The turmoil in the over-the-counter derivatives market – widely blamed for exacerbating the financial crisis – is prompting customers to look for alternatives to the banks that traditionally deal the contracts, according to Bernard Dan, chief executive of MF Global, one of the world’s biggest financial derivatives brokerages.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Dan said MF had opened more than 300 new institutional accounts in the three months to the end of September in the US and Europe, with OTC transactions accounting for 43 per cent of the company’s total revenues, up from 31 per cent in the same period last year.

Mr Dan said customers were telling him they were concerned at the continued risks on the books of the biggest banks, such as difficult-to-value “level 3” assets. He said cheap financing from the Federal Reserve for US banks was aggravating the problem.

“Our new accounts come on the heels of this dislocation in the banking sector, with clients seeking a compelling non-bank alternative,” he said. “We’re beginning to see clients saying: ‘I don’t want to be with the nine big banks because of those level 3 assets and all that greater risk they’re taking.’ So we’re reaping the benefits in spite of the bigger headwinds in the industry.”

The scale of those headwinds became clear on Thursday, when MF reported that its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in the last quarter were $25m, or 1 cent per share, down from $88m, or 20 cents per share, a year earlier and below analysts’ average forecasts of 3 cents per share.

The company saw a slight fall in its listed futures market share from last year, to 29.7 per cent of total volumes on the US and Europe’s biggest futures exchanges from 30.1 per cent a year earlier.

However, Mr Dan pointed out that the broker’s market share has been growing since he took over as chief executive late last year. That appointment came after a turbulent period following the ousting of his predecessor after a “rogue trading” incident last year, in which a wheat trader at MF’s Memphis office racked up $141m of losses in unauthorised trading in the largest trading scandal ever to hit agricultural commodity markets.

Since taking over, Mr Dan has embarked on a hiring spree. In recent months he has gutted the senior management, with new heads of equities and foreign exchange and a new chief operating officer for North America.

The new hires are part of a changed management structure that fits Mr Dan’s strategy of diversifying across asset classes and geographies. “When I joined, this was a very regional, desk-driven company,” he said. “Now we’re global product-led, so we can serve a global client better today than we could a year ago because of centralised governance.”

Mr Dan said reform of financial regulation in the US would put further pressure on the big banks, with higher capital requirements for proprietary trading and lower profits on OTC transactions that are moves into clearing houses.