As the newly appointed Head of Advanced Execution Services (AES) Global Sales at Credit Suisse, Manny Santayana is already working hard to foster the group’s global, multi-asset focus.

“My number one objective is to provide global brand consistency across each of the regions we are in — the Americas, Middle East, Asia, Europe and Africa,” says Santayana. “That includes how we communicate internally and externally and a global sales discipline for pipeline management as well as client servicing and support.”

This includes more cross-regional flows – for example between Europe and the Americas or Europe and Asia – in terms of trading.

“Our global plan is to increase our global footprint by connecting to every exchange and ATS we can and continuing to develop speed of access and lower latency,” he says.

Intelligent sales calls will also be a key to his strategy, making needs based rather than product based sales calls. The group has also hired a global sales channel manager to continue building third-party distribution relationships with OMS and EMS providers, network providers and consultants who resell the AES products.

As for the products themselves, Santayana says he will be working to continue enhancing reliability, versatility and quality in price and performance. “We want to be seamless in the workflow process and fit into the client’s workflow without disintermediating any third party – we are completely vendor neutral,” he says.

More specifically, the AES team will also focus on improving the customization of adaptive algorithms, which adapt to market conditions to get price improvement. “We will also continue to improve our routing capabilities, particularly through CrossFinder Plus,” he says. “No matter where a pool of liquidity exists, we will be connected to it.”

The AES team will also have a multi-asset class focus as the group now encompasses AES Equities, AES FX, AES Options and AES Future. “We’ve built up the teams and infrastructure and launched each of these asset classes over the past year and a half and now it will be a primary focus,” he says.

Santayana also says, “we have recently developed incredibly unique client service and support tools that will completely enhance the overall AES trading experience.”

As for future global possibilities, Santayana says the team will be looking to open up shop in Latin America – Brazil and Mexico for sure. In addition, there will be a heavy concentration on the Canadian marketplace going forward.

Santayana replaces Richard Balarkas, who is reportedly moving to Instinet Europe.