Christian Grabbe will join Solactive AG as Chief Operating Officer (COO), with effect from 1st January 2015. Christian Grabbe will join the management team following a tremendous growth of the company in the last couple of years. He will help Solactive develop and expand even further, especially by working on the operations processes.
We expect a lot of changes in the index business in the upcoming years. Industry consolidation, increased regulation and a strong continued increase of the passive investment business represent a significant potential growth for Solactive. While some traditional index providers focus mostly on their own branding, Solactive relies more than ever on both an efficient IT infrastructure and fast operational implementation services.
Christian Grabbe will be in charge of IT, Operations, Human Resources as well as Legal. Steffen Scheuble, CEO, will remain responsible for Strategy, Sales and Finance. In addition to the Board Members, Henning Kahre, Head of Equity Indexing, and Astrid Ludwig, Head of Bond & Complex Indexing, continue to play central roles in the company. Both divisions have contributed significantly to the company's success over the past few years. Sebastian Seifried will keep bringing his expertise to Solactive as a member of the Supervisory Board.
While German speaking countries and structured products were key in the early years of the company, revenues are now driven by a broad range of index-linked products, equally in Europe and in North America. The ETF business has clearly been an area of growth for Solactive, with over 160 ETFs tied to indices calculated as of today, including 100+ in North America.
Commenting on the appointment, Steffen Scheuble, CEO and Founder of Solactive said: "I am delighted to have Christian joining us, as he has built a formidable depth of expertise and hands on management capability in a career spanning over 20 years. His profile and extensive experience in the banking and financial industry will be of considerable value to Solactive, so we can pursue our growth strategy and further develop our business model.”
Christian Grabbe added: "Over the past eight years, Solactive has filled in a gap in the market by offering fast and flexible services at a competitive cost and established itself as one of the key players in the industry. Now it is time to continue on that path and address the upcoming operational challenges of the index business."
Christian Grabbe joins Solactive from Baader Bank where he held several positions over the past 12 years, including recently as Head of Derivatives Trading. He notably developed a successful Mutual Funds and ETF trading desk, and he rolled out an OTC bilateral platform to almost all discount brokers in Germany and Austria. Prior to this, he worked for Citigroup and Deutsche Bank for 10 years on Structured Products Trading.