Mega-money manager Blackrock snagged Rajesh Nagella, who left Citigroup in July. Nagella had been with Citi since 2008, where he held various roles including EMEA head of algorithmic products, head of algo products for the U.S. and head of its Americas execution platform.

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MUFG Investor Services, the global asset servicing arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, has hired Ben Griffiths as Managing Director, Global Head of Fund Financing. Griffiths will lead the fund financing team globally to service clients, including funds of hedge funds, private equity lines of subscription, and FX lines for feeder funds of hedge funds. Mr. Griffiths joins from Citco Financial Products (CFP), a subsidiary of Citco Group, where he was Managing Director and CEO, responsible for lending and FX solutions. He will be based in London and will report to John Sergides, Global Head of Sales and Marketing.

OCC announced that Kurt Eckert, Partner and Head of Market Structure at Wolverine Trading, Rachelle Keller, Chief Operating Officer for Prime, Futures and Securities Services at Citi, and Stephen Luparello, Managing Director and General Counsel for Citadel Securities, have joined the Board of Directors as Member Directors.

Luparello was appointed to fill a vacancy for a term ending in 2018 created by the departure of Jamil Nazarali. Eckert was appointed to fill a vacancy for a term ending in 2019 created by the departure of Ray DiSanza. Keller was appointed to fill a vacancy for a term ending in 2020 created by the departure of Eric Noll.

Academy Securities, a registered broker-dealer, certified Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise (DVBE), and Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), said it added Peter Tchir as Director, Head of Macro Strategy. Tchir served as Managing Director of Brean Capital for the last three years where he expanded services provided to clients and produced the T-Report from research and other “focus” pieces. Prior to this, he founded TF Market Advisors where he built an independent research, advisory, and consulting business into one that had several top hedge funds and money managers as clients.

NEX named Ken Pigaga as the new Chief Executive Officer of NEX Optimisation following Jenny Knott’s decision to step down as the division’s CEO. She will remain with the company for a period to ensure an orderly handover. Pigaga will remain in his role as a Director on the NEX Board. He will hand over his Global COO responsibilities to Sam Wren, Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of NEX, who will assume the role of Global COO in addition to her role as Group CFO. Ken will continue to work alongside Sam on the NEX Transformation program, given the material contribution that NEX Optimisation will make to this program.

Style Research, a vendor of factor-based equity analytics and portfolio communications, has hired Jamie Spark as Managing Director for the Asia Pacific region. The appointment of Spark, who has worked in the funds services industry for 27 years, with leadership positions at OneVue Fund Services, Citigroup, RBC, and several boutique service providers. He will be based in the firm’s Melbourne office. Also, the firm has landed CJ Zou as Client Relationship Manager, Asia Pacific. Zou will be based out of the Tokyo office.

Centana Growth Partners, a growth equity firm focused on the future of financial services, hired Tom Davis as Principal, and Matthew Alfieri as Vice President. Prior to joining Centana, Davis spent nine years at General Atlantic where he focused on investments in the financial services sector. Prior to General Atlantic, Davis was an investment banker with Morgan Stanley.

Alfieri joins Centana from Goldman Sachs where he spent nine years, most recently as a Vice President with the Principal Strategic Investments team, where he invested in financial technology and enterprise technology companies.

Neudata onboarded Julia Asri Meigh in London as a data analyst with her focusing on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues.

Advanced Logic Analytics, a provider of finance and trading analytics solutions for buy- and sell-side institutions and other financial firms, hired Ryan Shuttleworth as Chief Technology Officer. Shuttleworth is an experienced C level technologist and engineer who has a long history of successful technology delivery. Most recently he was Director of Global Cloud Engineering at ING Bank Netherlands and, before ING Bank, he was CTO Verizon Cloud and Technical Evangelist at Amazon Web Services. His earlier career includes Cisco and IBM.