The most fascinating hedge-fund hire of 2024 wasn't a star trader or C-suite executive

• "Business development" has become a coveted role at hedge funds amid the war to recruit top PMs.
• The Citadel BD ace Matthew Giannini's joining Walleye was one of the most noteworthy moves of 2024.
• Hedge funds hired dozens in BD in 2024 — BI tracked the names of more than 40 who joined top firms.

One of the most intriguing hedge-fund personnel moves in 2024 came late in the year. It wasn't a superstar portfolio manager or another big bank executive migrating to the buy side.

It was someone with barely any media profile at all: Matthew Giannini, a senior leader in Citadel's business-development unit whom Walleye Capital hired in October as chief operating officer of its long-short equities business.

The move from the industry's $66 billion killer whale to a much smaller fish surprised several industry insiders Business Insider spoke with at the time, underscoring the continued demand for the niche role of vetting and wooing investment professionals.

BI wrote in May about the evolution of the "business development" role, which has grown into a coveted specialty amid the boom in multimanager hedge funds. These firms, prized by investors for robust returns uncorrelated with the stock market, have added $200 billion in assets since 2019. Hiring has followed suit — head count since then soared by 90% at multimanagers compared with just 6% at other hedge funds — provoking a talent war that has been one of the industry's defining themes and challenges over the past few years.

Though total assets managed by these firms declined in 2024 for the first time in seven years (some investors pulled money amid growing costs paired with lackluster returns in 2023), "the war for talent appears to be continuing unabated," Goldman Sachs' prime-services team said in a September report on multimanager hedge funds. These roughly 50 firms added 2,400 employees over the previous year, Goldman found, a 15% increase.

Business development was no exception, with dozens of hires by top hedge funds in 2024, according to industry sources, LinkedIn bios, and publicly reported moves.

Millennium, the largest multimanager, with $72.1 billion in assets under management and more than 6,000 employees, hired at least 10 people in business development in 2024, BI found. Balyasny, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars hiring PMs this year, added at least six new BD executives to facilitate hiring, including three managing directors — most recently the commodities specialist David O'Connor, who joined in November from the external search firm Maven.

Citadel has been hiring as well, adding a handful of people to one of the most revered BD units in the industry. The hedge fund last year became the most profitable of all time, something its founder and CEO, Ken Griffin, attributed in part to an "unparalleled" ability to "recruit experienced professionals to Citadel" and "tremendous success attracting gifted graduates from the premier colleges and universities." Unsurprisingly, Griffin's talent whisperers are highly sought after.

Perhaps none has more gravitas than Giannini. Several industry professionals who know him say he's tall, charismatic, intelligent, and deft at winning over PMs — someone who provides an actual edge in an industry desperate for it. Giannini's leaving Balyasny in 2018 to rejoin Citadel contributed to a turf war between the funds.

"Matt is, if not the best, one of the best closers I've ever met," a BD professional told BI this year.

Leaving Citadel for Walleye may raise some eyebrows, but joining Walleye offers a potentially lucrative upside for Giannini compared with a typical BD role. Business group heads at these funds usually take home a cut of their unit's profits, and while Walleye struggled in 2023, it has been executing an overhaul that's bearing fruit. The fund was up by 15.4% through November, putting it near the top of its peer group for 2024.

He also joins some familiar faces at Walleye, including Thomas DeAngelis, an ex-Citadel BD leader who's now Walleye's president, and Anil Gondi, a longtime PM who joined from Balyasny this summer and will oversee the long-short equities division with Giannini. The two overlapped at Balyasny in the 2010s.

The hiring of Giannini and dozens of others at top funds in 2024 signals that the burning demand for investment talent, and those gifted in recruiting it, isn't likely to dim anytime soon.

"One clear theme from our conversations with multimanagers was that the 'war for talent' synonymous with this segment has not seen any material de-escalation in the last year," Goldman Sachs said in its report.

BI tracked business-development professionals who joined top funds in 2024, using industry sources, LinkedIn bios, and publicly reported moves. This list isn't exhaustive, and we may update it as we learn more.