RBC builds London FX

The bank has added 11 staff -- nine in sales, one in strategy and one in trading -- to the team during the past year, said Keith Dack co-head of FX at RBC Capital Markets in London.

"We are in a growth phase in Europe," said Dack. Increased concentration of global trading during London’s trading hours and the bank’s aim to target more client business has prompted the expansion, he said. And London’s continued status as Europe’s prime hub for FX trading is also a factor.

"We have allocated resources to London because the City’s role in the markets continues to increase," said Mark Allen, co-head of FX at RBC, pointing to the Bank for International Settlements’ triennial survey of the FX markets, published last year, which showed that over 30% of global FX is transacted in London.

The bank’s most recent hires are David Foley and Steven Whittet, who joined RBC’s UK and US institutional FX sales team from Prudential-Bache last month. They followed the hire of Anthony Kritikides from Westpac earlier in the year.

However, the main focus of the bank’s sales expansion is the European client base, said Allen. To that end the bank has hired Susana Romero-Miguel from ING Barings, Lyndon Mullen from Merrill Lynch Investment Management, Tommy Rolke from SEB and Alessandro Di Carlo from Banca Nazionale del Lavoro for its European corporates and funds sales team over the past six months.

RBS has also added another strategist in London. Monica Fan joined RBC last week from Bank of America (see related trading place, right), to work alongside FX strategist Jeremy Stretch and emerging markets strategist Tania Kotsos.

On the trading side, RBC has hired dollar/yen trader Mark Portlock from Bank of America.

The bank’s niche Canadian dollar trading has also helped its growth in Europe, said Dack. "The Canadian dollar has been in everyone’s focus," he told FX Week. "Canada is currently the strongest G7 economy and our expertise insight and depth of liquidity provision has been a door-opener for us."

Allen added that the bank’s AA- credit rating has also been helpful. "It’s important in these markets where quality of credit is playing a major role in determining relationships," he told FX Week.

In Asia the bank recently hired an FX team in Tokyo from Bank One, while Jeremy Rumble -- formerly head of FX options for Asia -- now manages the bank’s FX operation in Asia, based in Sydney. Meanwhile, Susan Strothman, formerly of Citigroup, now manages RBC’s corporate and institutional sales effort in the US, based in New York. Sales dealer Linda McLaughlin joined Strothman’s team from Mellon bank while Keith McCann also joined from Bank of America.