Turquoise, the pan-European multilateral trading facility (MTF) that was recently purchased by the London Stock Exchange (LSE), has announced its new management structure.
Adrian Farnham, who joined Turquoise in December 2007 when it was still owned by a consortium of banks, will remain as chief operating officer of the platform. Natan Tiefenbrun, who has worked at Instinet and XConnect, and Mark Ryland, previously at SWX Europe, have been confirmed as commercial director and head of technology respectively, having both been appointed to those roles at Baikal in February last year.
In addition Anthony Ball, who held roles at City Index, ABN Amro and Kleinwort Benson before joining Turquoise in 2008, takes the position of chief financial officer.
“I am pleased to confirm Adrian, Natan, Mark and Anthony in their new roles,” commented David Lester, who was appointed as Turquoise CEO at the beginning of February 2010. “They bring with them a wealth of experience from roles at the previous Turquoise and Baikal operations, and from backgrounds in the broader trading environment before that. I look forward to working with them in this exciting next phase of Turquoise’s development, and am confident that together we will build an efficient operating unit which will deliver a range of pan-European products and services that clients want.”
Work has already begun to merge Turquoise with Baikal, the LSE’s dark MTF that was originally launched as a joint venture with Lehman Brothers. Following the collapse of Lehman in September 2008, the LSE continued with the Baikal project and launched its routing functionality, supplied by trading technology provider Fidessa, at the end of June 2009, before delaying the project further because of the Turquoise acquisition, announced at the end of last year.
Turquoise was originally launched in September 2008 after founding members Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS committed to launching a pan-European platform to rival incumbent domestic exchanges. Earlier this week, Barclays, Nomura and J.P. Morgan announced that they have each invested £1 million for a 3% stake in the new venture, taking the total number of investing banks to 12 and leaving the LSE with 51% controlling stake.