WeMatch has announced the expansion of its London office with five appointments that it expects to accelerate the growth of the company’s securities finance and derivatives platforms.
Nora Assad-Russo has joined the company as head of product on equity derivatives. Previously working for Morgan Stanley, Assad-Russo spent six years on the equities trading floor managing cross-functional projects for front-office risk.
With 12 years of experience in securities finance, Brendon Johns has been appointed product manager of securities finance at WeMatch. He has held various positions during his career to date, including managing the total return swap (TRS), repo and securities lending book for Macquarie in South Africa.
Additionally, Johns had previously served on the executive committee of the South African Securities Lending Association (SASLA).
WeMatch has also welcomed two sales traders for its equity derivatives division, Myriam Laroqua and Michael Dryden.
Laroqua has joined the multi-asset securities finance platform from Commerzbank, where she ran the equity derivatives flow and Delta1 sales desk for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Prior to her position as senior sales trader for WeMatch, Laroqua worked for BNP Paribas’ Paris office, where she covered client types from hedge funds and private banks to pension funds.
Dryden has been welcomed to the WeMatch team as a sales trader after spending five years at Citigroup’s equity derivatives sales desk. In this role, Dryden was exposed to a range of flow products while covering institutional clients in the UK, Switzerland and the US.
Supporting the securities financing division, Ryadh Bakiri has also moved to WeMatch as sales trader. He joins from CACEIS, where he worked on the securities finance and repo desk at the firm’s Luxembourg office.
Within front-office sales, Bakiri covered clients from regulated funds to institutional clients located in France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Netherlands.
Commenting on the announcement, David Raccat, head of securities financing and head of EMEA, says: “The growth of the existing business and the additional product needs requested by our banking partners are requiring increasing expertise and need for talents in our London office. Good luck to all of them in those new roles.”
Michael Sabbah, head of equity derivatives, adds: “We are about to deliver a unique product to the equity derivatives industry, where automation and data will help traders scale up their executions, monitor their risk, and reach a level of understanding of market structure never attained before.
“It is with great pleasure that I will be working again with Nora on this task. With Myriam and Michael, we are already building a team of experienced flow sales to help us have a powerful impact from launch. It is great to welcome such talented individuals as Ryadh and Brendon to push the financing’s success even further, very exciting times ahead for WeMatch.”
