Appointments

Citi hires RBC’s Lippert to drive change

Citi has hired Marty Lippert, former group head of global technology and operations for Royal Bank of Canada, to a combined role heading up “transformational change across Citi’s newly centralised Global Technology and Operations divisions”.

Lippert will be chief information officer and corporate operations and technology chief operating officer, working closely with Kevin Kessinger, Citi’s chief operations and technology officer. In addition, Lippert will oversee Citi’s corporate shared services and real estate operations and will join the Citi Senior Leadership Committee. He is a natural choice for the role, his work at RBC having included; unification of the technology and operations divisions, the collapsing of back office systems onto a single platform – an issue that a bank with Citi’s scale cannot fail to appreciate – and development of the Client First initiative, driven by his belief that banks often fail to differentiate themselves to their customers.

He has an open mind on outsourcing, believing that non-commoditised IT could be built externally as long as the intellectual property is owned by the bank, while there is no value in developing solutions that offered no commercial advantage such as ERP and HR tools that are available ‘out-of-the-box’.

Vikram Pandit, Citi chief executive said that the appointment “emphasises the importance we place on technology in driving enterprise transformation, and we’ll look to him to be a key architect of that change … we will look to him to advance Citi’s business strategy by developing technology and operational platforms that are robust, agile, and cost effective. His role will involve the design and deployment of globally integrated solutions that are client-centric, and will reclaim Citi’s position as an innovative leader in the financial services industry.”

As vice chairman and group head of global technology and operations for RBC, Lippert served as a member of the Group Executive Team and as chairman of RBC Dexia and Moneris Solutions. Prior to joining RBC, he spent 16 years at Mellon Bank, serving as executive vice president for information management & research and chief financial officer of technology.

Saxo Bank has appointed two industry specialists to newly-created roles to ensure greater strategic alignment between business and IT ventures. Paul Ronan has been appointed head of Enterprise Architecture and reports directly to Tobias Straessle, Saxo Bank’s chief operating officer and head of IT and operations. Ronan’s responsibilities include defining business and IT ventures, comprising business architecture, application architecture, technical and data architecture. Ronan will also chair a committee of IT and business representatives of the bank, to ensure full strategic alignment between the groups and the development of new projects. Ronan was previously a partner at Capco, a financial technology and consulting firm following its acquisition of City Practitioners where he was Senior Consultant. Claus Thorball has been appointed head of global market Data and also reports directly to Straessle. Thorball is responsible for overseeing Saxo Bank’s market data activities on a global basis, covering prices, news and reference data, and selecting vendors and vendor. Thorball was previously head of global data sales and head of market data at Nasdaq OMX.

Richard Stevens has joined the CME Group as director of research and product development, based in London. CME Group says that the new position was created to support growth initiatives in Europe. Stevens will be responsible for identifying and developing new product opportunities, maintaining the viability of current product offerings, and contributing insight into market and business development. He will report to Julie Winkler, managing director of research and product development.

Mutual Fund Technologies has appointed Toby Sunderland as head of application delivery. Sunderland joins MFT from Northern Trust, where he was responsible for the IT service provision within the UK for fund accounting, global investments and securities lending.

Knight Capital Group has appointed Bradley Duke to the newly-created position of managing director, head of Institutional Electronic Sales in Europe. He joins from Jefferies & Company where he has worked in European institutional electronic sales and business development for the past eight years.

John Mason has joined SmartStream Technologies as UK regional director. Mason replaces Richard Cummings who is moving to head SmartStream’s Asia Pacific operations. Prior to joining SmartStream, Mason was managing director, EMEA for Capco Reference Data Service/Netik and has held management positions with BCS, Aleri and GoldenSource.

Low latency trading systems provider Celoxica has appointed John Oddie as non-executive director and acting chief technology officer. Jean-Marc Bouhelier, who joined the board as a non-executive director in October 2007, takes on the chairmanship of the company and chief operating officer Antoine Rescourio becomes company secretary. Until 2007, Oddie ran the exchange business for Atos Euronext Market Solutions. Prior to this, he was the chief executive of Instinet’s Global Equities business and has also held senior business and technology roles at Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch.

Fundtech has made some changes to its EMEA management structure. Mark Wilson has been promoted to the position of senior vice president and managing director of Fundtech’s London operation. Previously he was vice president of sales. Dieter Prang has become senior vice president and managing director of the Frankfurt operation. Prang had been senior vice president of Fundtech GmbH, which was formed when his company was acquired by Fundtech in 2007. The two now manage all aspects of Fundtech’s business throughout Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Neptune Software, which recently announced its new Rubikon family of banking software, has given details of its management team, which will be headed by Pat Hayward as managing director. Hayward most recently worked with GoldenSource, and has worked at Midland (HSBC), Bank of America and Gulf Bank as well as software companies like Internet Systems (which later became mpct Solutions) The rest of the team includes Alan Goodrich and Paul Carty who join Shalini Shivashankar (Finance and HR), Nathalie Gaudillat (Marketing) and Kamal Shah (Research and Development).

Chris Jackson, director of equity markets at Merrill Lynch, has been elected as co-chair of the FIX Protocol Limited EMEA Regional Committee. He will work closely with co-chair Daemon Bear, head of equity trading at JPMorgan Asset Management, who was elected in June. Jackson is currently responsible for selling Merrill Lynch’s global equity execution platform including algorithmic trading, direct market access, smart order routing and transitions. Prior to his current tenure, he worked within Equities at SBC Warburg.

Monitise has appointed Jan Verplancke, chief information officer at Standard Chartered Bank, as a non-executive director. Prior to joining Standard Chartered, Verplancke was CIO at Dell EMEA. He began his career at Levi Strauss in Brussels.

Tullett Prebon Information, a market data vendor, has hired Andrew Reeve as regional manager, Asia Pacific. He reviously worked at Thomson Reuters for 11 years in support, product and commercial roles in Sydney, Singapore and most recently Japan.

Lívia Judith Szabo has been appointed chief executive of GBC, the Hungarian card payment arm of the Italy-based SIA-SSB Group. Szabo was most recently at Next Consulting. Previously she has been presidential advisor at OTP Bank in Budapest, where she led the business development and managed acquisition projects in Russia and was vice chief executive of the consumer banking division of RoBank, a Romanian bank bought by OTP in 2004. Before that she was associate vice President and account Director for central-eastern Europe at MasterCard International, based in Budapest.

Eurobase Banking Solutions has hired Andy Kidd in the newly-created role of customer relations director. He joins Eurobase from ABN Amro, where he was executive director of eBusiness. Kidd’s responsibilities will include customer account management and developing opportunities for Eurobase’s Siena eTrading products through new channels.

Financial Architects has appointed Peter Baldwin as vice president for regional development based in London. He joins FinArch from Institutional Shareholder Services where he was responsible for the development of their top tier accounts but has spent the majority of his 18 years in the City with Thomson Financial, culminating in a role as global account director.

Omgeo has added of four new industry luminaries to its board of managers. The new board members are Naresh Kumar, global head of operations at Citi’s Institutional Clients Group; Peter Johnston, managing director of Global Securities and Clearing Operations at Goldman Sachs; Matthew Burkley, global head of strategy for Thomson Reuters Markets Division; and Jon Robson, president of, Thomson Reuters Enterprise business. The new board members replace Robert Kaplan, Robert Gartland, Sharon Rowlands and James Toffey, who have retired their positions. The members of the board are responsible for representing the interests of all Omgeo’s clients as decisions about strategy, governance and operations are made.

MasterCard Europe has appointed Leigh Clapham to the position of general manager, Developed Markets, Europe, in which role he will be responsible for MasterCard’s operations in the UK, Ireland, Nordics and Baltics, reporting directly to Javier Perez, president of MasterCard Europe. An internal appointment, Clapham was previously executive vice president of MasterCard Worldwide, based in Sydney, where he has been responsible for all business conducted in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific since 2002.

CheckFree, part of Fiserv, has promoted Paul Thomas to the post of managing director, International Operations for CheckFree Investment Services Software. In his new role, Thomas will assume responsibility for managing the strategy and operations of CheckFree Investment Services Software across all international customers. Thomas joined CheckFree Investment Services as vice president and sales director in April 2005. Prior to joining CheckFree, Thomas led the global sales and marketing of trade finance and treasury reconciliation solutions at Surecomp. Before this, Thomas worked at ADP for more than 10 years, ultimately as managing director of sales for Europe and Asia Pacific.