Ex-Citadel and Goldman Sachs MD selects a curious new employer
Sometimes leaving Goldman Sachs means going to a hedge fund like Citadel. Sometimes (but not often), it means going somewhere bizarre and entirely unpredictable. Mark Maislish seemingly couldn't settle for just one option.
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Maislish was most recently a portfolio manager at Citadel, but he was only there for four months, joining in February and leaving in June. Prior to that, he was EMEA head of equity capital markets syndicate at Goldman. Now, five months after leaving Citadel, he's joined Gibraltar-based gaming firm Pramatic Play instead. Maislish isn't commenting, but sources say he left Citadel to join Pragmatic.
What makes Pragmatic so popular? The gaming firm has over 1,000 employees, predominantly in Romania with a large Bulgarian contingent. It also has a sister company, ARRISE, which appears to have over 1,600 employees. Less than 40 of employees across both firms are based in the UK, while ~60 are based in North America.
Pragmatic Play was founded by Julian Jarvis, a former UK Barrister who rose to prominence as associate general counsel of AOL during the dot com bubble. He's now based in Gibraltar, like Pragmatic Play, where he's been since 2019.
Pragmatic Play's score on TrustPilot is 1.2 stars out of a potential five. A gambling platform will naturally incite more negative reviews, however, and major players in the space have similar scores. Pragmatic Play's reviews suggest it has been enlisting streamers to game on its site, and allege that the luck those streamers experience is different to their own experiences with the game.
Maislish is not the first person to quit banking for gaming; JPMorgan AI MD Andy Alexander left for a data science role at Entain in 2022. He's since returned to finance, however.
Nonetheless, the decision is still peculiar. Maislish's previous roles in equity capital markets were highly relationship driven, and you won't find many other ECM guys working at a place like Pragmatic Play.
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