The recent past has seen quite a few senior employees of brokerages and investment banks switch jobs. The churn has been visible in both foreign and domestic entities.
On Tuesday, four top officials of the high-profile institutional equities team of Anand Rathi left the domestic brokerage to join Standard Chartered.
Chief executive officer Ratnesh Kumar, along with Rajesh Mayani, Dheeraj Agarwal and Narayan Mulchandani, had moved from Citigroup to Anand Rathi in early 2008.
Kumar will now head equities at Standard Chartered.
Industry observers said while the first few months of the calendar year saw some of the biggest names in the deal-making arena switch jobs, the recent past has seen significant churning at sales and trading desks of domestic and foreign brokerages.
"While there is some uncertainty in the market, no one is really questioning the overall India story," said an institutional dealer who recently moved out of a domestic brokerage.
"Global financial majors, who set shop in India a few years back, are now more comfortable hiring from domestic entities," he says.
Among other moves, Manish Popat has moved to JPMorgan after spending over 10 years at Citigroup Capital Markets as director of sales trading.
Chetan Patni has moved out of JPMorgan to join HSBC as managing director and head of sales trading. Malay Sameer of Kotak Securities is believed to be headed to BNP Paribas.
Sameer was a senior vice-president at Kotak, managing the institutional sales business.
Apart from these, quite a few people had moved from the buy side to the sell side, and vice versa, said a market observer.
The rise in demand from foreign brokerages is due to the fact that more and more overseas players are looking to set up base or expand in India.
Incidentally, recent divestments saw a major chunk of issues being managed by foreign banks, including Citigroup Global Markets, JPMorgan India, RBS Equities (India), Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley India and UBS Securities.
This was in sharp contrast to earlier years, when most fund-raising in the domestic capital market was done by Kotak Mahindra Capital, Enam Securities, JM Financial and ICICI Securities.
In the investment banking space, the year has seen some of the biggest names changing their employers: P J Nayak has moved from Axis Bank to Morgan Stanley India; Vedika Bhandarkar has joined Credit Suisse India after staying with JP Morgan for around 12 years, and Sonjoy Chatterjee has joined Goldman Sachs India as managing director and chief executive officer after quitting ICICI Bank.
In March, Nomura got on board Nipun Goel and Nitin Jain from Merrill Lynch India and ICICI Securities, respectively.
More recently, Tarun Kataria of HSBC joined Religare Capital Markets as India CEO.
