One of the founders, Stuart Taylor, has now turned up at MUFG, as head of electronic trading in the global markets business. He will lead this activity for MUFG Securities in every region except Japan, and — if that's not a big enough remit — there is "potential to expand the scope in the future", according to the bank.
The position covers all of sales and trading for the securities business, including equities as well as fixed income.
Taylor has what his new boss Atif Hayat calls "an innovative streak": as well as the Algomi venture, he launched a bond trading auction system called Bond Port while working at UBS, and was more recently advising Symphony, a fintech communications service on issues related to trading.
Going in the opposite direction is Sebastien Rozes, who is leaving MUFG at the end of the year, one of a number of senior bankers to quit in last few years. Rozes joined from Royal Bank of Scotland in 2015 to run the corporate bank in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. These moves come at a time of a strategy shift at the bank, as GlobalCapital reports here.
Meanwhile, another recent departee, Sarwat Faruqui, former head of EMEA syndicate and co-head of international syndicate at the Japanese bank, has popped up to advise Bond Origination Technologies (Bots), a new tech company that aims to automate pricing indications in the primary debt capital markets.
Bots was started up by other former bond bankers: Stephan Gimpel and Oliver Corstjens, previously at Citi.
Faruqui joins as an investor and adviser, alongside Peter Charles, former head of EMEA fixed income syndicate at Citi and Hugh Carter, former deputy head of global syndicate and head of credit syndicate at Commerzbank. The start-up has finished an initial fundraising round ahead of planned launch next year.
“The core of what we offer to banks is the ability to maintain live pricing curves for any issuer in the market, of which there are over 10,000,” says Gimpel. “We automate low value parts of the workflow, freeing up [debt capital markets] and syndicate bankers for higher value tasks.”
Another ex-banker taking a position outside the industry is Nick Mihic, who formerly ran JP Morgan's equity derivatives sales business in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and also the overall markets business for Switzerland. MSCI has hired him as head of client coverage for, perhaps unsurprisingly, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Elsewhere, UBS's Vinod Vasan is not leaving the industry, but is changing roles. Seven months ago, he became vice-chairman of EMEA debt capital markets, but now he will be vice-chairman of global banking.
"In this newly created position, Vinod will devote more time to applying his knowledge and experience of origination and structuring holistically across a range of financing opportunities in both public markets and private markets," said an internal memo.
Finally, Schroders is seeking to take advantage of the market impact of the crisis, through a new private credit fund, which will use a mix of securitized bonds, warehouse lines, direct loans and other instruments.
The firm follows the route taken by other investment managers in looking for lucrative opportunities away from the public markets, blurring the lines between "alternative" asset managers like private equity and hedge funds and traditional fund management houses.