Head of ECM at RBS resigns after three months in the job

Royal Bank of Scotland’s head of equity capital markets for Asia, Stanley Ho, has resigned, putting pressure on the bank to look for a new regional head of ECM for the second time in just three months. Ho was promoted to lead the division on June 3 after former ECM head John Sturmey handed in his resignation the previous day.

The quick appointment of Ho was viewed as a positive move and showed the bank was keen to maintain consistency in its ECM department after it had also been forced to replace its head of Asia equity syndicate Rene Mijne. Mijne was about to transfer to the US to head up a new syndicate function at the bank’s US headquarters.

The fact that Ho is leaving after just three months will be a blow to those efforts and RBS will now most likely have to look outside the bank for a new ECM head.

It is unclear what Ho will do, but expectations are that he will resurface somewhere else in Hong Kong before long. Initial speculation that he would follow John Sturmey and rejoin UBS appears not to be correct, however.

Sturmey left RBS to become co-head of global capital markets (GCM) for Asia at UBS together with Joseph Chee. The pair replaced Steven Barg, who left the firm in late May to join Goldman Sachs. Sturmey had a long history at the Swiss bank where he spent more than 10 years before he joined ABN AMRO in 2008 when the latter was already in the process of being integrated into RBS. When he left UBS, Sturmey was head of equity syndicate for Asia.

Stanley Ho worked on that same syndicate desk before he left UBS for a stint with ICH, a Singapore-based financial advisory firm. He joined RBS as head of ECM for North Asia in 2008. Ho has 10 years of experience in ECM origination and syndication across Asia.

RBS declined to comment on a possible replacement. However, a source said it appeared as if Ho had agreed to stay on for a short while to “clean things up”.

Mijne’s former position as head of Asia equity syndicate was taken over by Patrick Ngan, who also joined RBS from the ECM team at UBS in 2008 and had been working within equity origination and execution for Asia since then.