Citi's ex-IG credit traders have got something going at RBC Capital Markets
As we noted just the other day, RBC Capital Markets has hired Robert Thorne, Citi's head of UK investment grade credit sales. It has since come to our attention that Thorne is not the only investment grade (IG) credit person RBC has hired from Citi. There are at least four other senior Citi people there too.
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Not all were hired recently. Dan Spitzberg, RBC's head of high grade credit sales in New York, joined from Citi in the dark days of 2019. Justin Snyder, RBC's head of US investment grade credit trading, came from Citi in 2023. Nirva Shah, RBC's head of spread products technology, arrived from Citi in 2023 too. Mike Fisher, RBC's head of futures product development appeared from Citi in 2024.
Thorne will therefore be in good company, and may find himself joined by other ex-Citi people soon. Vincent Boccio, for example, has also just joined in New York as US head of electronic credit strategy. Boccio spent the last six years bouncing between four employers, but spent seven years at Citi until 2020.
RBC didn't respond to a request to comment on its partiality to people from Citi's IG team, but some RBC people are looking askance at their new colleagues. "RBC's hiring seems to have been extremely Citi centric in the past few years," says one. "Hiring externally is supposed to bring new ideas, but this won't be the case if everyone is coming from the same shop."
RBC's credit trading team has undergone changes in the past year following the departure of James Chapman, the global head of credit trading who did not come from Citi but who once worked for Deutsche Bank. Chapman appears to have been popular.
Not all RBC's senior hires have come from Citi. Last year, the Canadian bank also hired Ralph Boumalham from UBS for leveraged loan trading, but Boumalham ironically left for Citi after only two months. It also hired Mousemi Dey from Unicredit, Justin Stratton-Christensen from KNG Securities and Stuart Marenghi from Wells Fargo.
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