HC Tech recruits Puma and Powers

US non-bank liquidity provider HC Tech has hired Richard Puma as chief operating officer (COO) and Eric Powers as head of infrastructure, as the firm continues to build its FX and direct-trading businesses, FX Week has learned.

Puma joins from credit hedge fund Duane Park Capital Management, where he was a partner and chief operating officer for more than two years from July 2016.

He started his career at Tudor Investment Corporation, where Joseph Niciforo, one of the firm’s founders, also worked as a managing director at the time.

HC Tech was formerly known as Henning-Carey Proprietary Trading. The Chicago-based proprietary trading and technology firm was launched by Joseph Niciforo and Charles Carey, a former vice-chairman of CME Group, in 2007.

The firm has bolstered its senior ranks in recent years, appointing Jessica Sohl as president in March and adding Giovanni Pilliteri as a portfolio manager in 2017 to expand its FX presence.

Over the past two years, HC Tech has added about 40 people to its team globally, nudging up the headcount to 120 across its offices in Chicago, London and New York.

Puma spent nine years at Tudor, between January 1995 and December 2003, and was head of US operations at the time of his departure. In January 2004, he switched to Ospraie Management, a New York-based asset-management firm. He spent more than nine years at the company, holding roles that included COO and chief financial officer.

Puma returned to Tudor in April 2013, as a partner and deputy COO, before moving to Duane Park in 2016.

At HC Tech, Puma will report to Sohl and be responsible for day-to-day operations.

Powers, meanwhile, joins HC Tech from Deutsche Bank, where he was a director in the global markets business and part of the core trading technology group’s low-latency engineering team.

He joined the German bank in January 2014, from Morgan Stanley, where he was a vice-president in the dealer’s high-performance network architecture team for more than eight years.

Powers started his career in the US Air Force in 1991, as a computer programmer. He has more than 23 years’ experience in product development and systems engineering.