A new M&A deal was announced in the past few days in the brokerage space, as a push around ESG and people moves continues in Asia Pacific.

Marex has agreed to acquire Volcap Trading, an independent multi-asset broker, to expand the group’s offering in structured products and commodities brokerage.

Going forward, both sets of clients will be able to access a broader product offering and the synergies for Volcap will be immediate, with the operations integrated directly into the existing Marex client platform. Volcap will continue to trade under the Volcap brand and remain under the leadership of Nathan Van Paesschen and Gregory Spaenjaers.

This capability helped us to attract Volcap, one of the most successful structured note brokerages to the Group - Nilesh Jethwa

Marex has established full end-to-end manufacturing and distribution capabilities within Marex Financial Products.

“This capability helped us to attract Volcap, one of the most successful structured note brokerages to the Group,” Nilesh Jethwa, chief executive officer at Marex Solutions Division, told SRP, adding that the acquisition is a good fit for the Marex and Volcap businesses, with similar mindsets.

The deal follows another tech announcement a few days prior: iCapital, which delivers access to alternative investing to asset and wealth managers, said it would acquire third-party distributor for structured notes Axio.

US structured notes platform Halo is expanding its digital annuities platform by welcoming life insurance firm Great American Life as one of its partners. Financial professionals will now be able to access, purchase, and manage Great American Life's extensive suite of annuities through the Halo platform.

On the people front, Mike Bayley has joined BNP Paribas as head of UK institutional, private bank and distributor sales for equity derivatives. In this newly created position, he will be based in London and report to Walid Maaouni, global head equity derivatives hedge fund sales & head UK equity derivatives sales, BNP Paribas.

Bayley joins from Société Générale where he was head of equity derivatives & solutions, UK institutions for the last nine years, responsible for quantitative investment strategies, risk premia, Solvency II solutions, cross-asset structured products and equity derivatives for UK pension funds, insurers, asset managers and discretionary fund managers.

More on the Apac people moves front: Pierre-Alexis Renaudin, a complex equity product structuring veteran at Morgan Stanley, will relocate from London to Singapore as head of Apac strategic equity at UBS in August this year. At Morgan Stanley, Renaudin was managing director, head of Emea equity-linked origination in the strategic equity solutions group. He joined the US bank from Deutsche Bank in 2011 where he had a similar role with a stint in Asia. Prior to that, he spent four years at Merrill Lynch based in London.

Leonteq has opened an office in Lisbon as part of its service centre initiative launched in 2020 to ‘support and facilitate future business growth in a more cost-efficient way as the company continues to expand and evolve’. The company’s onsite presence was established through a phased approach which started by establishing a serviced office set-up and was completed in the fourth quarter of 2020 – this phase included hiring a small number of external IT development specialists and other personnel in shared services functions. Phase 2 was launched in the first quarter of 2021 to launch a Leonteq office with up to 100 designated roles along the entire value chain.

The second largest Singaporean bank by assets, OCBC, is offering a six-year callable deposit with fixed interest rate, whose proceeds will be invested in securities issued by companies that meet the OCBC’s ESG criteria. Launched on 24 September, the tranche for the first three years will pay an annualised interest rate of 1.2% and 1.25% for the next three years. The offering marks the first ESG-linked structured deposit in Singapore, available for subscription until 8 November.  

The payout is easier for customers to understand compared with structured deposits whose return are variable contingent on the performance of underlying assets, according to New Say Ping, regional head of investment & structured products at OCBC Bank.  

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