Head of specialist sales departs Deutsche Bank
The head of specialist equity sales at the Deutsche Bank, who previously managed one of the largest teams dedicated teams in Europe, has left the bank, Financial News can reveal.
Audrey Wiggin left last month having spent 11 years at the German bank. She was most recently head of specialist sales within the equities division, running a team of around 30 staff across sector research, midcap stocks and special situation sales.
She was registered as inactive on the Financial Services Authority's register of authorised persons last month. Wiggin could not be reached for comment. Deutsche Bank declined to comment.
A telecoms specialist, Wiggin in 2006 ranked third in the Thomson Reuters Extel rankings for specialist salespeople covering the sector, before taking on a management role. In the most recent survey, the bank had two top-ranked specialist salespeople.
Specialists salespeople act as the eyes and ears of both their clients and the bank’s own traders and sales traders in a given sector. Deutsche Bank has one of the biggest specialist sales teams in London, along with Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.
Deutsche Bank's equities business has undergone a number of changes over the past five months, following the appointment in May of Andre Crawford-Brunt, previously head of equity trading for the Americas, as global head of equity trading.
His predecessor, Kerim Derhalli, was at the time due to take on an undefined strategic role. However, he was registered as inactive on the Financial Services Authority's register of authorised persons earlier this month. Derhalli could not be reached for comment.
Derhalli’s role as head of European equities was handed to new co-heads Murray Roos, previously head of prime finance for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Rick Saunders, who previously led European equity research sales.
Antoine Bisson, a managing director and senior figure in the bank's trading business, and Simon Rose, a vice-president in electronic trading have also both left the bank recently, according to Thomson Reuters.
European equities businesses, facing both cyclical and structural challenges, have been under pressure for much of the last 18 months.
At its investor day in September, Deutsche Bank included both the European and Asia-Pacific equities business in the "turnaround" bucket in the bank's strategic priorities, despite ranking first, by its own metrics in European cash and Asia-Pacific cash, and third in European equity derivatives.
Speaking at the event, Colin Fan, co-head of corporate banking and securities, said: “Equities is a structurally high cost-income business, though it is a low user of capital. By reducing the cost-income ratio, while preserving critical mass, equities can be accretive to return on equity when markets normalise."
