People Moves: HKEx, FCA, Clear Street, and more

HKEx president and COO Calvin Tai to retire

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) has announced that Calvin Tai, president and chief operating officer, will retire at the end of May. Tai will also retire as chief executive of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (SEHK) and Hong Kong Futures Exchange (HKFE).

HKEx has named John Buckley, current head of exchange operations and transformation, and Wilfred Yiu, current co-head of markets, as co-COOs following Tai’s retirement. Yiu will also succeed Tai as chief executive of SEHK and HKFE. The new appointments take effect June 1.

Tai joined the HKFE in 1998 and has held a number of senior roles within the HKEx Group, including interim chief executive, head of clearing, co-head of equities and FIC business, and head of trading division.

In their new roles, Buckley will continue overseeing the HKEx exchange operations and transformation functions, while Yiu will also continue in his role as co-head of markets.

Buckley joined HKEx in December 2021 from Citadel, where he was Asia chief operating officer for three years. Yiu joined HKEx in April 2019 as head of markets, where he had responsibility for the group’s equity and derivatives markets business and operations. Yiu previously held posts at Goldman Sachs and Beijing Gao Hua Securities.

FCA makes three senior hires

The Financial Conduct Authority has announced new senior hires that include Mel Gunewardena as senior advisor, Graeme Reynolds as director of competition, and Simon Walls as interim wholesale director.

Gunewardena is currently chief market intelligence officer at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission. His previous roles include time at Goldman Sachs, State Street, and Deutsche Bank.

Reynolds is currently one of the FCA’s deputy chief economists. Walls has been head of wholesale markets since 2016 and has been with the FCA/FSA since 2006 in a variety of wholesale roles, including 7 years in asset management supervision.

Clear Street names product and design chiefs, engineering VPs

Clear Street, a fintech prime brokerage, has announced three additions to its senior leadership team. They include the appointments of William Dulude as chief product officer and Prerak Sanghvi as vice president of engineering, and the promotions of Emilio Schapira to vice president of engineering and Brent Brooks to chief design officer. Together, they will oversee the firm’s product, engineering & design (PED) function.

Dulude most recently served as director of electronic trading product at Galaxy Digital, prior to which he was global head of operations at Tagomi. He has also held senior roles at Tower Research Capital, KCG Holdings, and Courant Capital Management. In his new role as chief product officer, he will be responsible for running product strategy at the enterprise level, as well as overseeing product development for all of Clear Street’s business segments.

Sanghvi, who will join Clear Street in June, most recently served as chief technology officer of Proof Trading. He previously served as head of venture technology at IEX Group and has held senior roles at RBC Capital Markets, Myrias, and Bank of America Securities. In his new role as VP of engineering, Sanghvi will oversee Clear Street’s product, securities finance, risk, and electronic execution services engineering teams.

Schapira has been promoted to VP of engineering after serving as the company’s engineering lead for clearing, custody and infrastructure since November 2021. In his new role, Schapira will oversee the clearing, data, research and analytics, control, and infrastructure engineering teams, as well as other horizontal teams that are in incubation stages. Prior to Clear Street, Schapira served in lead engineering roles at Waze and Google Cloud Platform.

Brooks joined Clear Street last year as head of design. He held previous roles in design at Bank of America and AIG.

FIX Trading names new management directors

The FIX Trading Community has appointed Jim Kaye and Laurence Jones as executive director and Americas regional director.

Kaye has been appointed executive director with responsibility for all FIX staff, marketing, communications, sales, and the day-to-day operations of FIX. He most recently served as Americas regional director and previously held roles at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

Jones has joined as the Americas regional director. He also serves as managing partner at TZero Partners and previously held roles at OSTTRA, CloudMargin, and LCH.

Gazit joins FIA Tech as head of product

FIA Tech, a technology provider to the futures industry, has hired Gily Gazit in the newly created role of head of product.

Gazit joins FIA Tech from Citigroup, where she was director of FX prime brokerage product strategy and led and managed the entire tech stack of the FXPB global business, from front-office products to middle office and key vendor products.

Daffern appointed non-executive company chair at Xceptor

Xceptor, a no-code software platform for data automation, has named Pete Daffern as non-executive company chair. Daffern was most recently chief executive officer at Foresee, an IT services and consulting firm, and prior to that, president of Netsuite, a cloud computing company acquired by Oracle in 2016.