Liquidnet has announced two new hires as expansion of its Execution and Quantitative Services (EQS) team continues.
The institutional block trading specialist has hired Craig Viani and Gerald Casey to join its recently launched EQS Group.
Viani joins Liquidnet as an execution consultant, and has over 20 years experience in the industry. He recently served as vice president of market structure and technology research at Greenwich Associates and was managing director and head of US electronic trading at Convergex.
Casey, also with 20 years industry experience, joins Liquidnet as head of trading strategy from Barclays Capital where he was a member of the global portfolio sales team.
The hires reflect further expansion of Liquidnet’s EQS Group, which recently launched its new algo products across Europe. The Next Gen Algo suite has already been used in the US since August 2015, and Liquidnet reported a 61% increase in year-on-year volume driven by algorithmic execution as a result.
Chris Jackson, European head of Liquidnet’s Execution and Quantitative Services Group spoke to The Trade about the launch, and he said: "Sometimes clients will look to cross in Liquidnet but may not be able to find a match straight away, so they will leave the pool to look for liquidity elsewhere and potentially miss out on other matching opportunities.
"We want them to be able to continue to access those opportunities while also being able to get working on that order elsewhere.”
Liquidnet’s EQS Group consists of “powerful execution tools, intelligent sourcing of….liquidity, and strategic trading advice to help buy-side traders more effectively navigate the institutional trading markets and achieve their execution goals.”
Recently, Liquidnet announced recording trading volumes on its institutional-focused dark pool, with trades in 2015 worth a total of over $133 billion, up 9.9% compared to 2014.
The firm also managed to set daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly trading records in October. It saw a record day on 15 October with $1.12 billion of principal traded, its record week traded $4.08 billion while October as a whole saw $15.9 billion traded, up 28% on its previous record month.