JP Morgan revamps its stock trading business in a sign of the changes sweeping through Wall Street

Finance news

J.P. Morgan Chase, the world’s biggest investment bank by revenue, has created a new management team to help it better serve Wall Street clients who increasingly want to trade with algorithms through electronic platforms.

The bank named Chris Berthe as its head of global cash execution with responsibility over teams that electronically match buyers and sellers of stocks, according to a memo exclusively obtained by CNBC. Dennis Fitzgerald will be head of global cash risk, which is dominated by stock trading departments where the bank uses its own balance sheet to help facilitate trades. The memo was sent Wednesday from equities trading co-heads Jason Sippel and Mark Leung.

The world of equities trading, which generates roughly $58 billion a year in revenue for Wall Street, has continued to shift to electronic platforms on the one hand, or to specialists in trading large blocks of stock and other scenarios requiring the bank’s capital, Sippel said in an interview.

In February, J.P. Morgan said 99 percent of equities orders were now electronic, which typically are a fraction of the cost of voice orders to execute.

Helped by investments in electronic trading, prime brokerage and quantitative services, J.P. Morgan has climbed the global rankings. It had 10.3 percent of the market for equities and prime brokerage last year, compared with 7.7 percent in 2012.

Berthe and Fitzgerald will rely on the company’s investments in big data, quantitative research and other technologies, the memo said. The company has a $10.8 billion budget for technology spending across its businesses this year.

The bank also created a new group, Americas execution services, led by Adam Englander and Matthew Mallgrave, to make sure that clients can easily transact in any way, whether it’s with humans or by electronic means.

“We believe that the new organizational structure and the people in it are perfectly suited to gain competitive share from the rapid evolution that is occurring all around us,'” Sippel and Leung said in the memo.

Link to the source of information: www.cnbc.com