The Asia bond syndicate head of Standard Chartered has resigned to join one of its mainland rivals in an unexpected shake-up of the emerging-market focused bank’s regional debt franchise.
Chao Li is leaving Standard Chartered to join CICC in Hong Kong, taking a broader role to oversee the origination and syndication, as well as sales and trading for the Beijing-based brokerage firm, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
The move comes at a time when China's banks follow their Chinese corporate clients in expanding overseas, with their debt franchises at the vanguard of the trend, as fixed-income products are easier to upsell.
“He is expected to start his new job in August,” the person said. “In his new role, he will cover both G3 and local-currency markets.”
Both Standard Chartered and CICC declined to comment.
It was not immediately clear whether his responsibility will be shared by his Hong Kong-based colleagues, or whether his boss, Ashih Malhotra, the bank’s Singapore-based head of global syndicate, would take over the China-focused role on an interim basis.
Standard Chartered promoted Li to the regional role in January 2017, managing a team of about eight bankers across the region. Li joined the London-based lender in November 2012 from the Royal Bank of Scotland, where he had worked for five years, mostly in Singapore.
Prior to his banking career, he worked for a software engineering company in San Francisco.
According to the Asia ex-Japan G3 league table compiled by Dealogic, Standard Chartered has slipped one notch to fourth of the closely watched ranking on a year-to-date basis, underwriting $5.8 billion in 51 transactions so far this year. The bank underwrote $18.7 billion in 141 deals for the full year of 2017.
