DLT-powered post-trade services provider Cobalt has made a round of executive appointments to play an important role in the rollout of the firm’s shared infrastructure based on shared ledger which optimizes risk management.
The company has hired five experienced professionals to help the company re-engineer the FX market which is currently riddled with complex legacy systems and manual processes.
To move its digital approach into the mainstream, it appointed New York-based Bob Linton as head of connectivity and onboarding at Cobalt. Linton, a market infrastructure technology expert with 13 years experience at Traiana, will be responsible to help institutions upgrade their technology for post-trade FX operations to Cobalt’s high performance shared ledger technology.
The company also appointed Dan Evans as Product Analytics Lead to focus on product innovation and reporting. Prior to joining the firm, he spent seven years at UBS where he analyzed FX trading data both as a Director of FX trading and founding his own consultancy.
For Information Security Manager, the company picked John Fitzgerald, an industry veteran with over 15 years in risk and security management who led information security at Rathbone Brothers Plc.
The company also appointed Nitin Talway, a former executive at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, RBS/Natwest Markets and Credit Suisse, as Head of Support. Kamaldeep Bhachu joined the firm as a senior business analyst at Cobalt to leverage his experience in the FX and treasury divisions at Morgan Stanley, UBS and Royal Bank of Canada.
Darren Coote, managing director of Cobalt, said:
“We are thrilled to welcome Bob, Dan, John, Nitin and Kamaldeep to the rapidly expanding Cobalt
team. They bring a breadth of FX experience across the interdealer and prime broker space and have an intimate knowledge of the competitive landscape as well as financial institutions’ systems. Each will play a key role in reengineering the FX market from the ground up, getting rid of legacy systems and replacing them with new technology which is more suitable for the low-latency FX market of today.”
It was in September 2018 that Cobalt promoted Darren Coote as Managing Director. He has been working with Cobalt since 2017 as a strategic advisor. His experience in FX amounts to over 25 years at a number of high profile roles running global Fx trading and e-Fx businesses, including UBS, Lloyds, the Bank of England’s FX Joint Standing Committee and EBS’s executive board.
