Two senior members of a transition management team lead by Tim Wilkinson, which moved from Citi to BNY Mellon in 2009 but has since spread to the four winds, have ended up at State Street Global Markets.

Greg Metzmacher returned to Australia in November to take a senior transition manager (TM) role, reporting to the country head of the unit, James Woodward. Metzmacher used to work at Citi’s transition team during Mark Levinson’s reign there. He shifted to Tim Wilkinson’s UK-based team, which was retrenched in the midst of the global financial crisis, as Citi pared down its capital markets division.

The seven-member team, including Metzmacher, were in March 2009 opportunistically hired by BNY Mellon Asset Management. However that arrangement has since splintered, with Wilkinson himself departing after a year and joining Russell Investments in September this year.

Metzmacher becomes State Street Global Markets’ fifth TM on the ground in Sydney, which also has two dedicated dealers. Woodward claims it is the largest transitions team in Australia.

State Street Global Markets has also hired another member of Wilkinson’s erstwhile Citi team, Raymond Pestana, who will be based in London.

Woodward said Metzmacher was the second addition to State Street GM’s Sydney-based transition team in 2010, with Matthew Cook joining as a TM earlier in the year.

Growth in transition volumes were particularly strong in a couple of areas, Woodward said – institutional investors were moving away from broad fixed income benchmarks to a number of more specific indices, splitting up their sovereign, credit and credit default swap allocations to gain more control.

The shift to Asian and emerging markets, as well as some noticeable instances of key staff departures at funds managers, had also driven his team’s volumes in 2010, Woodward added.