StanChart to hire 1,800 for trading division

Standard Chartered plans to hire about 1,800 people for its global trading and underwriting operations over the next three years as the bank aims to more than double revenue from those businesses.

The expansion from the current 1,700 employees at the Financial Markets unit is part of a goal to boost net revenue from those operations to about $10 billion by 2014 from $4.4 billion last year, Leonard Feder, head of the division, said in a November 25 interview in Singapore.

“This is just the beginning,” said Feder, who joined Standard Chartered in July 2007 after spending 11 years at Bear Stearns Cos, where he was last the co-head of its prime brokerage unit. “We’re just scratching the surface on what the opportunities are.”

Standard Chartered is challenging firms such as Goldman Sachs Group, the Wall Street bank that got $38 billion in revenue from investment banking and trading in 2009. The London-based lender, which gets most of its profit from Asia, plans to expand in underwriting securities denominated in the Chinese currency and boost trading on behalf of clients in equities, commodities and currencies, according to Feder.

Offshore yuan-denominated products is “probably number one on our list,” Feder said. Standard Chartered arranged McDonald’s Corp’s sale of yuan bonds in Hong Kong in August, the first by a foreign non-financial company.

Standard Chartered is working with several funds and issuers to spur trading in so-called dim sum bonds, said Sundeep Bhandari, the bank’s head of global markets for Northeast Asia. Average daily turnover may rise as much as six-fold to 300 million yuan ($45 million) by the end of 2011, from 50 million this month, the bank estimates.