People Moves: Tradeweb, Ion, Burton-Taylor, HKEx, and more

Tradeweb taps Pluta for next president

Tradeweb Markets, a global operator of electronic marketplaces for rates, credit, equities and money markets, has announced that markets veteran Thomas Pluta has been appointed its next president. He will join the firm as president-elect in October and become president on January 1, 2023, when current president Billy Hult succeeds Lee Olesky as chief executive officer. As previously announced, Olesky will retire as CEO at the end of 2022 and continue as chairman through 2023.

As president, Pluta will work closely with Hult and the rest of the executive management team to set and execute against the firm’s strategic agenda, oversee the day-to-day business, and continue to drive a strong culture of collaborative innovation. He will report to Hult. A member of Tradeweb’s board since 2017, Pluta will continue on the board of directors in his new role.

Pluta will join Tradeweb from JP Morgan, where he spent nearly 27 years and was most recently global head of linear rates trading and co-head of North America rates trading.

Ion appoints ex-Microsoft exec as EVP

Ion, a global provider of trading, analytics, business information, and risk management solutions for capital markets, commodities, and treasury management, has appointed Carlo Purassanta as executive vice president for strategy and corporate development.

Purassanta has been president of Microsoft Italia (2013–2017) and Microsoft France (2018–2021). Before this, he worked for IBM and had been business development executive for Southwest Europe, and director in France and in EMEA. He is currently a member of the strategy advisory board for the Graduate School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, a member of the advisory board for Only The Brave, and a member of the investment board of the French Touch Fund.

Burton-Taylor hires senior research staff

Burton-Taylor International Consulting has added Hadley Weinberger and Steven Semel to its analyst team. Weinberger joins the consultancy as a senior analyst, and Semel will serve as a research director. Both will report to managing director Bob Iati and will be responsible for managing the research business.

Weinberger brings more than 20 years of experience in data management with Citi, Raymond James, Janus Capital, and Barclays Capital. As a senior analyst, he will be responsible for developing market data research and for expanding into the most critical areas of data usage, including how it is purchased and deployed across the spectrum of a client’s operation, as well as how the data products themselves are meeting market demands.

Semel joins Burton Taylor following more than 20 years of experience with Bank of America, Dow Jones, and GoldenSource.

HKEx names chief strategy officer, expands emerging business development team 

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx) has appointed Daniel Sonder chief strategy officer and as head of data business with HKEx Markets. In his strategy role, Sonder will lead the group strategy function, working closely with the HKEx management committee and executives across the business. He will also become HKEx Markets’ head of data business, where he will lead the development of business by adding new data sets and services including environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data to HKEx’s existing offering, as well as overseeing the continued development of HKEx’s Sustainable and Green Exchange, known as Stage. In this capacity, he will report to HKEx chief executive officer, Nicolas Aguzin.

Sonder joined HKEx this year from the Brazilian stock exchange, B3, where he was most recently chief financial officer.

Sonder joins two other senior leaders at the helm of HKEx Markets division’s newly expanded emerging business development team. Andrew Walton joins HKEx Markets as managing director and head of digital assets, and he will be responsible for driving the development of digital products and market-facing digital platforms. Ken Chiu, who joined HKEx in 2018, becomes the division’s head of carbon and ESG products, leading HKEx’s efforts in developing carbon and ESG financial products, and having recently helped establish and launch HKEx’s Hong Kong International Carbon Council.

In their emerging business development roles, the three executives will report to HKEx co-heads of markets, Glenda So and Wilfred Yiu.

Two Sigma hires Google product lead Steve Francia

Quant fund Two Sigma has hired Steve Francia, a former Google product lead known for building out the Go and MongoDB programming languages. Francia will serve as managing director on the engineering product management team, reporting to head of product Jason Bigler.

TS Imagine recruits marketplace leadership with non-exec board appointments

TS Imagine, a provider of trading, portfolio, and risk management solutions, has appointed three new board members to support the firm’s rapid growth: Thomas Chippas, Sabrina Wilson, and John Stracquadanio.

Chippas brings nearly 30 years of experience working for banks and financial technology businesses. Previously, he was chief executive officer of ErisX and now serves on the board of Eris Clearing, LLC, the cryptocurrency platform recently acquired by Cboe Global Markets. He previously held senior positions at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and Citi.

Wilson is the chief operating officer of the institutional digital asset infrastructure firm Copper.co. She previously held senior positions at JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Citi.

Stracquadanio is a co-founder of private investment firm, Appia Ventures. He brings over 30 years of banking experience and was previously CEO of Scotia Capital in the US.

Crux hires new core development lead

Crux Informatics, a provider of end-to-end external data integration and operations solution to scale data delivery and transformation, has named Ivan Batanov as its new senior vice president of engineering to lead core development activities.

Previously, Batanov led the building of cloud-scale solutions at ServiceNow and was most recently SVP of engineering at Tealium.