JPMorgan's European IG credit team is on a hiring spree
As we reported two months ago, there have been changes to JPMorgan's North American credit trading team following the exit of Austin Garrison after 23 years. In Europe, JPMorgan's investment grade (IG) credit trading team has changed too, and it's hiring.
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JPMorgan isn't commenting, but in the past few months its London-based IG credit trading team has added at least seven people by our count. All have come from rival banks.
The new hires include: Saba Danish, the former head of European credit sales at Morgan Stanley; Kru Patel and Joel Bell from Barclays; Alessandro Pelleriti from Deutsche Bank; Abigail Cheesman from UBS; Joseph Chotard from Mizuho; and John Levy from SocGen. All have joined in the past few months.
The arrivals follow changes to JPMorgan's London-based IG credit team last year. It's now managed by James Wilson, a former Nomura trader who joined in 2019 and Paris-based Frederick Salt.
JPMorgan's hires come as other banks have been cutting credit traders as trades are increasingly placed electronically. "A lot of traders of my generation are simply leaving the industry and deciding that they want a change," one veteran trader told us last year.
It's understood that JPMorgan is swimming against this tide. As other banks cut teams and focus increasingly on algorithms to trade investment grade credit, there's an opportunity for the bank to double down on the kind of voice trading that's necessary for very large trades.
JPMorgan is investing in algorithmic credit trading too, but it also wants humans. And humans are making the most of this.
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