People moves

Latest appointments within the hedge fund and related industries.

Arrow Capital Management, the hedge fund founded by Alex von Furstenberg and Mal Serure in 2003, has appointed Ivan Wanat as director of business development. He joins from Atlantic-Pacific Capital and will focus on growing the company’s institutional business. Arrow Capital manages approximately $425 million in assets. Wanat will report to co-managing members Mal Serure and Alex von Furstenberg.

Appleby plans to open an office in Guernsey, Channel Islands, and be operational in the spring of 2010. The office will practise Guernsey law with a focus on corporate, commercial, private client, litigation, insolvency and restructuring. Following approval by the regulator, Guernsey Financial Services Commission, Appleby will offer a complete range of fiduciary services.
Appleby Guernsey will initially comprise two group partners, Barney Lee and Helen Crossley, in the corporate team and two partners, Jeremy Le Tissier and Gavin Ferguson, in the litigation/insolvency and private client area.
David Clark, a banking and asset finance partner in Appleby’s London office, will relocate to Guernsey to lead the office.
On the fiduciary side, Chris Ward will join the firm to lead the fiduciary and administration services business in Guernsey. He previously served as managing director of Rothschild Trust, Guernsey.

Royal Bank of Canada has appointed Jim Pettigrew as non-executive director of Royal Bank of Canada Europe, its European subsidiary in London. In addition to his non-executive directorship at RBC, Pettigrew holds non-executive directorships at Hermes and the Edinburgh Investment Trust.

RBC Global Asset Management, a Canadian-based global investment manager and part of RBC Wealth Management, has appointed Philippe Langham and Michael Joynson to its London team. Langham, who holds the position of portfolio manager, will be responsible for establishing and leading RBC GAM’s emerging markets equities team. Previously he was the head of global emerging markets at Société Générale Asset Management (SGAM) in London, and prior to this, he was based in Zurich as head of Asia and Emerging Markets for Credit Suisse. Joynson joins as a senior member of the European equities team and was most recently at Citigroup where he was a director in global equity strategy. The appointments of Langham and Joynson follow the news that Jane Lesslie and Soo Boo Cheah, both fixed income portfolio managers, have relocated from RBC GAM’s Toronto group to London.

Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA) has appointed Sean Walters as an executive director. Walters currently serves as IMCA’s deputy executive director and will start his new role on March 1, 2010. Current IMCA executive director, Edythe (Dede) Pahl will retire on February 28, 2010. Based in Denver, IMCA was set up in 1985 to deliver investment consulting and wealth management credentials and educational support such as conferences, research and publications.

Fixnetix, a provider of ultra-low latency co-location hosting, market data and trading infrastructure connectivity services, has appointed 13 new employees who have all joined the company during the last quarter. Employees joining the company include Richard Reed from Verizon, who has been appointed as head of network and co-location strategy; Owen Chuck and Gareth Richardson in sales and business development; Mehdi Ramouni and Mark Harrington in market data engineering; Michael O'Shea and Wayne Xiao in network engineering; John Staples and John Williams in trading systems and Helen Gilbert and Leah Morton in the service desk team. Additional appointments include Russell Stephen as service delivery manager and Gavin Kennedy in data centre engineering.

ICV Capital Partners, a private investment company focused on investments in smaller middle market companies, has promoted Zeena Rao from vice president to principal. Rao originally joined ICV in 2001 after working in the investment banking division at Lehman Brothers. She is a director of ICV portfolio companies The PFM Group and Marshall Retail Group. She is also involved in associate development and plays a key role in ICV's diversity supplier advisory board.

Simon Cheshire has joined Asset Control as vice president of strategy and business development based in New York. He will be responsible for working as part of asset control's global leadership team. Previously he was global head of strategy and corporate development at Moody's KMV where he helped to redefine the company's focus on the enterprise risk and regulatory capital management sectors.

Nexar Capital Group, a global alternative investment manager, has appointed Russell O’Brien as a managing director, institutional sales and consultant relations, North America. Previously he was at Russell Investments where he was a director of alternative investments. Nexar Capital Group is a global alternative investment manager with over 30 professionals located in New York and Paris offering variety of hedge fund products including funds of hedge funds, volatility arbitrage hedge funds and tailored hedge fund portfolios.

ConvergEx Group, a provider of investment and execution technology solutions to institutional clients, has appointed ConvergEx veteran Chris O’Connor as head of Australian sales for the company’s order management system, the Eze OMSTM. It has also opened a sales office in Sydney, Australia. O’Connor was most recently director of European sales for ConvergEx’s Eze Castle Software and is succeeded by Christopher Kyriakou who joins from Global View Software where he was director of sales for Europe, Africa and the Mideast and was responsible for all regional strategic planning.

Russell Investments has appointed Stephen Metcalfe as a consultant in the consulting and advisory services team. He joins from Friends Provident where he was a consultant in the asset liability management team. Metcalfe will be based in London and reports to Sorca Kelly-Scholte.

Alexander Ineichen has joined Prime Capital, a provider of integrated asset management and investment banking solutions, as senior strategist. He will be responsible for the research and product development for satellite investments, focussing on alternative investments and absolute return strategies. Ineichen is founder of Ineichen Research and Management, a specialist absolute return and special topic investments company.

Daniel Perrin has joined the Osmium Capital Management (Bermuda) team as an analyst. Previously he was working for Lawndale Capital management where he spent five years as a senior analyst focused on activism in equity and debt special situations. Osmium Capital Management (OCM) manages the Osmium Special Situations Fund which focuses on market neutral, global, equity event driven opportunities and currently has approximately $245 million under management.

Independent financial advisory and investment banking firm Duff & Phelps has appointed Alan Swersky as the firm’s New York office as a director in the portfolio valuation service line and head of the firm’s operational and risk due diligence group. Swersky has spent a majority of his career in the alternative asset management community. Previously he was global head of operational due diligence at Olympia Capital Management, a Paris-based fund of funds with $3 billion in assets under management.

Investment Technology Group, an agency broker and financial technology company, has appointed Duncan Higgins as a director within the electronic sales group in Europe. He reports to Robert Boardman, head of electronic trading. Higgins previously worked at multi-lateral trading facility (MTF) Turquoise where he was head of client relationship management.

Manchester Companies, a financial advisory and restructuring company, has named Jeffrey Baker as managing partner and Chris Sheffert as partner. Both also become shareholders in the company. Baker joined Manchester in 2007 as a general partner of Manchester Capital Fund, a private equity fund. As partner, Sheffert is responsible for managing the company’s client financial services. Most recently Sheffert was a private equity investor with Svoboda Capital Partners, a $250 million Chicago-based middle-market private equity fund.