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.
• Citadel BD ace Matthew Giannini 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 nor 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 COO of its long-short equities business.

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

Business Insider 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 — headcount since then soared 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.

Even 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 observed in a September report on multimanager hedge funds. These roughly 50 firms added 2,400 new employees in the previous 12 months, Goldman found, a 15% increase.

Business development was no exception, with dozens of hires by top hedge funds 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 BD in 2024, BI's analysis shows. Balyasny, which has spent hundreds of millions hiring PMs this year, added at least six new BD executives to facilitate hiring this year, including three managing directors — most recently commodities specialist David O'Connor, who joined in November from 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 founder and CEO Ken Griffin attributes 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. When Giannini left Balyasny in 2018 to rejoin Citadel, it 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 earlier 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 the past year that's bearing fruit. The fund is up 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, company president and another ex-Citadel BD leader, and Anil Gondi, a long-time PM who joined from Balyasny this summer and will oversee the long-short equities division with Giannini. The pair overlapped at Balyasny in the 2010s.

Giannini's hiring and the dozens of others at top funds in 2024 signals that the burning demand for investment talent, and those gifted in recruiting it, won't likely dim any time 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.

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