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CIBC continues to hire as it seeks to capitalize on the health of its balance sheet and build out its trading businesses. The latest recruit is Takis Spiropoulos, who joins as managing director and head of the bank's electronic solutions group (ESG) in its FICC business. Spiropoulos was previously at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He will be based in Toronto and reports to old colleague Christian Exshaw, CIBC's managing director and head of distribution FICC.

Kenan Altunis has apparently left his role as global head of sales at UniCredit. The buzz is that he's gone back to his old stomping ground at Deutsche. There's no official word from either bank, although one Deutsche sources says: "Everyone good comes back to DB in the end."

Patrik Olsson, the London-based global head of local markets at RBS, has left the bank. "Patrik played a valuable role to the local markets business in delivering record levels of profitability last year and we thank him for his contribution to our success and wish him well for the future," the banks says in an internal email. His roles have been split between Jason Richardson, currently the banks head of currency options and emerging markets, North America, who will now run local markets trading, and Peter Najarian, who will run sales.

MarketFactory, the FX connectivity specialist set up by a number of EBS alumni, has unveiled its Sherpa Connect software code. The company says this FX-specific product provides full and correct interpretation of the data, translation into a flexible trading API and optional connection to third-party middleware to ease integration into existing trading infrastructure.

Unfortunately, it seems that for many of today’s FX players the only network they are interested in is the one their trading systems sit on. But such a blinkered view is foolish.

I went along to the International Derivatives Expo in London this week. The show, put on by the US Futures Industry Association and the UK’s Futures and Options Association, is always well attended and I thought it would be good to know what’s going on – after all, if the regulators have their way it seems everything will either be traded on an exchange or have some kind of clearing house involved in the post-trade environment at least.

As if judging which bank deserves to win the Euromoney Award for Excellence wasn’t hard enough, my task has been made harder by the way some of these outstanding institutions have submitted their pitches.

Saxo Bank has purchased stakes in two specialist asset managers, taking the entire share capital of Capital Four Management and 51% of Global Evolution.

dbFX has launched an FX educational portal that will be carried by Bloomberg and utilize its information and data. “The launch of this new initiative with Bloomberg reflects a growing understanding and knowledge of FX and dbFX.com’s commitment to equip its retail traders with the best information possible to make informed trading decisions,” says Betsy Waters, global director of dbFX.

Officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council have set 2013 as the new deadline for the region’s common currency, according to Standard Chartered, quoting local media reports. The initial deadline for the project was 2010, but progress has been slow and complex, with both Oman and the UAE pulling out of the union. Despite this, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have decided to go ahead. But Stan Chart says that even if goes ahead, excluding the UAE means excluding the region’s second largest and most diversified economy.