Walton-On-Thames, England, United Kingdom
Highly experienced, versatile, delivery focused Technology Leader within financial services industry. Design, Leadership, IT Strategy, Integration, Expertise in creating high performance lean technology teams, IT Transformation, Stakeholder Engagement. C-suite roles in Start-ups (CTO, COO & CPO) • Finding elegant solutions to business problems Hands-on Design & Architecture Lead. Outstanding programme management skills under both agile and waterfall paradigms, successfully delivering business enablement through proactive stakeholder engagement/management, coupled with proven team building and leadership skills having led diverse groups across multiple geographies. • Technical background in low latency trading systems, having built and run a number of high-performance trading systems. • Implemented DevOps and led Service Management Teams in Brokers and Investment Banks on a Global Basis. • Highly Experienced in Data Centre and Networks – covering new builds, upgrades and migrations to new sites, globally. • Managed Budgets in excess of £15m • CISO - ISO 27001, SOC2 • Business Transformation. Covered both Buyside and Sellside. Agile. Lean. Transition to Cloud. AWS. Google. DevOps. Enterprise Architecture, Electronic Trading. Low Latency, High Performance Trading Systems. Central Counterparty. Fixed Income, UST, eFX, Capital Markets, Credit Risk. Regulatory Reporting (Mifid, Libor, Volcker, FATCA), GDPR, Trade Reconstruction, Trade Surveillance, KYC, AML and Payments Systems. • Project Management: SCRUM, Kanban, Prince2, Full SDLC, Test Management, Test Automation • Technologies Include: DLT, Blockchain, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, OneTick, Streambase, Mongo, Gitlab, Docker, Kafka, FIX, XML, FpML, Java, C, C++, C#, Elastic (ELK) • Fintech: AWS, Charles River, Thinkfolio, BBG TOMS, WallStreet, Murex, ION, Caplin, Millennium, OM, Digital Marketing, Advertising, Customer Journey, E-Commerce, UX/UI, Multi- Cloud Design, Digital Assets, Crypto, Infrastructure Management, Azure
• Spearheaded the development of company goals, strategies, and tactics to drive operational excellence. • Maximized revenue while minimizing costs through strategic planning and resource allocation. • Established company values and behaviors to foster a positive workplace culture. • Designed and implemented internal processes and procedures to enhance efficiency and clarity.
• The first job was to move from an outdated system to a new trading platform, which was achieved within four months. • We now launch new functionalities every six weeks, enhancing user experience on one of the leading carbon trading platforms. • We chose to move away from purely a trading model to a service based model focussed on multiple registry connectivity and portfolio management.
I was Head of Product for the first 18 months - designing the trading system, covering the client journey & ensuring product/market fit. Designed, built, and delivered an FCA-regulated, Distributed Order Book, Corporate Bonds trading system (MTF) on r3's Corda Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). We pioneered the distributed order book with DLT technology to provide reveal conditions on the orders in each user's own order book. I have had the privilege of leading the design of a truly leading-edge trading system. The key feature was the distributed orderbook, in which the owner could stipulate under which conditions his orderbook would be made visible to other players. We have a relatively small internal team augmented by a team of 70+ people spanning development, test, network, cybersecurity, and Office Systems Tech Support vendors. Worked directly with large asset managers, like Fidelity, to define Buyside workflow and integration with Charles River. The system is deployed in AWS and client network connectivity is achieved via Equinix. The tech stack is React, Java, REST, AWS Services, Kafka, Corda (DLT, Blockchain), and Python with client comms via FIX 4.4. with FIX 5 tags. UI integrations - OpenFin, FDC3. In November '22 Ledgeredge won the award for "Outstanding Fixed Income Trading Venue" at the TRADE News Awards. One of the key features was the ability to monitor and predict the behaviour of client traders. This was achieved by implementing a set of AI oriented features - gathering trading data, machine learning of trader behaviours triggered by internal and external events . We used this facility to mark clients as good or bad players in our ecosystem and this also fed into brokerage fee adjustments.
Responsibilities •Responsible for overall Design in Azure & overall control of the Delivery Programme to get the firm into Production. One of the key aspects was the integration of the lending platform with the insurance underwriters at SwissRe.
Leading Front Office Development Teams and Support Teams covering E-Trading, Price and Order Management. Asset classes covered include Rates, Short Term Markets (Repo), Credit & FX. Transformed both the IT team and business teams to follow Agile practices with the goal of reducing time to market and minimizing project risk. Utilized Agile tools including Jira and Confluence. Both SCRUM and Kanban were used. • Changed the technology stack from Oracle, SQLServer, .Net & C# and implemented Microservice/API based technology using JavaScript and java. Introduced new tools including, Gitlab, MongoDB, Elastic Search, Cucumber, Gherkin, Kibana, Logstash, & Docker. Implemented BDD and TDD based development methods & container-based deployment and fully automated testing and deployment. • Implemented continuous deployment – as the first step of implementing full DevOps practices within Production Management. Created and trialed the pipeline of delivering Docker containers into the cloud. Experience with Google & AWS. Front Office Delivery for Mifid - Covering all UK Front Office systems, external trading venues and integration with Google cloud based sales trader workflow & rules engine. Regulatory experience includes Mifid, PRIIPS, FATCA, Dodd-Frank EMIR and Volcker. Responsible for trade capture and Middle Office workflows. Implementation of IONTrading for Rates, Bonds and Credit for all UK based trading desks. Also covered transition to co-location of low latency systems to Equinox. Managed E-trading Support Team. Implementation of Gilt Edged Market Making (GEMM) business. Covered all business processes form price dissemination through to settlement and Risk.
Covered the initial negotiation and requirements gathering phases for the TurkDEX Futures and Options Exchange Programme.