Mark Duff, co-founder of online brokerage Boom Securities, has stepped down as chief executive and managing director in a move that marks the end of an era for Hong Kong's Internet scene.
Boom named former Prudential-Bache International executive James Kelso to replace Mr Duff, who will keep a 'significant' stake in the private company and stay on the board as a non-executive director.
Boom was founded five years ago by Mr Duff and Jonathan Hakim, one of the city's most vocal boosters for Internet-based businesses. Both were fixtures on the dotcom networking circuit and the company was recognised with regional information technology awards.
Boom proclaimed itself Asia's first online stock trading firm and at first the servers were kept in the founders' flats, in the style of Silicon Valley's garage start-ups.
Mr Duff said the search for his replacement formally began six months ago. Boom sought new leadership partly to gain expertise in dealing with institutional clients interested in buying its back-end services, he said, even though retail broking was still a bigger part of the business.
'Frankly we needed Jim specifically, who has institutional, intermediary and comprehensive retail experience,' Mr Duff said.
In the past several years, Boom has received about US$25 million in investment from big players such as Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp and the Eu family of Hong Kong.