Citi Names Leaders for New Credit-Markets Group

Citigroup Inc. has named veterans Mickey Bhatia and Carey Lathrop as co-heads of a new group spanning credit trading and securitization, key cogs in its sprawling and growing fixed-income business.

The moves were announced by the bank in an internal memo Friday from Paco Ybarra, Citigroup's global head of markets and securities services, according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Bhatia, who is currently head of global structured credit products, will, in part, take the role of Mark Tsesarsky, who earlier this month left Citigroup after three decades to join hedge fund Millennium Management LLC.

Alongside Mr. Bhatia will be Mr. Lathrop, currently Citigroup's global head of credit markets. He will still focus on credit markets, but will now also lead securitized markets.

The two will work together to more closely integrate the trading of bonds and other more-complex credit products. The idea is to balance out swings in trading activity between the two areas. Bond activity tends to be less during periods of low volatility, as is the case in today's markets. The opposite is true of structured credit products.

Though esoteric, securitized products are a big business for Citigroup. This involves the structuring and trading of bonds backed by corporate loans, consumer loans, mortgages, credit derivatives, and more exotic assets.

Overall, Citigroup has the second-biggest fixed-income trading unit on Wall Street, after J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., generating $3.6 billion in revenue in the first quarter. The bank credited an uptick in securitized-product trading as a factor in its 19% first-quarter revenue jump from a year ago.

Mr. Bhatia, who holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined Citigroup 10 years ago from Deutsche Bank AG. Mr. Lathrop, a veteran bond trader who started at Salomon Brothers in 1988, has been Citigroup's head of global credit markets since August 2008.

Write to Telis Demos at telis.demos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 12, 2017 10:47 ET (14:47 GMT)