After a stuttering start, it looks like Turquoise is getting its house in order in preparation for a busy New Year. The bank-backed rival to the London Stock Exchange has been variously dubbed Project Tortoise and Project Red Face by City wags for its signal failure to deliver a coherent business plan as the MiFID deadline loomed and its subsequent aborted reverse takeover of Plus Markets in October.

Since then, however, the Turquoise collective has appointed a new CEO in Eli Lederman, who officially moved from Morgan Stanley to take up the postion full-time on 3 December. In Mid-November came the appointment of Yann L'Huillier - formerly chief information officer at the Boston Stock Exchange (BSE) - as chief technology officer (CTO), followed yesterday by the arrival of Adrian Farnham, from Morgan Stanley, as chief operating officer (COO) and UBS' Duncan Higgins as head of client relationship management.

But this is just the beginning. I can say this with absolute authority, because the Finextra news mailbox yesterday received the following personalised e-mail from a major City recruitment firm:

Hi there 

I know this is a bit out of the blue but I do exclusive recruitment for Turquoise Trading here in London and I was given your email address by an old colleague of yours.

I was wondering if you were currently looking for any new roles at the moment perm or contract? OR if you'll be looking in the new year?

Turquoise has a huge recruitment drive at the moment and will also be doing a lot of recruitment in the new year and I wanted to see if it'd be worth running roles by you as they come out?

Please let me know when you have a chance! Also, if you have a CV you could send me it would help me to get an idea of roles you'd be looking for.

Maybe Turquoise is recruiting for a robust, scalable, mailbox server, capable of performing personalised e-mail messaging tasks with 100% efficiency. If so, they came to the right place.

Any humans out there who think they can perform the job better should form an orderly queue at the City offices of Robert Walters.