The London Stock Exchange Group’s decision to cut roughly 120 jobs stems from new CEO Xavier Rolet’s desire to streamline operations, the exchange said.
Both the group’s UK and Italian operations will be affected, with around 60 job losses earmarked in the UK. TheTRADEnews.com understands that initial cuts have been focused on the group’s marketing and secondary markets (trading) functions, but that this could widen to affect other units.
“The idea is to try and flatten the structure,” LSE spokesman Patrick Humphris told theTRADEnews.com. “Xavier wants to improve the speed of our decision-making. We are in a competitive environment and we know our decision-making needs to be quick and responsive. There may be opportunities for some people, but there will also be job losses.”
The changes build on the restructuring of the LSE’s operations implemented by on taking office on 20 May. The group is now organised around three key business areas: capital markets – including equities and derivatives – headed by Raffaele Jerusalmi, information and technology, headed by David Lester, and post-trade, led by Massimo Capuano in addition to his roles as CEO of Borsa Italiana and deputy CEO of the LSE group. Martin Graham, the LSE’s former director of equity markets, left in April.
Having replaced long-standing chief executive Clara Furse, Rolet has wasted little time in making his mark on the LSE. At the exchange’s results conference on that day, Rolet hinted that the exchange may replace TradElect, its high-speed trading engine, which was first implemented in 2007 in part to enable the LSE to compete for high-frequency flow with emerging rivals such as Chi-X Europe.
The LSE is also working on further initiatives to compete for market share. The launch of the smart order routing portion of Baikal, the LSE’s non-displayed multilateral trading facility with liquidity aggregation facilities, is expected next week.
The LSE’s share of trading on the UK FTSE 100 index by turnover was 40.35% in May 2009, down from 46.23% in April and 41.56% the previous May, according to monthly market share figures from data vendor Thomson Reuters.
Unlike some market share measures, which only take account of order-book trades, the Thomson Reuters numbers incorporate over-the-counter trades, such as those reported to trade reporting venue Markit BOAT. BOAT’s share of FTSE 100 turnover in May 2009 was 29.66%.