LeapRate Exclusive… LeapRate has learned that the management makeover at Forex broker platform and technology provider Leverate is continuing.
Costas Michael
The latest executive to leave Leverate is Costas Michael, who had been General Manager and head of Leverate’s Cyprus based entity, CySEC licensed Leverate Financial Services Ltd, for the past four years. He had actually been at Leverate a total of six years, after a brief stint at TFI Markets. Mr. Michael left Leverate for X Trade Brokers Dom Maklerski SA (WSE:XTB), which operates the FCA regulated XTB.com retail FX brand. He will now head XTB’s Cyprus office.
Costas Michael’s departure has led to a number of other dominoes tumbling. Replacing him as General Manager of Leverate Cyprus is Pantelis Christou, until now Leverate’s Head of Brokerage Department in Cyprus for the past four years. And taking Mr. Christou’s position as Head of Brokerage is Pavlos Antoniou, who has been a brokerage department officer at Leverate for the past two years.
Jovana Grozdanic
In another executive move, Leverate has hired Jovana Grozdanic for Compliance / AML in Cyprus – an increasingly important and paid-attention-to role in the FX world, given the increasing regulatory complexity which the sector has been facing.
Jovana Grozdanic joins Leverate from another CySEC licensed company, B.O. Tradefinancials Ltd., or BOT. BOT was the licensed entity owned by binary options platform and brokerage provider TechFinancials Inc (LON:TECH), from where TechFinancials ran its regulated binary options brokerage brand OptionFair. It also ran under BOT its binary options market making operation MarketFinancials Limited. As we reported in March, after a failed attempt to sell the OptionFair and MarketFinancials businesses Techfinancials decided to simply shut them down, renouncing BOT’s CySEC license in the process.
Ms. Grozdanic had been at BOT less than a year. She had also worked in the since-closed Cyprus branch of Saxo Bank from 2014-2017.
As mentioned, Leverate has undergone a fairly extensive overhaul in its senior management team both at headquarters in Israel and in Cyprus over the past year. The company brought in a new group CEO last summer, former Playtech executive Yasha Polyakov. And as was exclusively reported by LeapRate in March, the company brought on board a new Head of Marketing, former Wix.com executive Yaara Rozenblat.