Carl Im believes he has spotted a niche in the market. "There is a gap," he says, "between the coverage model of the bulge-bracket banks and the demand space." Im, a former Goldman Sachs options trader who set up the firm’s Korea business before moving to head the Pacific Rim strategic solutions group at Merrill Lynch, believes he can fill that gap by providing his expertise in complex financial products to small and medium-sized companies, as well as private equity firms that may be looking at those companies. Much of his work so far has been in helping smaller firms with distressed liabilities – including Korean companies caught up in the recent kiko FX derivatives fiasco – find a way out of their situation. He is also working with private equity companies, which might regard these distressed firms as unsalvageable, to see if there is a way he might be able to help them restore their potential purchases to health.