BondDesk Group Names Crosbie New CEO, Slaymaker Now Chairman

Electronic trading company BondDesk Group LLC announced yesterday that Peter Crosbie would become its new chief executive officer and that former CEO Rob Slaymaker would be named the company’s chairman, a newly created position at BondDesk. Slaymaker and Crosbie said in an interview yesterday that the company will maintain its strategy of focussing on odd-lot trading in fixed-income markets. The BondDesk platform accounted for 261,100 municipal bond trades during the third quarter of 2007, up from 232,929 during the same period of 2006, the company said.Crosbie was the chief executive of Moody’s KMV until 2003, and he helped manage the merger of Moody’s Risk Management Services and KMV LLC. Since leaving that post, Crosbie has been working as a consultant and serving on several companies’ boards of directors. He joined BondDesk’s board at the beginning of this year.During his career, Crosbie has also been a director of loan portfolio management at Barclays Bank of New York, and taught marketing at Santa Clara University Business School, according to BondDesk.“[BondDesk’s] primary focus is to continue to enhance our platform and solutions providing our current client base with next-generation trading technologies and access to a best-execution liquidity pool,” Crosbie said in a company statement.Slaymaker will be working on more strategic planning for the company in his role as chairman. He added that the company’s strategy of adding extra tools to encourage odd-lot trading on its system will remain central to BondDesk’s plan going forward.“We believe that if you provide more content and tools to the average retail representative, they will trade more fixed-income,” he said.Among all fixed-income asset classes, BondDesk accounted for 1.23 million trades during the third quarter, the company said. This was up from the 1.18 million trades it hosted during the same quarter of 2006.By par volume, trades on BondDesk’s platform in all asset classes totalled $104 billion last quarter, the company said.