Baton Hires Sales Director

Baton Systems has named Alistair Griffiths as director of EMEA Sales, he joins from FIS Global, where he led sales for the UK, Channel Islands and the Netherlands.

Prior to that Griffiths worked at Bank of New York Mellon, BlackRock, and UBS, at the former he built up eight years of experience in collateral management, sourcing and growing the firm’s tri-party collateral management activity across the global market.

He will report to Baton’s global head of sales, Alex Knight and be based in London focusing on new business acquisition across all Baton solutions in the region. His appointment follows the expansion of Baton’s Core-Collateral solution which is connected to major CCPs globally including the network’s most recent addition of the OCC, which was announced in August.

The firm adds Griffiths’ appointment also comes as it continues to focus on reducing settlement risk and increasing available liquidity and funding, by extending its Core-FX solution across additional currencies and counterparties. Using distributed ledger technology, billions of dollars of FX transactions are now automatically netted and then risklessly settled on a payment vs payment (PvP) basis on-demand and within a matter of minutes every day.

“Alistair’s deep knowledge and industry experience complements that of the wider team as we seek to ensure that our clients are served by those who have an authentic understanding of the collateral and FX markets and the challenges our client’s face,” says Knight. “Alistair’s appointment is also testament to the growth trajectory Baton is now on. Over recent months, we’ve witnessed a considerable increase in demand for our Core-Collateral solution as market volatility and the rising interest rate environment has encouraged banks to focus even more closely on maximising the efficiency of the use of their assets. With this in mind, more and more firms are looking to Baton to improve the speed, efficiency and cost base of their post-trade processing.”

Griffiths adds, “Baton’s technology is revolutionising the way post-trade processing is conducted. I am excited by the prospect of working for a company that is having such a transformative impact on how the collateral, liquidity and FX post-trade space is now evolving.

“Given today’s environment with high volatility pushing up margin requirements, and with rates moving dynamically intraday, the need for market participants to be able to quickly and accurately react to these changes is more important than ever,” he continues. “Relying on yesterday’s end of day data to make decisions today is no longer a viable option. This is where Baton excels. I’m looking forward to working with Arjun, Alex and the whole team to enable firms across the industry to meet these challenges.”