Societe Generale has appointed Florian Dumas (pictured) as head of financial institutions sales for fixed income & currencies (FIC), global markets in Asia Pacific. This newly created role is aimed at better serving the bank's financial institutions clients. Dumas' main responsibility is to accelerate the expansion of business in this sector working with financial institutions clients and leverage Societe Generale's FIC products, further driving new sales and strategic opportunities in the region. Based in Hong Kong, he reports locally to Guillaume Miquel, head of FIC, global markets, Asia Pacific, and to Albert Loo, global head of FIC and cross asset solution sales, global markets who is based in Paris.

Dumas joins from BNP Paribas where he was head of FX and rates institutional sales, Asia. He has been based in Asia since 1998 and has held various front office positions in Tokyo and Singapore, covering both G10 and emerging markets. FIC provides a full set of products and services to support clients in their investment and risk management, and services clients in four main areas, including global market risk advisory, FX and rates hedging, liquidity investment solutions and structured finance hedging.

Rajan Jain, director corporate equity derivatives - structuring & sales, at Credit Suisse in London, has parted ways with the Swiss bank. Jain joined Credit Suisse in 2010 as head of complex & corporate structuring, equity derivatives, Europe, Middle East (Emea) with responsibility for structuring of complex/ non-standard transactions and developing and delivering client solutions, as well as non-quantitative aspects of structuring (e.g. legal, accounting, tax, credit, capital).

Prior to that Jain was a senior vice president & counsel at Citigroup for three years, after spending five years as an associate at law firm Linklaters in New York.

Old Mutual Wealth, one of the UK's largest wealth management businesses, has appointed John Porteous in the newly created role of retail customer solutions director. Porteous will be responsible for establishing the retail customer solutions team, which will play a central role in Old Mutual Wealth's strategy of blending market-leading businesses to create customer-focused end-to-end wealth management solutions.

The retail customer solutions team will work across the business units within Old Mutual Wealth to ensure that its overall proposition and services deliver improved outcomes and superior customer experience, particularly where advisers and customers are choosing to access multiple parts of the Old Mutual Wealth proposition. Porteous joins Old Mutual Wealth with a wide range of experience and expertise in the financial planning, platform and wealth management industry, most recently as Tilney's head of client proposition.

Old Mutual Wealth has a number of live products in the UK market including the Skandia RS GBP Investec FTSE 100 Defensive Autocall Fund Issue 2, Skandia RS GBP Investec FTSE 100 Defensive Autocall Fund Issue 1, and Skandia Shield Fund.

Robeco has appointed Maureen Beshar as head of Robeco Institutional Asset Management US (Robeco US). In her new role, Beshar will head Robeco's sales and client relationship management efforts out of the company's newly opened New York office, focusing on both global and local key consultants and on institutional investors in the US while overseeing and leading Robeco's strategic business expansion in the US market.

Beshar has over 30 years of experience in the US asset management industry. Prior to joining Robeco, she was a member of the executive committee and head of global institutional distribution, client service and marketing at Nuveen Investments. Beshar also served as head of institutional sales and consultant relations at ClearBridge Investments, managing director global consultant relations at Lazard Asset Management, director of global consultant relations at Invesco and head of East Coast institutional sales at Weiss, Peck & Greer.

JPMorgan Asset Management (JPMAM) has appointed Karen Ward, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as chief market strategist for Europe and UK. She will be based in London and will start shortly after the Autumn Budget, reporting to David Kelly, US-based chief global strategist.

Ward replaces Stephanie Flanders who left JPMAM in June to lead a team of journalists and researchers for Bloomberg Economics. She will head the Market Insights team across Europe which produces JPMorgan's Guide to the Markets and provides insight into the economy and financial markets to thousands of professional investors across Europe and around the world.

In her role as economic adviser to the Chancellor, Ward advised on macroeconomic issues including fiscal strategy and Brexit. Previously she served as chief European economist at HSBC Global Banking & Markets, where she was responsible for managing a team driving thematic research. Before joining HSBC in 2006, she was an economic analyst at the Bank of England.

BMO Global Asset Management has appointed Rogier van Harten to the newly created role of head of institutional distribution & client management Europe. Based in the Netherlands, Van Harten is responsible for managing the client management and distribution teams across Continental Europe, excluding Germany. As part of his role, he joins the Europe, Middle East & Africa (Emea) client management leadership team and the board of BMO Global Asset Management - Nederland. Van Harten joined BMO on September 1, reporting to Mandy Mannix, head of client management Emea at BMO Global Asset Management.

Van Harten joins BMO Global Asset Management from BNP Paribas Asset Management, where he was head of institutional clients Continental Europe (ex. France, Belgium and Italy) since 2014. Prior to this, her was the head of institutional clients Netherlands at BNP Paribas Asset Management and was previously a member of the management team in Amsterdam.

Recently BMO Global Asset Management has expanded the size and breadth of its European distribution teams with key senior hires in sales and relationship management, and has opened offices in Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris and Stockholm as part of its ambition to grow the business across EMEA

Arabesque has appointed three new non-executive directors to its board. Subject to regulatory approval, the new members of the Board are Dr. Carolyn Woo, former CEO and president of Catholic Relief Services; John Ruggie, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Yolanda Kakabadse, president of WWF International, who will commence on January 1, 2018, following the completion of her term of office at WWF International.

They join Barbara J. Krumsiek, former CEO and president of Calvert Investments, and Georg Kell, founding executive director of the United Nations Global Compact, on the board of directors.

Arabesque is an asset management firm, spun off from Barclays Bank in 2013, that uses self-learning quantitative models and big data to assess the performance and sustainability of listed companies. The firm's rules-based approach to stock selection integrates environmental, social and governance (ESG) information with financial and momentum analysis, processing over 100 billion data points via 250,000 lines of code to construct its strategies, and to deliver a range of ESG investment products.

The firm partnered with Deutsche Bank in 2016 to launch a family of investment products that apply a 'proven quantitative stock selection mechanism' to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.

Law firm Winston & Strawn has appointed John Servidio and Daniel Bley who have joined the firm's Derivatives and Structured Products Practice in the New York office. Servidio joins the firm, as a partner, from McGuireWoods, while Bley joins, as an associate, from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.

Servidio will represent dealers and issuers in structuring derivative and equity-linked capital market transactions, as well as advise clients on listed and OTC derivative documentation, and other agreements for securities, interest rate, currency, energy, and commodities trading. He will also cover regulatory compliance advice to broker-dealers, swap dealers, alternative asset managers and end-users on SEC and CFTC regulations. Servidio was previously assistant general counsel at Bank of America Merrill Lynch for its sales and trading and capital market businesses. Prior to that he was an associate and attorney at Bear Stearns.

Bley will advise clients on a wide range of derivative and structured finance transactions, including loan facility total return swaps, deal-contingent swaps, CLOs, risk retention financing, distressed structured products, and regulatory capital solutions. For three years Blay was in-house counsel at a major New York-based hedge fund, where his practice focused on structured products.

Cannex Financial Exchanges, an independent provider of annuity pricing and analytics to the financial services industry, has appointed Tamiko Toland as its new head of annuity research.

Toland will be responsible for product research on the annuity market and she will contribute to the development of Cannex services. She brings to her role 15 years of experience as a researcher and editor focused on retirement income and annuities. Toland will provide financial institutions and annuity product manufacturers with insights into product design and trends. Toland most recently served as managing director, editorial and research operations/retirement income consulting, at Strategic Insight, parent company of Planadviser. Prior to Strategic Insight, she was managing editor at Annuity Market News, a SourceMedia publication that provided industry news about fixed and variable annuities, as well as variable life insurance.

Architas, Axa Wealth's specialist investment house in charge of the firm's continuously available capital-protected range, has promoted its head of UK proposition Sarah Ackland to head of UK funds, replacing Cedric Bucher who is leaving to take up a role in the institutional pensions sector. Ackland will be responsible for all commercial aspects of the UK business including distribution, marketing, proposition and business development.

Meanwhile, the firm has also hired Frank Potaczek from Defaqto, where he was senior vice president responsible for its fund and discretionary fund manager (DFM) products and its fund ratings service, to take up Ackland's previous role as head of UK proposition. Reporting to Ackland, Potaczek's new role will involve responsibilities for the existing fund ranges offered by Architas in the UK, as well as the development of discretionary management services, manage future product and proposition strategy.

Ackland joined Architas in 2014 after spending seven years as a sales director at Thames River and then F&C after it was acquired. She has also previously served in an offshore role for Friends Provident International as manager of the funds marketing and research team and was responsible for its international fund range. Before his time at Defaqto, Potaczek previously held senior roles at Intrinsic Financial Services, Close Brothers Asset Management, Legal & General Investments, Threadneedle Investments, and F&C Asset Management.

The Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) has announced that Femke de Vries, member of the board of the AFM, will leave the regulator as of January 1, 2018. De Vries, who became a board member of the AFM on October 1, 2015, is joining &samhoud consultancy as a senior partner. De Vries has been active in financial regulation in the past fifteen years, among other as a supervisor and division director at De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB). She will remain as a special professor of supervision attached to the University of Groningen.

The AFM said it will start recruiting for the vacancy created by the departure of De Vries and once a suitable nominee is found he or she will be nominated to Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch Minister of Finance.