Derrick Wong to join CB team at Standard Chartered

Standard Chartered has hired Derrick Wong from Credit Suisse as it starts to rebuild its equity-linked team after the departure of Nathan McMurtray and two other bankers in June.

Wong, who will join in mid-August, has worked on the Asia ex-Japan convertible bond desk at Credit Suisse since October 2007, initially as an analyst and later as an associate. While quite junior in terms of titles, he has a lot of deal experience. During the past three years, as Credit Suisse has emerged as one of the most active CB houses in Asia, he has been involved in more than 35 transactions, sources estimate.

At Standard Chartered he will take on the title of director and is expected to focus on public CBs for issuers in the Greater China region in particular. He will work alongside Barton Lee, who has been heading up the equity-linked desk since his former colleagues left, and one associate. Lee and Wong know each other from UBS, where they both worked in the mid-2000s.

Wong spent a little more than three years at UBS before he joined Credit Suisse. To begin with he worked in equity capital markets, but after about a year-and-a-half he moved into corporate finance.

Standard Chartered runs its equity-linked business differently to most other major houses, as it offers CBs primarily as an alternative or complementary product to its existing clients, as opposed to targeting any company in the region looking to issue CBs. Even so, the firm has made a big push into the asset-class in the past few years alongside its broader expansion in equities. In 2009 it ranked eighth in the equity-linked league table for Asia ex-Japan and last year it advanced to sixth, ahead of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citi, according to Dealogic data. Credit Suisse was the best placed international bank in third place, behind two Chinese investment banks, which focus primarily on domestic CBs.

Nathan McMurtray, Deutsche Bank

So far this year, Standard Chartered is outside the top 10, but it has worked on a few transactions, including last week’s $300 million CB for Taiwan Glass, which it led on a sole basis. It was also involved in Agile Property’s $500 million CB in April, together with four other banks.

According to sources, Standard Chartered is looking to add more resources to its equity-linked team when opportunities arise, but is not about to go on a massive hiring spree.

Nathan McMurtray had been global head of origination for equity-linked securities at Standard Chartered for just over a year when he left in mid-June. Mrinal Parekh and Susanne Schroeter, who also worked on the CB desk, resigned at the same time. All three of them will join Deutsche Bank, which has been thin on equity-linked resources since its former head of equity-linked origination for Asia ex-Japan, Pierre-Alexis Renaudin, transferred back to London at the start of this year.

McMurtray is expected to take on Renaudin’s former job, while Parekh and Schroeter will assume less senior roles in the same team.

Meanwhile, Credit Suisse is expected to replace Wong, who worked his last day at the bank on July 15.