Persella Ioannides
Executive Director
Persella has an MBA and an MS in Financial Engineering from Columbia University and a BS in Mathematics and Statistics from Bristol University. She spent three years as a risk manager for Morgan Stanley’s institutional equity derivatives desk in New York. In 2007, Persella set up MeritKapital, an FCA investment firm with an initial focus on asset management and investment advice. Since, she has progressively grown the firm’s product offerings to include proprietary trading, brokerage, custody and the underwriting business and has worked towards building the firm’s global presence. Persella has developed the firm’s niche in the Eurobond fixed income space, particularly in the emerging markets. Her strong relationships with large buy side funds are testament to the positioning of MeritKapital in its field of expertise.
Ekaterina Rtishcheva
Executive Director
Ekaterina has an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Economics (First Class Honors) from the University of Sheffield. Following, she began her career at MeritKapital’s brokerage unit where she exhibited a keen interest and solid understanding of the financial markets and was thus subsequently transferred to the proprietary trading unit. Ekaterina’s focus has been the fixed income emerging markets space where she actively covers both the primary and the secondary markets. She has single handedly built the firm’s primary issues desk which has enabled her to widen the horizon of underlying coverage from corporates to sovereigns alike across the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey as well as Latin America and Sub Sahara Africa. Ekaterina’s strong quantitative skills and solid understanding of macro fundamentals and their correlation to the financial markets have positively contributed to the firm’s standing within its industry.
Emerging Markets
Fixed income brokerage