BNY Mellon has named Neal Thompson as its newest head of its FX options unit in New York, which serves different buy-side institutions to hedge their currency risks in the $6tn a day global FX market.
Thompson has been working in the fixed income industry for nearly three decades, starting his career with Nat West in London and then moving to New York in 1995 to trade with Credit Suisse.
Neal Thompson, Head of FX options at BNY Mellon
He joined the Wall Street bank from ANZ, where he held an analogous position from 2015 to 2017. Other stops included working as a portfolio manager with BlueCrest Capital Management, and head of Standard Chartered’s New York FX options desk.
Thompson has spent the bulk of his career trading currency derivatives, commodities, exchange-traded instruments, equity indices, and other OTC markets. He was also involved with client marketing, training staff, as well as developing risk management tools.
BNY Mellon rolled out its foreign exchange (FX) options products back in 2018 to allow its clients to better hedge currency exposure. The bank has ventured into the options space to complements its existing foreign exchange business, which consists of FX custody, Payments , and hedging.
Thompson replaces Sam Osterman, who led the new venture since its inception. Osterman left his job as global head of FX options at BNY Mellon back in May, parting ways with the position he held for nearly 15 months.
BNY Mellon rolls out more FX products
Sam Osterman originally joined BNY Mellon in January 2018 to head the new options business. At the time, BNY Mellon said his appointment is another step in the transformation of the FX business following the hire of Adam Vos as the global head of FX earlier in 2018. His addition was the latest in a series of FX industry veterans in electronic trading, sales, and prime brokerage that joined BNY Mellon Markets over the past two years.
FX options is just one of a number of new services BNY Mellon Markets has introduced to enable its clients to more efficiently access global currency markets. The comprehensive FX suite leverages the bank’s existing pool of Liquidity , collateral, and funding capabilities and opens it up to its global client base.
Earlier last year, BNY Mellon launched a prime brokerage service taking on rivals such as Citi, Deutsche Bank, and JP Morgan. The service enables clients to trade and margin their FX through a counterparty that oversees more than $30 trillion of assets under custody.
