NeoXam Hires Data Sales Vets in Key Growth Markets

Data management software vendor NeoXam has made a handful of key sales hires in offices around EMEA and the Middle East as part of a new five-year growth plan instituted after the company’s acquisition in May by private equity firms Cathay Capital and Bpifrance.

Over the past two months, the vendor has hired Markus Titze as sales director for the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) area, enlisted Ettie Takacs as a business development consultant in Israel, and Zilani Rahman as sales director for Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, following the hire of Saad Amor as business development and project manager in Morocco earlier this year.

“We already have a global footprint, but we believe that we need to increase that now, as there is huge momentum,” says Florent Fabre, global COO at NeoXam, who is responsible for sales and professional services, and also in charge of the company’s global expansion plans. “We clearly see huge demand for data management solutions that can provide a single point of truth for large buy-side companies, and tier-two players are now very motivated to put these kinds of platforms in place… so we want to be in a lot of new countries to be able to take advantage of that.”

Titze most recently spent 13 years at FactSet in various roles, including MD of FactSet Gmbh and regional sales manager for Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Central and Eastern Europe region. Before that, he spent five years at investment form Value Management and Research AG as a fund of funds manager and a trader, and also served as a trader at German interdealer broker Finacor Rabe & Partner.

His role at NeoXam will be to bring greater structure to existing sales operations in the region. “First, we need to still be strong in our traditional core markets in EMEA, which is why we have expanded our pre-sales in the German-speaking region. We already had a sales team in Germany… but now we have a sales management structure for the long term,” Fabre says.

Takacs is founder and CEO of Ensemble Technologies, an Israel-based consultancy focusing on financial technology, which will act as a partner to help NeoXam develop its local presence and distribution, and value-added services. Before re-establishing Ensemble—which she also ran between 1996 and 2005 from South Africa—in 2016, she was MD for Israel at FIS and SunGard, where she spent 11 years, including as COO of SunGard APT (Advance Portfolio Technologies) and MD of SunGard Financial Systems, based in Johannesburg. Before her prior stint running Ensemble, Takacs spent seven years as IT director at Standard Corporate and Merchant Bank, and four years as a director of Q-Data Systems Group, which managed SCMB’s IT.

“We already have clients in Israel. We needed someone who could really upset the market there and strengthen our presence,” Fabre adds.

Rahman joined the vendor in September after almost a decade in sales roles at Thomson Reuters in South Africa, most recently as head of financial sales for Africa. Before joining Thomson Reuters, he was a European account manager for StarMine, and held the same role at FactSet, prior to which he spent more than six years at Thomson Financial as a client support manager.

“We really believe that Africa in the long term will be the continent where we see growth over the next five to 10 years. We already have a footprint in South Africa—a team of people in delivery roles to serve existing clients—but didn’t have a full sales team there. We want a full sales activity to service clients and cross-sell,” Fabre says. “And the same for Morocco: We believe it could be a hub to address demand from the north part of Africa.”

In Morocco, Amor joined NeoXam at the start of this year, having previously worked at Cognizant Business Consulting France as a senior capital markets consultant in Paris, prior to which he was a structured products sales assistant at BNP Paribas Wealth Management, held a similar role at Societe Generale, and served briefly as an overseas sales and financial analyst assistant at petrochemical information provider ICIS in Shanghai.