Pioneer Investments, the fund manager owned by Italy’s Unicredit, has beefed up its newly-created emerging market team based in London with five hires.

The team now includes Sebastian Barry Taylor, consumer analyst and team leader; Ji Young Park, consumer analyst; Richard Clode, technical analyst for global emerging markets; Caroline Galligan, financial analyst; and Oleksiy Soroka, senior credit analyst. All of them report to Marco Mencini, head of equity and emerging market research, apart from Soroka who reports to Garrett Walsh, head of credit research for Europe and Asia.

The addition of the emerging markets team in London was announced in February and it is the latest reflection of the Milan-headquartered firm’s belief in investment opportunities in such markets. The company, with €162 billion ($258.4 billion) in assets under management at the end of 2011, previously had emerging markets teams in other parts of the world and they have now been brought together into one entity which combines equity and fixed income.

Barry Taylor was latterly a senior consumer analyst at Henderson Global Investor (previously Gartmore Investment Management). Before that, he was an analyst for JP Morgan’s London-based Latin America and EMEA equity research sales team.

Park joins from M&G Investments, where he was an equity sector specialist in global emerging market consumer industries.

Clode has experience in long only and long/short strategies for investment houses such as Moore Capital in Hong Kong and Gartmore in London.

Galligan previously worked for AllianceBernstein, where she was a Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa financials analyst. She has also worked for Williams de Broe as a European bank analyst.

Soroka comes across from Credit Suisse, where he was a director of CEEMEA corporate credit research. Between 2001 and 2010, he was a senior credit analyst at BNP Paribas.