It has been a month since A-Team Group wrote about Kevin Milne’s departure from Xtrakter and it seems that the interests he has decided to pursue outside of the Euroclear Group include becoming the London Stock Exchange (LSE) Group’s new director of Post-trade Services. Milne is in fact returning to where he began his financial services career: he worked for the LSE between 1986 and 1991 in a variety of marketing and business development roles.
In his new role, Milne will report directly to group CEO Xavier Rolet, join the executive committee and will be responsible for driving the growth and diversification of the LSE’s Post-trade Services division. The exchange group has been very active on the trading front over the last few months, with the acquisition of Turquoise and its dark pool development, but there has been a dearth of news from the post-trade side of things.
It is, however, a key focus for 2010, according to Rolet, and it is likely Milne will be engaged in developing new offerings related to the “provision of market infrastructure and ancillary services”. To this end, LSE has been in discussions with Fortis for some time with regards to potentially taking over Amsterdam-based clearer European Multilateral Clearing Facility (EMCF) and it is rumoured that this deal may be completed within the next couple of months. The exchange operator is also rumoured to be working on its Sedol Masterfile offering in the background with a large data vendor (more to follow on this later in the year).
An update from LSE on the Sedol Masterfile is long overdue, given that the last major release (apart from a client win in February last year) was in September 2008, when it indicated that the centralised reference and financial data management solution had been migrated onto UnaVista, its global matching, reconciliation, data integration and validation service.
Milne is no stranger to the world of post-trade services and during his two years as CEO of Xtrakter, he was focused on transforming the Trax vendor from a market services division within a trade association into a fully fledged fixed income service provider. He was a member of the senior management team and led the extension of the vendor’s ambitions in the operational risk management, trade matching and regulatory reporting services world.
Prior to his appointment at Xtrakter (then ICMA), Milne was executive vice-president at investment management systems vendor SS&C, which he joined from order management systems vendor MacGregor. Milne also spent a number of years leading the Electronic Settlements Group (ESG) of Thomson Financial in EMEA, Asia and Australia, up to and including its merger with the DTCC TradeSuite business to form Omgeo.
At LSE, Milne replaces incumbent head Massimo Capuano, who remains CEO of Borsa Italiana, deputy CEO of the LSE Group and head of legal and regulatory strategy.
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