FNG Exclusive… Further to our (exclusive) report from yesterday that longtime OANDA executive David Hodge was leaving the company, FNG has now learned that Mr. Hodge will be joining Retail FX and CFDs broker Skilling as that firm’s new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), and effective “#2” to Skilling CEO Michael Kamerman.

The appointment will only become official and effective in early 2022, following a brief gardening leave period for David Hodge, after he finishes up his existing commitments with OANDA, as we noted in our earlier article.

Skilling is somewhat of an interesting upstart in the Retail FX world. The broker was founded about 10 years ago by former Scandinavian partners in a company called Optimizer Invest – Henrik Persson Ekdahl, Mikael Harstad and Andre Lavold. The three hired former Google Sweden country director Anders Berglund as CEO in 2016, and Skilling formally launched as a CySEC-licensed entity in 2019. Mr. Berglund left around launch time, at which point Andre Lavold took over CEO duties, handing them over to former FXCM UK senior executive Michael Kamerman who joined Skilling about a year ago.

Skilling is now managed from several locations including the southern Spanish resort town of Marbella where Mr. Kamerman is based, Cyprus, and London. It has been increasingly focused on “new age” products such as crypto trading and NFTs, recently adding trading in Fan Tokens.