Brokerages reel under attrition

After mutual funds, it is the turn of brokerage houses to see attrition of senior executives. Recent weeks have seen Mumbai-based brokerages struggling to retain senior and middle-level executives as a boom in stock prices is triggering an unprecedented demand for experienced professionals in broking. The trend shows employees leaving in a group of three or four to a new organisation.

There is a churning among senior executives of Sharekhan, Brics Securities, Religare Securities, IL&FS Investsmart and Ambit Capital as domestic brokerages are on an expansion spree in the wake of an imminent competition from global players such as Citigroup, Macquarie, Credit Suisse, StanChart and others, who plan to enter the retail brokerage business in the country.

Rahul Rege, a former senior vice-president at Sharekhan, moved to Brics as business head of the non-institutional division. Two of his colleagues at Sharekhan, Sameer Shah and Tejas Shah, also joined him at Brics Securities.

Amitabh Chakraborty, along with three others at Brics, left the organisation to join Religare. Chakraborty, who was heading research at Brics Securities, joined as president of equity business at Religare. Similarly, Sandeep Jain, joined as head of private client group at Ambit Capital.

He left Sharekhan along with six relationship managers to Ambit Capital. In another instance, Anil Advani joined SBICap Securities as head of research from Religare, while Jignesh Desai from Networth Stock Broking is expected to join Advani at SBICap Securities soon.

"Like-minded people often enjoy working together. Further, we also wanted to look for bigger challenges," said Jain, who as vice-president and head of sales of private client group is building a new team at Ambit.

Multinationals such as Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Macquarie and StanChart are among the global players that are expanding into retail brokerage business and this is expected to further trigger the demand for experienced personnel in the domestic brokerage.

"We went for a larger responsibility. We know each other well and there is a comfort factor," said one of the executives, who joined Brics from Sharekhan.

Industry observers feel the demand for analysts and sales executives at brokerages will grow by leaps and bounds as brokerages try to expand their client base to include institutional and high networth clients.

The domestic equity markets are experiencing one of the strongest rallies and trading volumes are expected to double to $3.2 trillion in 2010 from about $1.6 trillion currently, according to a recent report by Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley projects the domestic brokerage business to grow to $3.9 billion by 2015.