West Hartford-bound Seven Stars Cloud, which will soon change its name to Ideanomics, has hired a new co-CEO.
The company announced yesterday the appointment of Brett McGonegal, the former CEO of the Hong Kong investment bank The Reorient Group, which was sold in 2015, as co-CEO, effective Sept. 21.
Prior to Reorient, McGonegal was co-head of equity sales and trading at Cantor Fitzgerald in Hong Kong, where he pioneered execution trading, and a senior managing director at Charles Schwab Capital Markets in the U.S. McGonegal will be based out of New York and Hong Kong.
McGonegal will be joined by Uwe Parpart, who will join Ideanomics as chief strategy officer, based out of Hong Kong. Parpart is the chairman of Asia Times Holdings, the Hong Kong company that owns the Asia Times newspaper. Prior to Asia Times, Uwe served as chief strategist and head of research at The Reorient Group and as a senior currency strategist at Bank of America.
The third senior appointee is Evan Kalimtgis, who will serve as Ideanomics’ chief investment officer and head of financial product development, based out of London and Hong Kong. Kalimtgis most recently was the founder of the strategic portfolio group at JP Morgan’s CIO division in London, which helped oversee the build out of the firm’s fixed income investment portfolio to over $400 billion. He also was the founder of the Glencore external credit fund, Asteri Capital and before that headed proprietary credit trading at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson.
“We’ve taken time to speak with various leaders in the global financial markets, looking for the very best talent to help support critical and dynamic areas of our business,” Bruno Wu, chairman and co-CEO of Ideanomics, said in a statement. “We are extremely pleased to announce the addition of Brett, Uwe and Evan as it delivers precisely what we were looking for, which is exceptional individuals with a blend of innovation in financial services and global market expertise that is essential for the high-growth business model of Ideanomics through the remainder of 2018 and beyond.”
These new additions to Ideanomics’ management team brings a lifetime of experience in serving at and building out global financial services and media firms. Their appointment builds upon Ideanomics’ stated goal of creating the world’s premier blockchain technology-based asset management platform infused with unique AI-based data structuring, analysis and risk management.
Their roles within Ideanomics will have a heavy focus on managing the global capital markets division of fixed income products, investor relations, AI-enhanced risk management services for Ideanomics’ commodities and energy division and strengthening the build out of the New York, Hong Kong and London offices.
“From our first conversation, it was clear that Bruno and I had a shared vision for the future of financial services and how digitization, tokenization and fractionalization can unlock tremendous value currently not available in today’s financial markets,” McGonegal said in a statement. “Today is a big step in making this future a reality. We are delighted to be joining the Ideanomics team at such an exciting time and look forward to help driving increased shareholder value through delivering the types of digital financial products that both asset holders and investors are looking for.”
The company has been busy of late, changing its name to Ideanomics a few weeks ago and announcing the acquisition of the end-to-end influencer marketing platform Grapevine Logic last week.
