A new chief executive is taking over the helm at the Singapore Stock Exchange.

Singapore’s stock exchange has appointed a new chief executive, Loh Boon Chye. He takes the helm from Magnus Böcker, who steps down after more than five years in the post.

Loh takes up the post on 14 July this year, the Singapore Stock Exchange said in a statement.

From December 2012 to early this year, he was deputy president and head of global markets, Asia-Pacific, at Merrill Lynch. In a career of 26 years, he started out as an investment officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore; he joined the Singapore branch of Morgan Guaranty Trust Co of New York in 1992. From 1995 to 2012, Loh was with Deutsche Bank in Singapore. There he held the posts of chief executive of the global markets division in Singapore, and head of global markets – Asia, as well as head of corporate and investment banking for Asia-Pacific.

He takes the helm at a time when the SGX faces competitive pressure from rival hubs such as Hong Kong. In the latter’s case, its recently-established Stock Connect link with the Shanghai stock market has been seen as a success.

The stock exchange in Singapore suffered three trading outages last year, events that prompted the Monetary Authority of Singapore to state such problems were “unacceptable”. It ordered the exchange to review processes that might have led to the outages.