Jeremy Amias, founder and chairman of boutique fixed-income firm Amias Berman & Co, and more recently Asia-Pacific CEO at commodities brokerage house Marex Spectron, is to become the global head of investor client coverage for Standard Chartered effective March 1, according to two market sources.
Amias is an Asia veteran, having been the chief operating officer for finance at Noble Group and the former head of fixed income, currencies and commodities for Citi in Asia, and prior to that Salomon Brothers. But he has never held a global role for a financial firm out of Asia.
Amias Berman was at the forefront of a new generation of Asian boutique firms founded by former bankers in the wake of the financial crisis. Evidently, Amias is now coming back to the fold.
The firm was set up in Hong Kong in 2009 as an independent, fixed-income agency brokerage and execution house. Amias’s partner, Charles Berman (the former co-head of fixed-income capital markets for Emea at Citi), has also quietly made other plans. For the past year, he has been head of public-sector global finance for Emea at Barclays Capital.
Interdealer broker Icap was one of the original investing partners in Amias Berman, and sources say the expectation was that it might one day take a bigger part. But that did not materialise.
Instead, Marex Spectron, a financial broker focused on commodities, financial futures and foreign exchange, invested in the firm in early 2011. Marex is owned by the JRJ group, which was founded by former top-flight Lehman bankers, including Jeremy Isaacs, who has been credited with building Lehman’s international operations, and Roger Nagioff, once head of Lehman’s European fixed-income business.
But Marex Spectron is more focused on the commodities side of things, while Amias Berman is more fixed-income oriented. So it seems that Amias Berman is now in the process of being sold to an as yet unnamed buyer in Europe.
Meanwhile, Amias’s role at Standard Chartered will be client facing and representing all products — not just fixed income.
