Standard Chartered has had a good time hiring six electronic FX people from UBS

12 June 2026

2 minute read

People who have worked together in the past like to work together in the future. Look at RBC, where Citi's ex-credit traders are congregating.

💥Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.💥

Citi's credit defectors are not the only cluster of former pals in the London market. It's come to our attention that Standard Chartered has got a cluster too. Standard Chartered has hired at least six electronic FX people from UBS.

The Standard Chartered recruits may have something to do with John Newman who joined from UBS last August as the London based global head of FX and rates trading. Two months later, Chris Aspinall joined from UBS in New York as head of eFX trading for the Americas. Then Robin Hutchings from UBS joined in January as Standard Chartered's global head of quantitative development (having previously been head of eFX quant dev at UBS). Two members of Hutching's team (Nikolaos Katsanos, Charles Exley) appeared at the same time.

That might have been the end of it, except that John Luke, an eFX quant developer from UBS also joined Standard Chartered in May.

There are unconfirmed suggestions that UBS is a bit peeved by all the hiring. UBS declined to comment. So too did Standard Chartered.

Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.

AUTHORSarah Butcher

Global Editor

ho
hot-take
16 June 2026
A loosely assembled legacy franchise of survivors whose core competency was repackaging solutions developed elsewhere in the bank and endlessly iterating on the same deck and framework with marginal cosmetic enhancements. Unsurprisingly, UBS's push to industrialise AI-led development appears to have rendered that playbook obsolete. The latest departures are un-coincidentally gravitating toward an environment where they can spend the next few years rewriting the same codebase off muscle memory rather than being forced to generate any genuine intellectual alpha. Comments of neither C.P. as he is the latest attrition in this flow, nor how unwelcome amongst peers the joiners are in their new seats?
Reply