Credit Suisse hired five directors and six vice-presidents in India across the equities, fixed income and investment banking departments.
"These appointments reflect Credit Suisse's continued investment in India and our ability to attract leading talent," said Mickey Doshi, chief executive officer of India for Credit Suisse, in a written statement.
The Swiss bank won a licence to open a bank branch in India in August 2010, enabling it to accept deposits, extend financing to clients and deal in government securities, domestic fixed income products and foreign exchange. The branch licence complements the wealth management, investment banking and asset management services Credit Suisse currently offers. Credit Suisse said in a written statement that it is beefing up across departments and especially in fixed income after the launch of operations at the Mumbai branch.
In equities sales, Graham Lappin will come in as a director and Anubhav Kanodia as a vice-president. Lappin, who will be based in Mumbai, joins from Royal Bank of Scotland, where he was an executive director and head of equity sales. Lappin was with RBS for 10 years across its offices in Mumbai and Hong Kong, and has also worked with Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong. Kanodia, who was previously at HSBC, will be selling Indian equities in Singapore. Both will report to Sangram Singh, who heads India equity sales for Credit Suisse.
Anantha Narayan, Jatin Chawla and Sandeep Mathew have joined in equity research in Mumbai. Narayan will be a director, covering the information technology and mid-cap sectors. He was previously co-head of equities at ICICI Securities and has also worked at Morgan Stanley and CLSA. Chawla joins as a vice-president covering the Indian automobile sector. He was previously the lead auto analyst at India InfoLine. Mathew also joins as a vice-president, responsible for real-estate coverage, from BNP Paribas. All three will report to Ashish Gupta, who heads equity research for India.
The equities hires are to some extent replacement hires as earlier this year Jefferies poached Kunal Bajaj, Govind Chellappa and Anand Agarwal from Credit Suisse. Bajaj was a director at Credit Suisse, covering institutional equity sales for clients based in Asia; Chellappa was a director in equity research, covering the automobile and consumer sectors; and Agarwal was a vice-president in equity research, covering the real estate and cement sectors.
On the fixed income side, Neil Bharadwaj has joined as chief operating officer and senior control officer for the Mumbai bank branch. He previously worked at Bank of America for 10 years and before that with ICICI Bank. Bharadwaj reports to Sanjeev Bajaj who is bank branch manager and head of fixed income for India.
Fixed income sales has added three people: Kiran Chakravarthy has joined as a director in fixed income sales from BNP Paribas; and Divik Maheshwari, and Devashish Roy have come on board as vice-presidents in fixed income sales from Deutsche Bank. All three report to Sanjay Singh who heads fixed income for sales for India for Credit Suisse.
Ujjwal Kumar has jumped ship from Standard Chartered. He will be a vice president in fixed income trading, reporting to Ajit Hebbar who heads fixed income trading for India.
Ankur Choudhary has joined as a director in the global markets solutions group in investment banking to structure risk solutions for corporate clients, reporting to Rahul Chawla who heads the group. She has worked at J.P. Morgan and ICICI Bank.
Earlier this week, Barclays Capital, the investment banking unit of Barclays Bank, made two senior India appointments: Bhuvnesh Singh to head equity research and Neel Shahani to head equity sales trading. Singh joins from Credit Suisse, where he was regional head of infrastructure and capital goods, co-head of global IT services in equity research and responsible for the Indian technology and telecom sectors. Shahani joined from India InfoLine, where he was head of sales trading.
The hiring in India is in stark contrast to the situation across most other financial centres, where downsizing is the order of the day. HSBC said in early August that it would cut 30,000 jobs worldwide during the next three years. And on Tuesday UBS announced that it would eliminate 3,500 jobs, of which around 45% will be from the investment bank, 35% from wealth management and the Swiss bank, 10% from global asset management and 10% from wealth management in the Americas.