JPMorgan poached a senior FX director from BofA amid exits

JPMorgan has poached Bhupen Velani, the former EMEA head of FX transactional banking at Bank of America.

Velani joined JPMorgan this month according to his LinkedIn profile. He arrives as an executive director in FX product, based in London.

Velani spent six and a half years at BofA, initially as the APAC head of transactional FX trading. He relocated to London to grow the EMEA transaction business in 2018. 

His is the latest in a series of exits from BofA’s global markets business following a disappointing 2020 in which BofA’s fixed income sales and trading revenues increased by just 15% versus growth of 45%, 57% and 59% at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley respectively.  In the past few weeks, Shyam Rajan – a managing director in rates trading, left to work for a client after 10 years, David Woo – head of FICC research, retired, and Courtney Campbell – an MD in equity synthetics and securities lending, quit for Credit Suisse. 

BofA has also been cutting heads across global markets after its commitment not to make cuts in 2020 expired. 

Bank of America is thought to have crimped bonuses for senior staff and increased the stock vesting period for 2020 after last year’s performance. JPMorgan is thought to have paid-up. 

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