Check out our SRP Asia Pacific conference and award coverage directly on our website. Don’t forget to also take a look at our new identity….

SCG Asset Management (SCG) has announced the appointments of Ian Merrill, Kevin Murphy and Todd Dilatush as president, head of trading, product and risk management, and head of distribution, respectively. Based in New York, they will be responsible for building out the firm's expanding asset management platform.  

Merrill joins from Barclays where he spent over 18 years in various senior management roles in derivatives and structured investments, while Dilatush was previously director of national sales for multi-issuer structured products and annuities platform Luma Financial Technologies. Murphy is also a seasoned executive with over 30 years of experience in the financial markets at several global investment banks at J.P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers and Barclays.

Malmberg will be responsible for expanding the bank’s structured investment products offering as the Swedish bank rebuilds its presence in the domestic market

In Sweden, Christian Malmberg has joined Handelsbanken as head of investment product sales in Stockholm. In his new role, Malmberg will be responsible for expanding the bank’s structured investment products offering as the Swedish bank rebuilds its presence in the domestic market. He will report to Christer Beckard, global head of equities.

It was conference week for SRP last week, with the 2023 edition – the 10th edition incidentally - of our Apac event taking place in Singapore. The SRP Apac Conference 2023 kicked off with three panellists from private banks sharing the strategy shift amid rising interest rates. It is the upward trajectory in interest rates that has impacted the structured products landscape the most, according to Rohit Jaisingh, head of capital markets products at DBS Bank, adding that the climb has led to risk de-escalation close to a risk-off mode.

"This means that the momentum of equity structure products, which were the key driver of our business, has stalled," said Jaisingh. "Inflation is persistent at high levels and corporate earnings are under some pressure. So, the outlook for equities is still unclear."

Elsewhere, four panellists from the buy- and sell-sides shared their views on the structured solutions driving activity among Asian investors. At Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), dispersion notes have become one of the most popular payoffs although the sales volume of this structure is not comparable to that of fixed coupon notes or accumulators, according to Olivier Pierlot, global head of structured products and fixed income, product manager.

With interest rates going up, there was "massive inflows" into fixed income instruments at SCB in the past year, which was echoed by several wealth managers and private banks in Asia.

On the partnership front, MUFG and Origin have launched Origin Documentation, an automated solution for the Japanese Bank’s equity-linked structured notes product offering. The documentation product forms one part of a broader drive for increased efficiency and improved client experience being led by MUFG’s structured solutions team in Emea and supported by the international equities trading team.

At UBS, global markets revenues dropped 17% to US$2.0 billion year-on-year (YoY) 'with lower derivatives & solutions and execution services revenues partly offset by an increase in financing revenues'.

Derivatives & solutions revenues dipped 29% to US$1.0 billion driven by a decrease in equity derivatives and FX revenues due to lower levels of client activity and volatility, partly offset by an increase in credit revenues.

As an issuer group, the Swiss bank has marketed over 30,000 products globally in Q1 23 with an estimated sales volume of US$9.6 billion which reflects a significant year on year decrease in issuance and a slight fall in sales (Q1 2022: 46,993 products /US$9.2 billion) but a growth from the previous quarter when UBS issued 25,663 products worth an estimated US$5.1 billion.