For a bank with an uncertain future, RBS has been doing a lot of hiring. In the past two months alone, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Register suggests it’s recruited six new fixed income professionals and a new head of anti-money laundering sanctions for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Most of RBS’s new hires were in previous employment elsewhere, suggesting it may even have offered them inducements to move.
The new recruits include: Vikram Balan, a vice president in credit structuring who joined from Deutsche Bank; Aliaksandr Burak, a credit trader who previously spent five years at Nomura; Vanessa Bradford, a senior credit saleswoman from Cantor Fitzgerald; Ian Devine, a senior syndicated loan salesman who was once head of EMEA loan trading at Credit Agricole; Govinder Gill, a vice president in credit sales from Mitsubishi; and Janahan Kaneshanathan, a structured credit sales professional from Stormharbour.
RBS has also hired Simon Kingsbury, a former global co-head of control room compliance at Citigroup.
We assume that these new hires are confident about the future of RBS’s investment bank. They either haven’t heard the reports that 80-90% of its investment banking staff will be made redundant, or they don’t give them much credence.