Nomura, Asia’s global investment bank, has appointed Mohamed Hassan as executive director of hedge fund and foreign exchange sales, with broad responsibility for derivative execution, advisory, and trade idea generation across the firm’s hedge fund audience.
In his new position, Hassan will implement a global client strategy in FX and strengthen the firm’s global footprint, based out of London. He has been in the foreign exchange market for nearly 15 years and was most recently at Mirexa Capital in New York, where he served as head of the FX desk in the Americas.
Mohamed Hassan, Nomura
Hassan spent nearly six years with Mirexa Capital, which is part of voice broker TP Icap. He co-founded Mirexa’s FX business back in 2014 with the aim of providing multi-asset Liquidity to an institutional client base through a foreign exchange execution and sales-desk. During his term, he collaborated with more than 20 sell-side counterparties and supported the transaction of FX Volatility and cash business, his Linkedin profile shows.
A raft of departures from Nomura’s FX team
Prior to that, Hassan worked at Standard Chartered Bank in New York in multiple FX-focused roles for over eight years. He originally joined the lender in 2005 in the desk tasked with FX, rates, and commodity derivative hedging.
In 2007, Hassan relocated to Singapore to focus on emerging markets of EM FX volatility, NDF's, and EM rates at the same time when the bank set out to expand its Asia’s FX coverage. He was promoted in 2010 to the director of investor sales of Americas, a position he held for three years until he left in 2013.
Nomura said earlier it would cut $1 billion in costs from its wholesale business and shut more than 30 of its 156 domestic retail branches. As part of these plans, the company has already announced it will fire nearly 100 workers at its troubled European business and signaled that more were on the way as it aims to reduce costs across its EMEA region by 50 percent.
Since then, Nomura has seen a raft of departures from its FX team to rivals over the past few months, most notably to US investment banks. This included State Street bringing in Nomura’s Harry Xu as a vice-president for foreign exchange in Asia.
