Former Deutsche head of rates who left for tech returns to J.P. Morgan

A former senior rates trader who left banking to set up his own tech firm has just resurfaced – in a rather different role at J.P. Morgan.

Pasquale Cataldi, a rates trader who spent 10 years at Deutsche Bank, latterly as head of European flow rates, and then two years at HSBC as head of European rates trading, has just joined J.P. Morgan in London as head of, ‘new products and initiatives’ for the markets execution group. Cataldi’s LinkedIn profile says he joined in June.

It’s a bit of a change of track given that a) Cataldi’s previous banking career had always been in (rates) trading and b) he’s spent the past 22 months trying to launch his own tech venture.

Cataldi’s big tech idea was ibiLive, an android app that allows people who share no personal information to “connect in real time”. Ibi users post their needs via video and a “revolutionary algorithm” matches them to other users who can help them out and respond either via live chat or live video stream.

Last year, Cataldi admitted that Ibi hadn’t “made it big” yet. As he’s not from a tech background, he said that learning all the new products and dealing with tech people had been, “quite difficult”.

Although ibiLive is still in operation, it looks a lot like Cataldi’s thrown in his tech aspirations and come back to banking. It’s not exactly clear what he’ll be doing at J.P.M, but his new role could actually be more interesting than his old one.

Set up last year by Daniel Pinto and run by David Hudson (the ‘most frightening man at J.P. Morgan‘) the markets execution group has a mandate to come up with “moonshots” that could completely change how trading operations are run. When the group was founded, Pinto described its purpose as being to, “assess emerging trends, technologies, electronic platforms and potential partnerships — inside and outside the bank — that could transform the way we, and our clients, do business”.

This being the case, Cataldi seems to have fallen on his feet. Maybe other senior traders should quit for a few years in tech too?

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Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com