ABN Amro Bank’s heads of equity finance and information technology solutions, Sander Baauw and Raymond Vuyst, have joined the IT company Synechron.
Baauw and Vuyst have become managing directors at Synechron. They moved on 1 May and are based in Amsterdam.
Baauw spent 11 years at Fortis Bank, which later became ABN Amro. He was responsible for equity finance trading in Europe.
Vuyst was in charge of IT solutions for the securities financing and the equities derivative departments at the bank.
“On the IT side we were always hiring Synechron for implementation, interfacing, testing, monitoring 24/7 and software development. That’s how we came to know them and move there,” said Baauw in a telephone interview.
Synechron provides IT services to the banking, financial services and insurance industries, as well as to digital media and technology companies.
Baauw added: “We are going to focus on capital markets at Synechron. But what we saw at ABN Amro was that once you hire a niche IT company such as Synechron, people from other departments look to hire them too, so before you know it you it you serve a range of in-house departments within a company.”
“But what we’re focusing on in the first instance is securities finance. At this moment I don’t see a dedicated IT company in the securities finance business like Synechron and we know enough about the needs of the trading desk, back office, risk management and financing department, including reporting and interfacing, to bridge that gap in the market.”
