Derivs - People and Markets

BNP Paribas Corporate and Investment Banking has launched its global prime brokerage platform.

RBC Dominion Securities has expanded European investment banking with the hiring of Steven Jones, Tim Cottrell and Ollie Champion.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has hired Jonathan Bewes as senior managing director and head of investment banking in the U.K.

Schroders has expanded fixed income with the hiring of Eric Friedland as head of municipal credit research.

The U.K. Supreme Court today upheld the flip clause in Lehman Brothers’ synthetic collateralized debt obligations which made Lehman subordinate to noteholders in the waterfall of payments when the firm filed for bankruptcy in 2008. The ruling highlights the differences in U.K. and U.S. law on the matter and could lead to increased scrutiny on the jurisdiction of parties involved in structured credit deals in the future.

Regulators in China are expected to release definitions for credit, interest rate and commodity derivatives by year-end, according to officials familiar with the discussions.

Nomura has hired Giovanni De Bustis Figarola, an ex-senior single stocks options trader at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London, in a similar position.

Swaps market participants in the U.S. or those participants dealing with a U.S. counterparty should be able to enter into swaps outside of the U.S. for legitimate business purposes without being concerned that their activity will be considered evasive under Dodd-Frank, according to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association in a comment letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

SPDR, State Street’s exchanged-traded unit, has launched 11 ETFs on the London Stock Exchange.

UBS said it is looking to reduce costs by CHY1.5 billion (USD1.86 billion) to CHY2 billion (USD2.48 billion) over the next to three years and to rethink its fixed-income business after reporting disappointing second-quarter earnings for the division.

Deutsche Bank warned the European debt crisis will cause its core investment banking division to misses it goal of EUR6.4 billion (USD9.26 billion) of pretax profit.

LCH.Clearnet has added has extended the range of currencies available for clearing through its SwapClear service to include interest rate swaps denominated in Hungarian forint, Czech koruna and Singaporean dollars.