Wall Street people moves: The top promotions, exits, and new hires at firms like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, HSBC, and KKR

Here’s a rundown of news on hires, exits, and promotions from the past week. Are we missing anyone? Let us know.

• JPMorgan Chase hired Jeremy Balkin as its new head of fintech and innovation for wholesale payments, Reuters first reported. Balkin previously had been the head of innovation at HSBC. Reuters noted that his new role will entail supervision of financial technology and innovation efforts for wholesale payments, and added that Balkin will “be involved in JPMorgan’s decisions to invest or partner with companies that can help further its strategy in the space.” From 2012 to 2014, Balkin was the president of Karma Capital, an independent wealth advisory firm, according to his LinkedIn page.
• Partner exits have continued at Goldman Sachs. Tom Leake, global head of systematic trading strategies sales strats and EMEA equity structuring, has retired, according to an internal memo sent on March 8 viewed by Insider. Ashok Varadhan and Marc Nachmann, co-heads of the global markets division, sent the memo. Leake first joined Goldman Sachs in 2017 as a managing director, and was named to the ranks of its partnership in 2018. He served on the firm’s client index and strategy committee and global markets sustainable solutions council.
• Also at Goldman Sachs, Jason Mathews has retired. Mathews was head of Americas Equity Flow Sales and a partner since 2016. The news of his departure, which concluded two decades at the firm, was announced in an internal memo sent on March 3 viewed by Insider. Ashok Varadhan and Marc Nachmann, global co-heads of the global markets division, sent the memo. Varadhan and Nachmann praised Mathews as having been “particularly dedicated to supporting the recruitment and integration of our diverse hires,” and said he was committed to efforts to support and promote Black talent.
• Goldman Sachs partner Sarah-Marie Martin has also left the firm, Bloomberg reported this week, and is heading to Yumi, a baby-food manufacturer, as its next chief financial officer. Martin, who first joined Goldman Sachs in 2016, was a senior investment banker within the firm’s financial and strategic investors group. Previously, she had been a managing director and then co-head of the Americas financial sponsors group at Credit Suisse, according to her LinkedIn page.
• Perella Weinberg Partners, a boutique investment-bank, announced on March 9 that it has hired Marie-Soazic Geffroy as a new partner in its advisory business, where she will lead the firm’s financial institutions group in Europe. Previously, Geffroy was a managing director and vice chairman at Morgan Stanley Europe.
• Tradeweb has hired Greg Jachno to serve as the global head of data science and analytics for the electronic trading venue, Insider has learned. Previously, Jachno spent time at Bloomberg and Ascential, where he worked on alternative data. Jachno reports to Lisa Schirf, Tradeweb’s global head of data strategy.
• BTIG Limited announced on March 9 that Kevin Edwards, Sean O’Brien, and Roxanne George joined the firm’s fixed-income credit division. Edwards was appointed as managing director with a focus on European financials and investment-grade credit sales. O’Brien has been named a director, focused on convertible sales lending. And George will be a vice president within operations, leading BTIG’s European middle-office loan operations, the company said in a press release. All three will be based in London.
• Private-equity firm KKR appointed Dinesh Paliwal as a new partner within the firm’s private-equity business. Paliwal will focus on helping the firm to identify investment opportunities within verticals including industrials, consumer, and automative, the firm said in a press release. He will also be involved in helping the teams driving KKR’s portfolio companies to achieve their goals in operations and strategic growth. Paliwal had previously served as the CEO of HARMAN International.
• HSBC announced Heidi Miller, the current chair of the board of the global firm’s US subsidiary, HSBC North America Holdings, will retire from the board at the end of May. She will be replaced by Jamie Forese, former president of Citigroup, who left Citi in 2019 after spending more than three decades there. Forese first joined HSBC’s board in 2020. He will assume the chairmanship as of May 28.
• HSBC also announced that Rachel Duan, most recently a senior vice president at General Electric and president and CEO of General Electric’s Global Markets, will also join the board as an independent non-executive director, effective September 1.
• Liberum, an independent investment bank with offices in London and New York, announced this week that it has hired Duncan Higgins and Charles Taylor to serve as senior advisors to the firm’s execution services business. Higgins is an independent financial markets consultant who had previously worked at ITG and UBS. Taylor was a founding partner at Redburn European Ltd. and is a partner at Aldbury International, a consulting firm.
• Citigroup’s head of EMEA emerging markets is retiring, the bank said in a press release. Atiq Rehman first joined the Citi graduate trainee program in Pakistan in 1984, before joining the firm’s investment-banking division in London in 1993. After holding a series of other roles, he transferred to Dubai in 2009 to lead Citi’s Middle East business, eventually taking over operations in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019, he took over management of the EMEA Emerging Markets Cluster, where he oversaw activities in 29 countries. A successor has not yet been appointed.
• Marc Serafin, a former portfolio manager at billionaire Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, has joined Douglas Bratton’sCrestline Investors as a portfolio manager in the Texas-based firm’s New York office, as first reported by trade publication Hedge Fund Alert. Serafin previously was an analyst at Citadel and worked at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.
• Chris Roberts, who was most recently a managing director and co-head of EMEA equity advisory at the boutique investment bank Moelis & Co., has left the firm to start his own equity capital markets advisory firm. Roberts will lead Start Point Advisory from London. Previously, he had been a managing director and head of EMEA equity capital markets execution at JPMorgan Chase; and, prior to that, a vice president in capital markets structuring at Morgan Stanley, according to his LinkedIn page. Roberts’ departure to his new venture was first reported by Financial News.
• Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest digital-currency asset manager, is advertising for a bevy of new jobs related to exchange traded funds. Among the nine roles it’s searching for in online job listings are a compliance officer, a finance reporting manager, and two sales directors. All of the roles presently show that they are based in Stamford, Connecticut. The series of ETF-related job postings was first reported this week by Coindesk, which recognized that Grayscale may be seeking to develop a cryptocurrency ETF, which would be a new product for the asset manager.

Dan DeFrancesco, Meredith Mazzilli, and Bradley Saacks contributed to this reporting.

Disclosure: KKR is a large shareholder in Axel Springer, which owns Insider.