TradeInformer understands that long-time IG Group executives Phil Harbage and Peter Ward are set to join rival broker Capital.com.
Harbage left IG three months ago and has been on gardening leave since then. The new Capital.com executive was Premium Client Manager at IG for over a decade.
He joined the broker at the start of 2015 and has been responsible for managing some of the broker’s largest accounts.
Prior to joining IG, Harbage had a short stint at stockbroker Redmayne Bentley. He also worked as a dealer at City Equities, a now defunct broker that specialised in UK small caps.
Ward has worked in the OTC trading industry for almost two decades, with the majority of that time spent at IG.
He originally joined the firm in 2008 and then had a brief stint at London Capital Group, before rejoining IG in 2016. He has been Head of Premium Client Sales since 2017.
Harbage and Ward follow in the footsteps of Sam Irwin, another senior sales executive at IG, who left the firm at the end of last year to join Crypto.com.
Capital.com began onboarding UK customers again last year after a lengthy pause. The firm has since ramped up its marketing activity in the country, with big budget campaigns on the Financial Times website.
Premium Client Managers can be among the most high value employees that a broker has.
Almost all firms operate with revenues that are highly skewed towards a small subset of valuable clients. If a PCM can bring over a portion of that book of business to a different firm, that can be extremely profitable for the new firm as a result.
