BoA boosts European structured products and rates groups

Banc of America Securities, the investment-banking arm of Bank of America, has hired Edward Charles to spearhead the European structuring side of its global structured products unit, and Ashwin Kumar as European head of interest rate derivatives trading.

Charles joins from Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) in London, where he most recently headed tax and credit structuring. During his five years at the Swiss bank, he also held a number of management roles in credit and insurance structuring for Europe and emerging markets. He previously headed structured products in London for JP Morgan, where he worked for 11 years. He will co-ordinate the origination and execution of credit, tax overlay, repackaging and pension/insurance products at Bank of America.

Kumar joins from Commerzbank, where he spent the past two years as head of US dollar interest rate trading in New York. He previously worked as a portfolio manager at NWI Management in New York, running macro and relative-value trading in fixed income and currency products. This followed a spell of eight years trading commodity and fixed-income options at CSFB, Citibank and Phillip Brother. Relocating to London, Kumar will run market making and proprietary trading of non-structured interest rate derivatives for Bank of America.

Charles will report to Arrington Mixon, head of debt capital raising and risk management for Europe at Bank of America, and Allen Shifflet and Sai Raman, global co-heads of structuring for the bank’s global structured products group. Kumar will also report to Mixon in addition to Bank of America’s global head of interest rate derivatives trading, John Kapustiak, who is based in Chicago.