Senior markets operative jumps ship to MST Financial

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Gerard Satur's MST Financial has made another high-profile hire.

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Grant Eshuys, right, is joining MST Financial. He is pictured with Citi's head of capital markets John Mclean.  Photo: Chris Pearce

Street Talk understands Citi's former head of equities distribution and market sales Grant Eshuys has joined the independent equities research shop as a senior partner.

Eshuys was most recently a director at Bell Potter Securities, a position he has held for the past five years. Prior to that he worked at Citi for more than 15 years, including as head of Australian market sales, head of equities distribution and head of institutional equity sales.

He is expected to run MST Financial with Satur, who himself is a former equities desk head at UBS, and target equity sales and small and midcap ECM deals.

MST's small cap research arm, MST Access, has about 30 small and mid cap stocks under coverage and plans to get to 50 in the near future. It has worked on six equity raisings in the past three months.

The hiring of Eshuys means another banker that cut their teeth at Citi has been added to MST's roster. In July last year, the boutique picked up well known Citi hedge fund sales trader Jarrod Bakker to lead MST's push into equities sales.

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MST Financial boss Gerard Satur. 

Ex-UBS bigwig Satur set up MST in 2017 and set about hiring some of the country's best-known research analysts, including Andrew Goodsall (healthcare), Fraser McLeish (telco and media), Mark Samter (energy), Rohan Sundram (gaming & contractors) and Hasan Tevfik (investment strategy).

The firm's pitch to clients has been about stepping up as the big investment banks scale back equities research and sales and trading functions. It has grown to about 50 staff in its Martin Place office in Sydney, and operates under a partnership structure owned by staff.