Salomon Smith Barney has hired Steve Segretta, a CDO structurer at CIBC World Markets in New York, as director in the newly merged credit derivatives structuring and trading teams and plans to hire two or three additional synthetic collateralized debt obligation structurers for its New York headquarters.
Rick Caplan, co-head of North American credit derivatives in New York, said "we are looking for very strong CDO structuring people. We think [Segretta] is a big hire. He has a broad range of expertise." Segretta will report to Caplan and Doug Warren, co-head of North American credit derivatives, when he starts this week. While at CIBC, Segretta reported to Ken Wormser, a department head in the firm's asset securitization group. The merged group has about 20 professionals.
The hiring effort will increase the team to about 23 professionals. Caplan said it merged the groups to make the firm's team more product focused. The merger allows small groups of pros within the new team to cover specific areas of the credit derivatives market, such as single-name strategies, portfolio strategies, credit-linked notes and total return swaps. "It's not that big of a change, but the goal is to make us focused on product delivery," Caplan said.
