Derivs - People and Markets

John Hobin, head of fx institutional sales for fixed income, currencies and commodities at Macquarie in London, has joined online fx platform Digital Vega in a new role as head of distribution.

Firas Zenie, an executive director in synthetic equity trading at UBS in London, has left the firm.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, PNC Financial Services Group and Wells Fargo have all taken steps to close their proprietary trading units ahead of the compliance with the Volcker Rule, according to Thomas Curry, the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency.

JPMorgan Chase has named Pascal Ravery to the new position of senior country officer for Switzerland.

The Singapore Exchange and London Stock Exchange are in talks to expand cooperation on clearing derivatives and share trading but deny they are planning a merger.

A series of structured product road shows is set for the U.K. in response to industry calls to better educate investors about the instruments, according to Ian Lowes, founder of Structured Product Review and managing director of Lowes Financial Services.

Catherine Bradley has departed as head of Credit Suisse’s equity-linked solutions group for Asia-Pacific and is on gardening leave.

Citigroup has hired Will McLane as head of corporate and investment banking for the Association for Southeast Asian Nations and head of its Asia-Pacific financial institutions group.

Former UBS trader Ramon Braga has lost his lawsuit alleging he was unjustly fired from the bank for gross misconduct for having worked with proprietary trader Denis Minayev, who allegedly overvalued credit default swaps.

The Bank of England has defended its role in the Libor scandal and has published a chain of e-mails between itself, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the British Bankers’ Association, which shows that the BoE put pressure on the association to reform the benchmark in 2008.

On June 29, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission published a proposed policy statement and interpretive guidance addressing the extraterritorial reach of the swaps provisions of the Commodity Exchange Act that were enacted by Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act.

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has changed its stance on the treatment of collateral supporting derivatives between an issuer of covered bonds and its special purpose vehicle.