ANALYSIS: G.H. Financials plans to ‘turbo charge’ growth amid Asia push

G.H. Financials (GHF) sees the Asia Pacific region as a key part of the broker's ambitious growth plans, as the firm comes out of a transitional period for its senior management.

Jerome Kemp, board chairman and interim chief executive, has been on a push to add experienced managers and align those hires with the firm’s strategic plans. The firm in September hired Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing's former European head Raymond Wong to run the broker's Asian business. The move shows the importance of the Asia region to the London-based broker.

“There is a massive amount of untapped potential in this market, particularly for non-bank players and we are driving that agenda forward aggressively,” Kemp said in an interview. “We will continue to grow and strategically hire to bring high grade talent into the firm. It's already a great team but we are looking to turbo charge it for growth.

“We look at Asia Pacific as one of the primary engines for that process, with new players emerging and keen to access new markets there is a real advantage for a globally connected intermediary and clearer such as ourselves to tap into that potential.”

Wong has not wasted time since taking up his new role, with GHF becoming the first remote derivatives clearing member on the Singapore Exchange (SGX), which was announced last month.

“My role in the region is to reshape our business here, and market access is a key part of that,” Wong told FOW. “With the SGX membership, we will be able to leverage our memberships with HKEX, ASX and we also provide access in Malaysia and Japan as of today.”

Through the SGX agreement, GHF will be able to offer access to the Indian market through the Singapore Exchange's GIFT City matching engine while the broker is also exploring adding China and India network availability.

“That is already a compelling proposition but the great thing about the region is the avenues for growth available to us,” Wong added. “The China story has been known for a while, and we have been exploring oversea intermediary access there and also in India as interest builds.

“Growing into India is also one of our priorities as more firms look to add exposure there, how we can best do that has yet to be decided, but with the GIFT City access we now have we can explore those options further. Overall, the bulk of the liquidity is going to be onshore, so having direct access there might give us an advantage over our peer group.”

The firm last week advertised a new position of head of sales based in Hong Kong, to help its push in the region.

For GHF, the move of traditional APAC high frequency trading (HFT) into medium frequency strategies and diversification by US HFT firms such as commodity trading advisors (CTAs) should provide fertile ground for the firm.

“There will also be a marketing and sales effort designed to maximise our growth as we finalise the building blocks of our product offering and that will cut across regions,” Wong said. “At this point in the cycle, and given the historic flows in the US, most of those systematic traders, the US CTAs, are looking at Asia as a growth area.

"What APAC offers is an untapped source of diversification for those firms. That goes beyond the big markets and should benefit South East Asian markets as a whole. Within APAC, firms moving from HFT or MFT, or mainland quant firms expanding outside of China will all be natural sources of new clients for us.”

Kemp became interim chief executive of the broker in May when former GHF chief executive Sharon Shi left to join Chinese bank CITIC.

Kemp, the former head of futures at J.P. Morgan and Citigroup, became chairman of G.H. Financials on March 31, according to the Financial Conduct Authority register, just five weeks after his appointment was announced by the firm.