A new competitor in the Australian transition management market, Instinet, has recruited the driver of Macquarie Bank’s portfolio execution business.
Matthew Moore left Macquarie in February and will soon join Instinet, a global agency broker owned by Nomura, to work in its transitions management business.
Moore worked with Macquarie for two years, advancing to lead the portfolio trading desk, which specialised in executing trades with transition managers. He previously worked on the transitions desks at State Street and Merrill Lynch.
Instinet is rolling out its ‘agency-only’ transitions offering, aiming to distinguish itself from the institutional brokers that dominate the market in Australia and the potential conflicts of interests arising within organisations that conduct transitions in addition other functions, such as proprietary trading.
Moore joins Graham Cook, head of portfolio implementation at Instinet, who left Morgan Stanley as joint head of its transitions business in December last year.
Instinet’s transitions team also numbers two traders and an operations specialist. It only runs transitions internally for equity mandates, and outsources tasks for other asset classes, such as fixed income.
The company’s managing director for Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, John Fildes, also a former Morgan Stanley employee, said the company was pushing its transitions management offering in Australia more than it was in other markets.
Superannuation funds ensured there was a “really healthy transitions market here,” Fildes said.
Instinet has been an ASX participant since September 2007, and in April became the 11th largest institutional broker by volume in Australia.
