously managed by its four co-founders, who hired Robin to oversee the firm’s planned expansion. Robin told RiskNews that he aims to partner with other consultancy firms this year to expand the company's reach in Europe. Evolution has 25 banking clients, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS Warburg.

“The proposed Basel II capital Accord, which comes into effect in late 2006, means a lot of investment banks are looking to consultancies such as Evolution to help hammer out implementation issues and to increase trading efficiency,” said Robin.

Richard Hall, Evolution's chief technology strategist, is a member of the FX working group for Financial products Markup Language (FpML), which supports electronic over-the-counter derivatives trading and is based on Extensible Markup Language, the standard meta-language for describing data shared between applications.