Citigroup is one of the few large investment banks steadfastly continuing to build out its commodities functions while rivals scale back and has just added another significant hire in London.
Giovanni Laureri joined earlier this month as head of precious metals sales for EMEA, according to sources close to the situation, having moved across to London from Zurich where he was an executive director in UBS’s commodities team since 2012.
Laureri is a seasoned investment banking salesman with experience across commodities and FX who has held roles at RBS, Barclays, Credit Suisse and UBS in the UK, Italy and Switzerland.
Before joining UBS, he was head of commodities and precious metals sales at Credit Suisse in both Zurich and London for nearly three years from February 2008. He made the switch into commodities from FX at that time, having previously been head of FX for Southern Europe at Barclays.
Citigroup said at the end of last year that it would try to gain market share as rival investment banks pull back from commodities. Part of this strategy would be to increase sales headcount by around 15% from the 80 people it had at the time.
In January, it added Jose Marza as head of cross-commodities structured trading. He was previously head of Continental power trading at Deutsche Bank.
Barclays, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank have pulled out of some commodities business areas over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, the likes of Wells Fargo and BTG Pactual have stated their desire to build in this area and, more recently, Goldman Sachs said that it was aiming to turn its commodities financing business from “a sort of appendage to being a really major organ”.
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