London, April 23, 2026, 15:26 BST
HSBC Holdings Plc, one of the world’s largest bullion-trading banks, is hiring JPMorgan executive director James Willis to lead global precious metals sales, four sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters, marking its second senior metals appointment this month. The move adds to a wider reshuffle across London’s bullion market.
That matters because HSBC is still simplifying the group, cutting costs and weighing deeper job reductions elsewhere. Fresh hiring in metals points to one area the bank is still willing to back.
HSBC, JPMorgan, ICBC Standard Bank and UBS are among the banks that quote prices and settle trades in London’s over-the-counter, or OTC, market, where deals are struck directly rather than on an exchange. The London Bullion Market Association says more than 20 million ounces of gold are cleared daily there.
Willis follows Mark Augustynak, an ICBC Standard Bank metals trader hired earlier this month to run HSBC’s global metals trading business. Reuters reported that Augustynak is expected to join in mid-2026 after the departure of Vincent Domien, who left HSBC late last year.
The market backdrop helps explain the urgency. World Gold Council data showed average daily gold trading volumes reached a record $965 billion in late January and stayed high at $525 billion a day in March, while independent analyst Ross Norman said earlier this year that “the only certainty at the moment seems to be uncertainty.” World Gold Council
HSBC has tried to frame the broader overhaul as selective rather than indiscriminate. When the bank lifted its medium-term profitability target in February, Chief Executive Georges Elhedery said HSBC was becoming “a simple, more agile, focused bank,” and a month later he told investors its biggest new-technology spending was going into generative AI. Reuters
Investors will get a near-term read on that strategy soon. HSBC said this week it will announce first-quarter results on May 5 and consider a first interim dividend for 2026, with payment due on June 26 to shareholders on the register by May 15 if the board approves it.
HSBC’s shares were not immune to the broader market wobble on Thursday. The London-listed stock fell 0.9%, versus a 2.1% drop for Barclays, as oil held above $100 a barrel and fading hopes of renewed U.S.-Iran talks pulled the FTSE 100 lower.
The risk is that a cooler gold market takes some of the heat out of London’s hiring race. Spot gold fell 0.9% to $4,696.71 an ounce on Thursday as a stronger dollar and higher bond yields bit, though Ole Hansen of Saxo Bank said the pullback looked “more a pause driven by rate uncertainty” than a structural shift. Reuters
HSBC itself has warned the rally will not be one-way. In January the bank said gold could hit $5,000 an ounce in the first half of 2026, but it also trimmed its average forecast for the year and said any correction could deepen if geopolitical risks eased or U.S. rate cuts stalled.
