BNY Mellon has appointed Filippo Santilli as head of Asia-Pacific sales and relationship management for its global collateral services business.
In this newly created role, Santilli reports to Jonathan Spirgel, executive vice president – global collateral services in New York, and locally to Dominick Falco, head of global collateral services – Asia-Pacific.
He will continue to be based in Hong Kong.
Santilli brings more than 15 years of institutional sales experience to his new position and has a proven track record of building successful sales organisations. He joined BNY Mellon in 2009 from Lehman Brothers Asset Management, where as a product specialist in Hong Kong he played a key role in building the firm’s liquidity business. His most recent role at BNY Mellon was managing director of liquidity services for the Asia-Pacific.
“Collateral is now an intrinsic part of a firm’s risk management framework. Global regulation has also sharpened the focus of brokers and investors on the importance of global collateral pools and the mobility of collateral across borders,” says Falco. “This is a particularly important issue in Asia-Pacific where cross-border activity has often been held back by a lack of interoperability between regions.
“We are seeing increasing opportunities to move that collateral across borders, even though traditionally it can be hard to access different markets and harder to track the movement of collateral overseas. Accordingly, we are expanding our team and investing in our collateral services infrastructure to ensure broker-dealers have the ability to collateralise transactions, both domestic and cross-border, securely and transparently.”
Santilli adds: “We are also seeing an increase in those same global broker-dealers looking to become more efficient with servicing their Asian clients and optimising their assets. Resources are constrained and efficiency is a big driver of the demand for collateral services. The challenge is having the infrastructure to ‘unlock’ these assets, which is where BNY Mellon can help.”
