UBS has hired a senior FX salesman in Singapore, in a sign that its FICC rebuild is spreading to Asia.
Rene Schwarzl joined UBS earlier this month as an executive director in FX global macro sales, according to his online profile. He previously spent three years and three months working in the same field at Standard Chartered, where he was a director.
Schwarzl was at Citi between 2006 and 2014, first in London and then as a Singapore-based director.
His hiring by UBS comes almost five years after the Swiss bank shuttered much of its fixed income sales and trading business. More recently, though, UBS has been hiring again, albeit on a small scale.
Earlier this year, for example, UBS recruited three Goldman Sachs salespeople. Peter Wilson, a London-based Goldman VP in macro FX sales is now a UBS director, while UBS also poached Ali Sanai in London and Aliza Raffel in New York, sales executives for rates and FX respectively.
Other European banks – including Barclays, BNP Paribas and Deutsche – and have been bulking up their FICC desks globally this year, although there are now fears that FICC revenues are set to fall in the third quarter.
Still, recruiters in Asia say FICC hiring in their region remains comparatively healthy. “Macro trading has been underperforming in recent years, but now some astute firms are adding more talent in Asia,” says Matthew Hoyle, a trader-turned-headhunter in Hong Kong.
Goldman Sachs is one of these firms. It hired two new executive directors into its Asian macro sales and trading team in July. Steve Ji Xu, a former Asia emerging markets FX trader at J.P. Morgan, joined the bank as a macro trader in Hong Kong, while Singapore-based Kevin Feng moved from Citi to work in south Asia macro sales at Goldman.
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