Headed by Jesse Cole and Bryan Miller in New York, Merlin Institutional Group will augment and expand Merlin's agency trading capabilities.

It will focus on delivering traditional institutional equity sales coverage and content to medium and large hedge funds. The group will provide clients with services such as corporate access, company modeling and trading ideas.

'Merlin Institutional Group represents an important development for Merlin,' says Stephan Vermut, founder and managing partner of Merlin. 'We have built our reputation on providing excellence in prime brokerage, reporting, trading, and operational support for our clients. With the addition of this new team, we will now be in a position to provide clients with investment ideas, research and modeling. Jesse and Bryan have been tasked with building out this group and bring with them a wealth of institutional sales experience. Both are recognised in the industry for their expertise, and we are delighted to welcome them to Merlin.'

Cole joins Merlin from Schonfeld IBS, where he was a member of the institutional sales and trading group since its inception in 2004. In that position, he grew the business from a new entity to a well-known execution platform. Prior to Schonfeld, Cole was with Pali Capital, where he served as a research sales associate focused on international accounts, primarily based in Europe. Cole began his career at ISI Group, working for Ed Hyman and Nancy Lazar

Miller was most recently with the institutional research sales and trading group at Collins Stewart. In this position, he was also an integral part of the firm's syndicate group and worked on a number of corporate finance deals. Prior to that, Miller was with a start-up equity sales and trading firm, Burlington Capital Markets, which was acquired by Collins Stewart in 2005. Miller began his career at CIBC Oppenheimer as an institutional equities research salesperson.