The Next Revolution - Harrington Starr

The Financial Technologist Fintech 2.0 Q2 .. 2017

The Next Revolution

The most innovative names talk Investment Tech | Wealth Tech RegTech | Robo-advisor Microservices | Big Data

plus

The HSTC healthcheck

The conclusion of the Ultimate Interview Guide

HS New York update

FinTech FOCUS TV The Financial Technologist | Q2 | 2017

Watch, feature, and subscribe to our brand-new channels! FinTech Focus TV focusses on the leading names in the Financial Services Technology community discussing the challenges facing the industry, the latest innovations, and the differentiators separating the best companies from the rest of the pack.

Contents 04

Introduction by Toby Babb

08

FEATURE The Rise of the Investor Portal

34

FEATURE The HSTC Health check

36

FEATURE Enterprise Agile Adoption

Nicholas Wright of Milestone Group explains how the demise of Defined Benefit pension schemes in favour of Defined Contribution plans has had an impact on outcome-orientated investing

44

FEATURE Robo-advisory on the brink of adoption: will firms tumble or be embraced?

FEATURE How we became a world class engineering organisation and saved a million pounds a year in the process

47

Alan Underdown, The Managing Director of Satuit Technologies, explains why Institutional Asset Managers are making more use of investor portals and more

12

16

FEATURE Fund Solutions for a new breed of investor

FEATURE Promised return from data assets under MiFID II

To feature your business on either of our channels, get in touch today! UK: +44 203 587 7007

www.harringtonstarr.com US: +1 646 381 2067

E: [email protected]

30

56

FEATURE From Across the pond

58

Market news & commentary

FEATURE Big Data Beyond the Hype Harsharan Nijjar shines a light through the fog around Big Data

66

FEATURE Embracing the chaos with API Management

67 68

Simon Pink’s fascinating white paper on how Microservices are breaking down monolithic systems

0 3

Parts 9 and 10 complete our extensive look at the tips that could make the difference between success and failure in your technical interview

54

53

FEATURE Dropping the Bomb on Asset Management

FEATURE The Definitive Interview Guide

Fintech Focus Stefan Hendrickx Founder & Executive Director, Ancoa Andrzej Szewczyk Vice President & Managing Director, Efigence Jon White, CEO, Duuzra

50

Ollie Cadman of Vela Trading Technologies looks at the impact the impending regulatory changes are set to have on the industry

26

48

FEATURE The capture and release of wild data under MiFID II/MiFIR

Lene Hansen of Bips Global Ltd investigates from the FCA Management Market Study

24

FEATURE What makes a great sales CV in FinTech today? Ricky Singh from Harrington Starr New York provides his expert advice on CV writing

VP Technology at AQMetrics, Steve Barnes looks at how the new regulations are set to enable better data collation

22

Ehab Roufail explains how is it possible to adopt agile across the enterprise

Alexandra Cheung of Cruxy & Co. on whether A.I. is set to take over or be another flash in the pan

CTO of Wealth Wizards, Peet Denny, explains how Britain’s inability to save has created an opportunity for software innovation

20

Harrington Starr Technology Consulting’s Gav Patel explains how his team can give your business the check-up it requires to improve operational and technological efficiency

Features from the Harrington Starr Inc, team in New York Insight on the market from dedicated experts in their field

Starr Insights They try to make me go to rehab and I say… that could be a good idea?, By Scott Richardson AWS Vs Azure, by Jon Kay The sharpest axes in recruitment, by Tim Dobie

69

The Breakdown 2017

73 74 75

About Harrington Starr Meet the Editorial Team Contact

TOBY BABB, CEO, THE HARRINGTON STA R R G R O U P

Welcome to the Financial Technologist’s second issue of 2017 Harrington Starr’s financial technology news, commentary, insight and features.

In

our January copy, we spoke of a period of significant turmoil but increasing opportunity within FinTech. On a macro-economic basis, the world was shuddering from the double tremors of Brexit and Trump. We were predicting an increase in tech spend to combat the major issues and opportunities that arose from both, but what impact would we see economically and how would the markets react? Four months on and we remain in that state of wait and see. At the time of writing, the picture has changed very little. The posturing between the US and Russia over Syria increases tension on a global scale and the Brexit process is in action but far from clear. Trump’s initial actions have been deliberate, bold and, some may say, aggressive. Exactly what was said on the tin! With that backdrop, what has been interesting has been the confident and robust approach from the

FinTech market. Our records are showing a significant peak in job activity, particularly within the Capital Markets area. Hiring is at an absolute peak. We have seen significant growth and investment in numerous companies and M&A activity continues. Naturally, deals have fallen out of bed, most notably LSEG and Deutsche Boerse, but the market has remained positive from strong tech players within FS to seek out opportunities and investment. Driving this are arguably the impending regulatory issues that are dominating board room conversations throughout the industry. With many woefully underprepared, there is a RegTech arms race to bring companies rapidly into line. Regulation has packed the agendas of all the major industry events of the first half of the year. It was the topic on everyone’s lips at the EMEA Trading Conference in March and heavily dominates the programme for Tradetech in Paris. With serious concerns about whether desks are agile enough for MiFID II, we are looking at major storms on the horizon for a number of key players across both the buy and sell sides. We are seeing an evolution in the dark pools under MiFID II restrictions and further confusion about what Brexit will mean for market structure, flow and MiFID II itself. Aligned to this has been the rapid evolution of Blockchain technology in 2017. We spoke last year about how we thought this would become more mainstream over the next few years but it already

"Four months on and we remain in that state of wait and see. At the time of writing, the picture has changed very little. The posturing between the US and Russia over Syria increases tension on a global scale and the Brexit process is in action but far from clear. " looks set to sit as the new normal far sooner than that. Adoption has been rapid and we have helped a series of companies upskill their teams in the space in the first quarter of the year with significant investment being put into the technology by many major players. We have also seen investment into a plethora of other technologies, all of which are pointing at the same key themes. Cloud (particularly in commodities trading), AI, Robo-Advisory, Cyber Security and Front End Developers (along with Blockchain & Regulatory Tech) have dominated the requirements that we have been looking at in 2017 so far. Perhaps unsurprisingly, high on tech agendas have been user experience, cost reduction and ease of use. Companies that have morphed their offerings to provide respite and solutions in these areas have thrived. The companies that are truly standing out in the market at the moment, and indeed those start-ups who are succeeding where countless others are failing, are truly looking at the major issues and pain points and are providing genuine solutions. We have spoken to multiple investors in the FinTech space

and the criteria for the most successful FinTech companies remain the same. Firstly, comes the track record of the team in place. Have they lived it and done it all before? Are they simply techies or also strong business brains? Secondly comes the product. Is it solving a genuine problem in the market? Is it a nice to have or a must have? Finally comes the potential market size and competitive landscape. Does it have a sustainable market segment? Have they got first mover advantage? What are the barriers to entry? It continues to amaze just how many FinTech companies have emerged in the last five years who fail to really grasp the last two points, in particular. Whilst many companies have thrived when they have genuinely answered a calling (most notably in Blockchain and RegTech), so many still fall into the trap of simply becoming a nice to have. They have also failed to comprehend the procurement process in Capital Markets and ran out of time, money, and patience to crack the big accounts. It is absolutely and comprehensively clear that to succeed in FinTech, there must be a far greater understanding of

GLOBAL LEADERS IN FINANCIAL SERVICES AND COMMODITIES TECHNOLOGY RECRUITMENT 0 4

0 5

processes, timings, and the bumps in the road ahead. Another subject that has sprung very much to the fore in 2017 has been that of diversity in technology. Whilst far from a new topic, the noise and need for diversity have come to their highest ever peak. There is an acute realisation in many firms that the bias to “white, middle aged men” in FinTech is a trend to arrest. From some of the biggest employers in London and New York to the most innovative and agile start-ups there is a pressing need for diversity. With greater investment coming into education and more and more success stories from companies led by “diverse” leadership teams, the future certainly looks brighter for the sector in this regard. We’ve enjoyed helping a number of companies position themselves as attractive employers in the space. As for the year ahead, my predictions remain very similar. I do not see huge changes in the landscape but absolutely believe that there will be a continued drive in FinTech job levels. These will, unfortunately, become more and more difficult to fill. We are already seeing less highly skilled tech immigration (through desire as much as government clamp downs) in both the US and UK markets and both countries have relied on foreign tech talent to see growth in the markets. This will place an even greater strain on the ability to find, engage and retain the best talent. Companies will need to focus heavily on their EVP (Employee Value Proposition), sell hard in their interview process and ensure they are quick and compelling in their hiring funnel. The predicted Brexit exodus of companies seems far from likely at this point. We will continue to see rapid innovation in the key areas previously mentioned. Regulation will be the “mot du jour” throughout the remainder of 2017 and there will be huge winners in the months ahead. Exciting times for the industry.

"Regulation will be the “mot du jour” throughout the remainder of 2017 and there will be huge winners in the months ahead" Harrington Starr Group news

Our driving purpose since launching the business in 2010 has been to be the very best that we can be and to change the perception of the recruitment industry by delivering real added value to our customers. Alongside brilliant basics, we have looked to provide magic touches and have built the business on the concept of “Your Success. Our Business.” This means ensuring that we not only look to build teams but also to help clients and candidates grow their brand and their networks. The Financial Technologist (and previously before merging, the Trading Technologist and FinTech Capital) has seen over 250 FinTech businesses now share their news, insight and thought leadership in these pages. Our events have connected over 2000 FinTech professionals and we regularly communicate to over 60,000 engaged FinTech professionals with thoughts, insight and advice. This year we have launched FinTech Focus TV to continue to try and grow and connect our

community. This is a dedicated YouTube channel where we host weekly interviews with thought leaders in their space, sharing their advice, stories and market insight. We’ll also have interviews with the key protagonists from all of the major industry events and look to share thoughts and advice to help in your hiring or job search. Please do take the time to follow us on the channel and let us know your thoughts. If you’ve got something to say about the industry, we’d also love to have you join us in the studio. 2016 saw us launch four new businesses in the group. North Starr, our commercial technology businesses has thrived and just posted its record quarter. Harrington Starr Inc. has exceeded all expectations in its New York headquarters and we will see significant expansion in our USA operations this year. Harrington Starr Executive Search has taken on mandates from all over the world with huge developments being seen in 2017 so far. Last, but by no means least, Harrington Starr Technology Consulting (our first move away from recruitment) has seen an immediate swarm of interest. With Ehab Roufail and Gav Patel leading the charge as two of the most revered names in the UK Agile Community we are extremely excited about what the future holds. Please feel free to contact me at toby.babb@ harringtonstarr.com to discuss how any of these businesses can help you. As mentioned, 2017 has seen record levels of jobs through for the Harrington Starr Group. With that has come record levels of placements with significant growth registered over the first third of the year. We are hugely grateful for the continued support of our candidates and clients who have allowed this to happen and are excited to be announcing some major innovations, investments, and improvements

to help ensure we are able to continue to execute to the highest levels in the year ahead. Watch this space!

In Summary

The market remains positive. I was honoured to have once again been asked to be interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live outside Westminster for the Budget and my comments were of the importance of positivity in the UK amid the wider political and economic backdrop. Aside from some awkward backtracking from the Chancellor, I was pleased to see a generally positive announcement. Positivity is at the very kernel of progress for the UK economy. With uncertainty all around us, what is absolutely crystal clear is that technology is the driving force of change and opportunity for the Financial Services industry. Be it as a disruptor, or far more commonly as an enabler, we are seeing huge advances, huge opportunities and huge growth in the sector. Regulation will dominate but there are huge wins for those who find faster, cheaper, easier and safer ways to answer the big problems in the FS industry. For those who really answer the critical questions, the future is extremely bright. Thanks,

Toby


0 7

The rise of the investor portal

n recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of institutional asset managers and other buy-side firms servicing their investors through portals. Furthermore, funds using portals have found more innovative ways to add value to their investor proposition.

The reasons for adoption…

Buy-Side Asset Managers have increasingly adopted Investor Portals to provide a convenient and secure method of distributing confidential information to clients. This was a movement supported by the unencrypted and unaudited nature of most email message content. It’s an argument that also held true for the traditional postal service, which many investor relations professionals also abandoned for reasons of cost, environment, and reliability. Security and compliance concerns were the initial considerations for many institutional asset managers. However, there are also a growing number of asset managers who leverage portal technology for more innovative reasons. So, exactly what are these enlightened asset managers doing for their investors?

Investor Portals: The next generation

Alan Underdown, Managing Director of Satuit Technologies in Europe explains why Institutional Asset Managers are making more use of investor portals, what funds are using them for and finally what investor relations professionals should look for when buying a portal

By Alan Underdown

Many asset managers now see the use of Investor Portals as key to their ability to improve and consolidate their investor communications and to provide daily data updates. Many are distributing not only their scheduled investor reports but also content including fund factsheets, fund research, market commentary and newsletters. Other managers are using their portal to ensure investors always have access to the latest regulatory material and forms. Some managers on the leading edge are providing “dynamic data” to their investors. In essence, the portal becomes a branded one-stop shop for the investor to pick up everything they need that relates to the fund. The vast majority of investors now expect access to a portal because it gives them confidence the data is being distributed securely and because it allows them to more easily consume, organise, and access the documents sent to them compared to receiving hardcopies or separate emails. Accessibility from any device and any location is now important and this isn’t always practical with hard copy content or email systems which often have archiving policies > or non-web based access.


0 9

Many investor relations professionals have also recognised the efficiency benefits of giving investors self-service access to their personal data. It’s more efficient to give an investor selfservice access to maintain – for example – their name and contact details and to report on those changes periodically than it is to maintain the data yourself. The more advanced investor portals available on the market can be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) systems allowing investor relations professionals to track and actively manage engagement by seeing which investor viewed what and when. A number

complaints should they occur. Additionally, investor regulatory attestations (such as restricted/ unrestricted investor status) can be addressed through forms exposed in investor portals. Notifications sent via email prompt investors to complete necessary actions within the portal and allow for near real-time tracking of progress among the investor base, easing the burden on compliance and client service professionals to maintain the status of each fund. In conclusion, those in investor relations have an opportunity to use Investor Portals as a means

Many institutional asset managers now see the use of Investor Portals as key to their ability to improve and consolidate their investor communications

of portals can also be plugged straight into back office data so that investors can consume dynamic data relating to their portfolios, holdings and transactions and use charting tools to visualise that data. Institutional asset managers also manage a number of relationships including with investment consultants. In many cases, institutional asset managers deploy their portal both to the investor and the consultant. It is therefore important that the investor portal has the data structure to handle all the following relationships: asset manager to investor; asset manager to consultant; and asset manager to investment consultant. By extension a good portal will add value and create efficiency for the investment consultant. For example, by providing them with a consolidated view of all data relating to a particular asset manager. Compliance features are also important. In particular, the ability to audit all client actions helps to manage adherence to data protection regulations and investment management agreement deadlines. Those features are also important for dealing with audits and to manage

Harrington Starr Technology Consulting is Europes fastest growing technical consultancy, providing an unrivalled level of service. We are experts in transforming organisations, providing innovative solutions, enabling faster changes, safer software delivery and a better solution. Talk to us about any of the following

to improve the ‘customer experience’ whilst also providing internal benefits in terms of efficiency, security and compliance.

Seven questions to ask when choosing an investor portal: 1 Does your portal easily integrate with your website?

2 Does the portal integrate with your CRM? 3 Does the portal integrate with your back office

system? 4 Is it truly mobile and how? (Can investors access all the features from a variety of devices, does it leverage responsive design or native apps?) 5 Can you set an expiry date for content? 6 Can you configure the portal colours, branding, etc.? 7 Are there features specifically designed to help institutional fund managers? (For example, in terms of handling investment consultants) 8 Can the portal be configured through the user interface, i.e. without technical IT skills?

Alan Underdown is managing director for Satuit Technologies, UK/Europe. For more information, please contact: [email protected].

Health check We'll join you onsite for a few days to observe, and then present a report of the key findings

Agile transformation We craft a uniquely enterprise Agile solution that delivers quantifiable value for your stakeholders

Project delivery

Training

Delivering successful projects to your satisfaction, on or offsite

Providing high quality training courses in development, testing and agile implementation

www.harringtonstarrtech.com

UK: +44 203 587 7007 E: [email protected] Twitter: @hstarrtech Linkedin: search Harrington Starr Tech 1 0

W

ith Defined Contribution plans now favoured over Defined Benefit pension schemes, there is a marked shift towards outcome-oriented investing. Investors are increasingly seeking to access better engineered, innovative multi-asset products to provide reliable investment returns over their lifetime that will ultimately provide an appropriate income in retirement. The industry’s response to this demand has been the development of fund solutions. In recent history, this may have been achieved through diversification, facilitated through investments in multi-manager funds. However, this type of product has found only limited success; a one size fits all design, high fees and a lack of transparency has resulted in a lack of investor demand that, in turn, has led to the widespread closure of many multi-manager funds over the last eight years.

Fund solutions for a new breed of investor By Nicholas Wright Business Development EMEA, Milestone Group

Increasingly, European institutions are marketing fund solution products that are tried and tested in more mature DC markets such as the US, South Africa and Australia. These products attempt to consider the investor’s personal circumstances and include lifestyle and target date funds. These funds are fund-of-fund solutions which blend underlying asset class funds using glide paths and asset allocation structures and are designed to take people up to and through their retirement. What is limiting the creation of these types of multi-asset fund solution products? The standout factor is high administration costs and technology constraints. Arguably, this is a space the new breed of robo-advice firms is expected to tackle. However robo-directed solutions are mostly limited to investing in a basket of passive exchange traded ETFs, rather than blended active cross-asset class,

cross-manager funds built for a specific purpose and targeted return. The rationale for robo-directed solutions exclusively offering only a blend of passive ETFs, is in all likelihood, that they face the same technology constraints and administration costs as their traditional peers.

Complexity and Scale

The administration requirements of fund product solutions that the DC market is increasingly demanding has run ahead of the industry’s current administration capability. The organisations manufacturing, managing or administering these new solutions have typically failed to grasp the possibility of adapting to these new demands at a technological level. Many are simply accommodating these new requirements as best they can within old operational infrastructure. For example, to manage and administer a custom target date product, the administration solution must be able to deal with complex, multi-tiered fund structures, requiring sophisticated cash allocation and rebalancing processes and the ability to manage the processing dependencies that multi-tiered fund of fund structures create. Additionally, the solution must be scalable due to the ‘building-block’ nature of these products - the potential number of investor outcome solutions for different cohorts that can be manufactured over a set of underlying building block funds beyond the scope of today’s infrastructure. However, the paradigm of administrating NAVs over the last 40 years has been to ‘manufacture’ daily NAVs of mutual funds in an increasingly high volume/ low cost standardised fashion. Existing processes and systems do not tend to cope well with the requirements of fund-of-fund structures or highly bespoke fund solutions, and if there is support, it tends not to scale.

Using Building Blocks to enable a Fund Solutions Platform

However with the appropriate infrastructure and technology in place, a range of underlying asset class funds and portfolios can be used to create an unlimited range of fund product solutions. Rather than remaining a challenge, creating multi-asset funds as fund-of-fund solutions that blend these building blocks can support the creation of highly personalised, targeted multi-asset solutions for a much more granular cohort of investors. For example, asset class funds and mandates

>


1 3

can become the building blocks of sector-specific fund-of-fund solutions which can, in turn, be combined as building blocks into a range of diversified multi-asset funds with different risk/ return profiles targeted at different groups of investors. The building block approach shown in Figure 1 above can also allow organisations to be prepared for significant market events like Brexit, which may require underlying funds and mandates to be switched from ‘off shore’ to ‘on shore’ depending on how the regulatory and passporting relationship looks after the UK’s exit negotiations have completed. End investors need not be aware of any switching of underlying building blocks as all units are held in the fund-of-fund solutions. To support the administration of the fund-of-funds in this building-block approach, the underlying administration platform technology must support the automation and industrialisation of all daily

administration processes; from daily cash allocation, rebalancing and order management to daily NAV calculations and reconciliations, whilst be designed specifically to deal with the complexity of multitiered fund-of-fund structures and their processing dependencies, look-through and other requirements that come with these types of structures. Milestone Group has been a pioneer and evangelist in technology based enablement of these multitiered fund-of-fund structures. Its pControl Multi Asset platform has been purpose built to address the operational requirements of managing multiasset fund solution products designed to utilise multi-tiered investment structures. As Milestone’s growing client base in this area globally attests, the convergence of a firm’s multi-asset front, middle and back office requirements onto a single administration platform creates material processing efficiencies, new product capabilities and supports the scale required to meet the fund product needs of the modern financially astute investor.

FIGURE 1: VISUALISATION OF THE ‘BUILDING BLOCK’ APPROACH

Multi-asset class fund 1 UK equity asset class fund

Multi-asset class fund 2

Multi-asset class fund N

20%

40% 40%

17% (+/- 2%)

24% (+/- 2%)

Download your free copy now! Visit www.harringtonstarr.com – downloads – reports

38% (+/- 2%)

21% (+/- 2%)

UK equity fund A

Asset class A fund

Asset class B fund

Asset class C fund

Asset class D fund

Asset class N fund

UK equity fund B

UK equity mandate A

UK equity mandate B


s a nation, we’re bad at looking after our money. UK personal debt is around £1.5tn. This means that on average, everyone has more debt than they earn in a year. Our savings, as a proportion of salary, are around half of the global average.

focusing on the four areas of People, Process, Technology, and Culture.

People

Average annual personal savings as a percentage of GDP (Global average: 24%) CHINA 49 AUSTRALIA 24 UNITED KINGDOM 26 12 ANGOLA 11 The average Briton has set aside just £87,000 in their pension pot which needs to last the rest of their life. Helping people to prepare for retirement is a particularly tricky problem to solve because the landscape is so complex. Regulated financial advice is typically out of the reach of most people.

How we became a world class engineering organisation (and saved a million pounds a year in the process) By Peet Denny, CTO, Wealth Wizards

Wealth Wizards’ mission is to make financial advice affordable and accessible to everyone. We do this by bringing together a combination of financial intelligence and smart software technology. Wealth Wizards has grown dramatically over the past few years from a young start-up of ten people in shared office space in 2015 to a medium-sized scale-up of over sixty people in early 2017. The ways of working that are effective for a start-up will not usually scale well, and like most successful start-ups, we found ourselves needing to transform. For example, our applications were becoming harder to change over time as they’d been written without sufficient test coverage. Our infrastructure had been hand-built, and only one person in the organisation understood how to operate it. We were releasing new software every two months or so. In addition, such aggressive growth had resulted in a 75/25% contract to permanent ratio. In short, the magic that had led us to our first major successes of winning large clients and securing investment would not necessarily help us to hit our new, loftier goal of changing a million lives by 2020. We decided to run a Lean Enterprise transformation

Drawing on the pool of local contractors had helped us to scale very quickly and get our products live and into the hands of customers and investors. However, the transformation ahead would require a lot of investment in people; there would be a lot of new technologies and processes to learn. We knew that to make this work, we needed a strong foundation of permanent, internal talent. We started a recruitment drive looking for the very best local engineers. Joel Spolsky, founder of Stack Exchange, and creator of Trello states that the best developers are five to ten times more productive than average, and we’ve certainly found that to be true. So, what does ‘good’ mean in this context? We focus on three elements: “Smart, gets things done, plays well with others”. I personally also look for people with a growth mindset, passion for changing the world and a deep and enthusiastic love of tech. The team we ended up with was smaller, but much more performant - able to deliver several features per two-week sprint instead of per two-month release. There was also a much closer attention to long-term quality with us moving from low doubledigit test coverage to being consistently above 80%. Since moving to mostly perm, the team feels very invested and involved in all aspects of product discovery and delivery. And there’s a huge amount of buzz and excitement around hitting our organisational objectives. Process The company has been agile from the beginning. However, an external assessment we commissioned showed that we were suffering from infrequent releases, low predictability and morale, things that would be addressed by doing an ‘Agile reset’; going back to basics and sticking to the core Scrum process before migrating to a more mature model. We elevated the main Scrum ceremonies, making them more frequent and made attendance mandatory for everyone in the team. We started being a lot more public about our commitments, tracking delivery-to-commitment and reporting on it every fortnight. As a result, confidence grew in our ability to deliver on promises, and it became >


1 7

obvious how important prioritisation was as there was always too much to build. We recruited an Agile coach who helped build our Product Management discipline to conduct discovery, shaping and prioritisation of new features. This SVPG (Silicon Valley Product Group) inspired product team spend time on the front line with customers, forming hypotheses, designing and running experiments and gathering data about what kind of features our customers most want to see, and how they want to interact with them. To support these fast turnaround interactions, we needed to streamline our delivery organisation to be able to take ideas and push them into live quickly, and to be able to measure everything – how many people used the new feature, what demographic were they in, how many completed the journey, where people dropped out of the process, who clicked where, which messages did people find confusing, which parts of the journey were unintuitive. Some of this data we can collect automatically from our analytics software. For others, we run sessions with customers, or have access to a UX lab where we can observe users’ interactions more closely

Our culture is centred around focusing the whole organisation on a small set of business goals, and empowering small teams to find creative ways of driving the company toward those goals.

engineering teams are arranged in a Spotify-style squads who are given one or two business metrics to own. Each squad is made up of three developers, a QA, an ops engineer and a business product owner. Everything the product owner needs to take an idea from inception to running in live is within her team. There’s no more waiting for other teams to deliver dependencies, and we no longer spend any time on timesheets or resource management. Developers say that they feel a sense of ownership and get satisfaction from seeing their work have a direct and tangible impact on the business. A highlight of our sprints is the all-hands show and tell, where the whole company comes together for an hour to see what we’ve achieved as a company over the past fortnight. Each delivery squad showcases what they’ve changed – where the emphasis is on what features have made it to live – and we often have presentations from sales, marketing, financial intelligence and other parts of the business too. So, we invested a lot in our operations and have tried to follow an ‘everything as code’ philosophy. This has allowed us to build a platform with a huge amount of automation. All of our infrastructure is built using scripts stored in version control. This not only means that we’re able to deploy highly tested code to our production environment with minimal human input, but also means that our estate itself is easy to change. When the Dirty Cow vulnerability was discovered, for example, we were able to ensure that our whole estate was patched in under an hour. The use of Microservices has meant that our products are built out of composable modules available via an API. This approach itself has helped us to be more reactive to new ideas or opportunities. For example, we recently reimagined one of our end user facing products as a productivity tool for IFAs. We were able to quickly plug together our existing microservices into a new configuration to create a new tool for a new user base. This ‘Robo-paraplanner’ is now saving human advisers around five hours per case handled. Culture Our culture is centred around focusing the whole organisation on a small set of business goals and empowering small teams to find creative ways of driving the company toward those goals. Our

Technology

Our infrastructure estate had been hand-built by a single engineer, who was the only person in the organisation who really understood how it all fit together. In addition, she was the only person who could make changes, or push releases to live. As well as being a key-man dependency the workload was also growing to be unmanageable for a single person.

Helping people to prepare for retirement is a particularly tricky problem to solve because the landscape is so complex. Regulated financial advice is typically out of the reach of most people.

Our transformation work has allowed Wealth Wizards to begin shipping robust, well tested product features to their customers several times per week. The engineering organisation is now much more performant, while costing around £1 million less to run per year.

How did it turn out?

The velocity of our development function means that our product organisation is now able to perform several cycles of test and learn per month. This has proven to be invaluable in finding a user experience that really works. We can iterate with speed, and have been able to concurrently try out many different approaches in live, gather data on how conversions are affected by change, and hone in on a mix of messaging and UX that has driven conversions way up.

The first principle of the Agile Manifesto is: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”.

Our Pension Wizard product was demonstrated at Finovate this year, to great acclaim. In the past quarter, we’ve launched both to our biggest client yet, and to our first FTSE 100 company. This means that we’re now helping thousands of people get their finances back on track.


1 9

The capture and release of wild data under MiFID II/MiFIR

ild data is roaming about your organisation. The new Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and Regulation (MiFIR) will demand you round it up, process it and release it as trade and transaction reports. The rules will apply from January 2018 to European Union firms, their branches outside of the European Union and financial institutions operating in the EU. Nearly all instruments are subject to the new regulation and directive, where under MiFID I only equities and exchange-traded funds were affected. Over-thecounter (OTC) trade reporting has been captured within the organised trading facility (OTF) and multi-lateral trading facility (MTF) frameworks, where MiFID I only affected trading of instruments on regulated markets (RMs). Trade reporting will make public information including volume, price and time of execution via an Approve Publication Arrangement (APA). Transaction reporting to authorities is more substantial and must be conducted via an Approved Reporting Mechanism (ARM). The increase in data fields for the purposes of transaction reporting under MiFID II – from 24 to 65 – multiplied by the increased number of instruments and range of trading involved gives an indication of the greater complexity of data that will need to be managed. Pulling data together so that it can be normalised takes considerable effort. In the report by analyst firm Aite Group entitled, “Reconciliation Trends in 2016: Regulation and Nervous Recs”, it was estimated that it takes nearly 65 days to develop and build a single new reconciliation. Investment firms need to understand how and where to report data, then take the operational steps to make it happen. Collectively, these requirements add up to massive project to aggregate and report data.

Get it together

By Steve Barnes, VP Technology, AQMetrics

Step one is identifying where this data is generated, if it is already captured and if not how to capture it. Some of the new additional data – for example, unique identifiers for traders, such as national ID number – may never have been captured and stored before. The risk around storing data of that granularity is considerable and may well require a review of data security measures.

Transforming that data into the right format to report, via extensible mark-up language (XML), offers further operational challenges, with new data required than before, and certain reporting not having been needed under MiFID I. The second step will require firms to develop in-house capabilities that they have not had before. They will need to build test harnesses, then build the platforms, harnesses, testing systems, and the silos. This will require a full technology build-out, setting up a rock solid system that can report to the regulator. For trade reporting, APAs have a five-minute window, near real-time, in which to take on the trade, pass it to the regulator, receive a response and pass that back to the system to determine whether it has been accepted or not. For high volumes of trading that could create real challenges around data latency. A system failure or a slowing down of processing will lead to challenges in fulfilling obligations. Any system built to handle reporting will also need to be able to scale in order to manage this workload.

Working the system

The key to handling data at scale is the capacity to tag and reuse it. A smart method of handling that process is using EXtensible Markup Language (XML). It handles the multifaceted nature of the data by managing the many relationships that pieces of information have with one another. Every aspect of the trade is tagged which allows it to be handled by different parties according to their needs. From an internal perspective, if a firm is warehousing this information it can map fields to tags in the XML, and then run programs – typically Java-based applications – to the XML file, and then run a schema validation. The European Securities and Market Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Central Bank of Ireland will all provide an XML schema to validate it the data. This creates a massive advantage for firms that employ the technology because the XML file that they have created can be validated and if it comes back with no errors, can be sent to the regulator, with near certainty that it will be good, or nearly good. Using technology effectively in this process allows a firm to round its herd of data up and brand it, so that the business can be certain of what it has and does not have, removing a massive amount of cost and complexity from the validation process.


2 1

Dropping the bomb on asset management By Lene Hansen, Bips Global Ltd Considering the fall-out from the FCA Management Market Study t is still in the interim phase but shock waves from the recent Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Asset Management Market Study are already being felt across the industry. Despite the voluminous and diverse amount of research and findings, the Executive Summary takes very specific aim at actively managed funds. The main observation being how poorly they compare to passive funds in relation to their performance and returns, particularly after charges. It is a valid observation but I do not believe that it is aimed at the real enemy. Initially several questions came to mind whilst I was reading this report; questions which largely boiled down to one central problem. These questions were:

a) How do we encourage investors and trustees to take more active and informed control of the investments that they have responsibility for? b) How do we incentivise asset managers to increase transparency, accountability and proportional economies of scale?

c) Within the asset management area how do we make fund managers and investment advisers make better decisions and to receive remuneration which aligns better with performance?

When I looked at all these questions it came to me that the central question and the real enemy here is the lack of clarity in communications between stakeholders (investors, investment advisors, fund managers, traders and trustees) and the fact that, for various reasons, they are generally not motivated to achieve it. The latter point is the important one. One astute observer questioned why people are

more inclined to question and save on pennies on their shopping than they are to save thousands of pounds on their investments. The answer given was that investors don’t feel that they understand or have control over their investments. This can generally be said to be true of all the stakeholders mentioned above. The reaction of the regulator is, as usual, to suggest more regulation. This is not the best approach when the market is already struggling under the current regulatory regime. Interestingly, the FCA itself points to the fact that the Asset Management industry takes an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to technological solutions. In our submission to the FCA we have asked them to step up and do the same. Basically, to consider what would most efficiently support constructive and long-term change in this market. It is our view that we should stop nannying the stakeholders. We should engage, empower and incentivise them instead. So how do we do this? There is a myriad of opportunities presented by this thinking. One suggestion would be for the FCA to consider developing a secure, cloud-based 'Investment Management' platform which would firstly give investors a quick tutorial outline of what to look for (i.e. not past performance). This could be followed by a simple website onto which they could enter details of their investments (structured to receive different types of reporting) and calculate their net profits/losses. Investors would be given a link with which to report groups which don't provide enough detail to support a clear investment picture and those which were not responsive to reasonable requests. In summary, over-regulation is not the answer here. The current lack of clarity in stakeholder communications has resulted in apathy and ignorance. Stakeholders should be encouraged to take responsibility and become informed and re-engaged with their investments and those that they manage for others. The happy fact is that technology is available to enable this. The sad fact is that it is unlikely to be utilised.

It is our view that we should stop nannying the stakeholders. We should engage, empower and incentivise them instead. So how do we do this? There is a myriad of opportunities presented by this thinking. GLOBAL LEADERS IN FINANCIAL SERVICES AND COMMODITIES TECHNOLOGY RECRUITMENT

2 2

2 3

Promised return from data assets under MiFID II

(OTC), they lack standardised trading mechanisms or even characteristics. Consequently, market participants will be required to demonstrate their trading behaviour more transparently, comply with specific trading rules and to quantify their trading activity more effectively than ever before. For many firms this requires a step change in data sourcing, processing and capture, stringent system controls and compliance procedures and increased pressure on market access infrastructure.

New market structure

By Ollie Cadman, Head of Product and Strategy, EMEA, Vela Trading Technologies

uropean regulators are tearing down the instinctive, qualitative world of trading and replacing it with a measurable, traceable, transparent trading grid. This rigorous framework is imposed by the re-invented Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), coming into force in January 2018. It will make data an invaluable asset for trading desks. The new rules toughen demands upon equity traders – which MiFID I had harmonised across Europe in 2007 – but also expands the directive to the majority of other asset classes including derivatives, fixed income, FX (excl. spot), and commodity derivatives. As these instruments are largely traded over-the-counter

The approach from the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has been to formalise the structure created around the way that assets are traded, whether on a venue, OTC, or via bilateral trading. This framework creates very clear definitions of, and rules for trading in, organised and multilateral trading facilities (OTFs/MTFs) meaning that all trading will fall within one of these categories and be more closely regulated. While MTFs and Systematic Internalisers (SIs) should be familiar terms introduced within MiFID I and are tightly defined multilateral or bilateral trading structures, OTF is a broad term for other activities, specifically designed to ensure there is no circumventing of regulation by categorising operations as ‘outside’ of the rules. It’s also worth noting that the SI definition has also been tightened further, likely resulting in a significant increase in the number of registered SIs across Europe. For equities, the directive also introduces new provisions for ensuring that price discovery

is not compromised by market fragmentation and ‘dark’ trading, by introducing new limits that specify where trading can take place. Knowing how and where a trade can be placed is restricted by thresholds set out in the new rules. All parties will need to know whether those thresholds have been hit. While these differ across instruments, they typically track the proportion of an instrument’s trading set against total trading and against trading via that specific venue/counterparty. As the various reporting and counterparty obligations of OTFs, MTFs and SIs are different, tracking activity accurately and reporting in a timely and consistent manner can have a real effect on where an asset can be traded and therefore on the implicit and explicit costs a firm faces as a result of execution. The number of data fields to be reported for a trade has grown to 65 from 22 under MiFID, and is applied across instruments. Consequently, aggregation and management of data has become considerably more complex. Data will also be needed under Article 17 of MiFID II, to support the testing of trading algorithms. Not only must these be subjected to testing for functional rigor, behavioural scenarios will need to be modelled in order to create confidence around their use and full regulatory compliance.

Data as an asset

Firms must up their capacity to gather and analyse market data for reporting and best execution. By formalising the trading and reporting processes MiFID II intends to make it easier to track trade and post-trade activity, particularly as European post-

trade reporting in OTC instruments such as fixed income is currently non-existent. However, the technology for tracking trading activity is nascent for many instruments, and maturing it organically will require considerable investment amongst buy- and sell-side firms to develop responsive capabilities. Given the additional reporting obligations and the need for increased connectivity across multiple platforms, they will have to become far more operationally agile than before. Data capture will have to begin with the buy-side order management system and continue throughout the trade lifecycle. Under the new transparency rules an electronic paper trail is needed that can be used to show where and why decisions were made. Automating the capture of this data pool and integrating it into the decision-making process can provide a real enhancement for traders, sales-traders, and portfolio managers. Not only can this enhance inhouse trading abilities, firms can share expertise in the market structure with clients to strengthen longer-term relationships as well as immediate revenues. The balance firms should achieve is between the regulatory requirement to be compliant and the business desire to invest, innovate, and grow. Finding the right balance will be key to a firm’s future success and selecting the right technology partner to overcome the challenges will allow them to focus on realising the new opportunities that present themselves from 3rd January 2018.


2 5

BIG DATA B E Y O N D T H E H Y P E By Harsharan Nijjar, Chief Architect, Harrington Starr Technology Consulting The world is creating data at an astonishing rate and this growth of data is only accelerating. The Internet of Things will make sure of this. This universe of data provides opportunities to generate great insight into the world around us, if only we can build technology that is able to interpret it and process it quickly enough across its many forms. This is the basic premise of Big Data. “As much data is now being created every two days, as was created from the beginning of human civilisation to the year 2003.” Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, 2010 “More data has been created in the past two years

than in the entire previous history of the human race.” Bernard Marr, Big Data in Practice 2016 While the headlines on the growth of data make for a compelling message and encourages us all to use the term Big Data freely, this paper will attempt to explain the term and some of its practical uses more clearly.

What is Big Data?

There is no official definition of Big Data but a commonly used precept for Big Data is the Three V's: volume, velocity, and variety. For something to be considered a Big Data solution, one or more of these properties needs to be true. Volume refers to the amount of data being processed, velocity

refers to the speed of data processing and variety refers to the different forms of data. The measure of each of these properties is specific to each use case so in some cases traditional “non-Big Data” technologies could be exploited and the solution still considered Big Data. The Three V's are being extended with new ones, i.e. veracity (uncertainty of the data) or value (business value), but I will stick with the original three for now.

Where did the term come from?

Big Data as a term was first used in an academic paper in 1999 and has continued to be used since then in many different contexts not always appropriately. So, the concept has been around for a while and is now becoming quite mainstream.

What technologies deliver Big Data solutions?

Big Data is a concept rather than a set of technologies so it does not really matter. However, the technology being used needs to deliver on the capabilities of the three ‘V’s. This could mean the use of traditional relational databases and simple Java in a distributed architecture. However, there are some technologies that make life a whole lot easier e.g. Hadoop, MapReduce, and Spark as well as many others.

How does Hadoop help?

Hadoop is an Apache opensource project that

delivers a software platform for managing massive data sets cheaply and efficiently across a cluster of servers. This is done with its distributed file system, HDFS. It provides a redundant and reliable file system that can maintain data integrity even when nodes in the cluster fail. The data to be processed is held on HDFS and any results generated are stored on HDFS. It is important to understand that Hadoop is not a traditional structured store of data. The processing framework that comes with Hadoop must interpret the data and infer the structure of the data itself.

What is the Hadoop processing framework?

Hadoop comes with a framework that will distribute the input data to processing nodes and then reconstitute the results for storage on HDFS. The default framework is MapReduce. This is where the real magic happens to process the data across a distributed set of nodes. MapReduce allows units of input data to be distributed randomly (or according to a defined algorithm) to a set of processing nodes. These nodes run a data processing program that has been written for a particular use case (in Java, Python, or other languages) and MapReduce will then pull together the results from each of the processing nodes to provide a result set. This can happen many times depending on the use case. The whole framework is based on true parallel processing on a distributed cluster.


2 7

H F D S

Hive

Map processing nodes

MLib

GraphX

Java, Python, Scala etc

Spark SQL

Spark streaming

Pig

Mahout

Giraph

Java, Python, Scala etc

Tajo

Impala

HBase

Reduce processing nodes Spark

MapReduce

H F D S

Where did it come from?

Google first used their own version of the framework and distributed file system to run their page rank algorithm which ranked all the pages across the web. This was a key component of their search engine. They opensourced it and it became Hadoop and MapReduce. These Apache projects continue to be actively maintained.

What are the down sides?

Hadoop is not appropriate for every solution and the distributed processing paradigm of MapReduce needs to be understood so that it can be exploited to give correct results. As HDFS is a disk based system it is restricted by disk IO speeds. So, the design of one’s algorithm needs to reduce disk access as much as possible and make it sequential at each node to maintain performance. This is being mitigated by SSD and other techniques but the most significant step forward is Spark.

What is Spark?

Spark is a memory based platform rather than a disk based system. It still uses HDFS to get data but it stores it for processing in memory so is only restricted by memory IO speeds. Of course, the size of data processing is reduced but it can still be large enough for a lot of use cases. Spark also interprets the processing instructions (Spark SQL) that are to be run on the data to optimise performance. This results in a significant

H F D S

performance gain while continuing to manage large datasets and a variety of data forms with redundancy and reliability. Spark is approximately 100x faster than Hadoop/MapReduce.

What were the other technologies?

As mentioned earlier, Hadoop is more geared to unstructured data with its restrictive MapReduce coding paradigm that is focused on one-input and two-stage dataflow. When it comes to large-scale structured data, traditional parallel database systems have been doing well as they can more easily allow development of SQL commands such as joins. To help in these scenarios, extra layers have been added to Hadoop to allow development at a higher level than MapReduce. Pig is a technology

Big Data is a concept rather than a set of technologies so it does not really matter. However, the technology being used needs to deliver on the capabilities of the three ‘V’s.

that allows for the development of scripts to load, manipulate and query data without needing to understand and develop MapReduce algorithms at a fundamental level. To allow the execution of SQL as a more easily understood language with Hadoop, Hive was introduced. It allows standard SQL statements (subset of SQL92) to be run over a Hadoop instance. Hive will convert SQL into Hadoop/MapReduce activities on compilation. There are other technologies and this is just a taste of the eco system that exists around Hadoop.

How will this help in Financial Services?

This new way of processing data allows one to consume massive amounts of data and run complex algorithms in performant timeframes. This is way beyond the capabilities of some more traditional technologies. A few examples use cases are: Pricing, Market Sentiment, Fraud Detection. For Pricing, one could have financial instruments of any hew processed for pricing across a distributed cluster of nodes in parallel. This could be aided by bursting out to the cloud PAAS providers of Hadoop at processing time with little effort. This could provide vastly improved processing times for pricing and efficient hardware use on demand and for batch processing.

insight to market sentiment on particular financial instruments by processing the unstructured data on a streamed basis. One would need to build the model to focus on particular identifiers and variations of those and then also understand what data signifies what sentiment. The flexibility afforded by MapReduce makes this possible. Fraud detection is a key requirement for all financial companies and the processing of transactions on a streamed basis can give real insight and early warning of possible anomalies. This could be significantly improved in conjunction with machine learning techniques to allow humans to focus their attention on more of the true positives rather than false positives. Or missing them completely.

All sounds good but do I really need to do anything? As you can see, there is lots of potential with this technology but it is not a silver bullet to everything. However, not having this in one’s capabilities for the right problems will be a handicap in the future for any enterprise.

With the massive amounts of data available through social media, one could look to gain


2 9

Embracing chaos with API Management

The world is running on APIs

People want data, and they want it now. It is no longer acceptable to wait for more than a few seconds for the latest news, weather or tweet on your mobile phone. This mind-set has rapidly progressed into the business world. Customers and corporate decision-makers are demanding instant access to precious company data. Staying competitive is heavily reliant on this data being easily accessible. As this thirst for data has grown, it’s become evident that monolithic systems that run in silo's, and a software delivery process that takes a year to get a product to market, are no longer fit for purpose. To provide the data that your clients are demanding, existing IT systems and methods need to be adapted. Enter the world of Application Program Interfaces (APIs). APIs have become the answer to sharing, modifying and leveraging data on mobile Apps, websites, corporate systems and the internet of things. APIs are everywhere. So, what is an API? The term API has been slightly re-appropriated and modernised; it is now generally understood to mean: a web service that provides an interface over your data and systems. Typically, an API is implemented as a RESTful service. APIs are not new. What is new, is the absolute requirement of having APIs in order to stay competitive.

RESTful services REST (Representational State Transfer) is a collection of architectural principles laid out in Roy Fielding’s doctoral dissertation. Roy Fielding is one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification. REST was created to improve interoperability, performance and scalability. As a result, REST has become the de-facto standard for building APIs.

Microservices and APIs A microservice is responsible for a single business process and is completely self-contained. A microservice wholly owns the underlying data and no other system should interact directly with that data, except via the service. Modern APIs are primarily built using the microservice principles.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

The good news is that to remain competitive you do not have to start from scratch. You can hide your monolithic and complex systems behind APIs. Your API then acts as a proxy to the target system. You can then combine data from various systems using API proxies and expose the resulting “mashup” of data to your clients. Gartner suggest that a bimodal approach to IT is core to digital transformation. Your existing predictable and well-understood systems are part of “Mode 1”. By placing APIs over top of these systems, you are enabling “Mode 2” - Mode 2 enables your systems to be agile in the face of uncertainty. For example, your sales team require the latest product information via an App. To enable this, you can create a new API that mashes up data from various pricing, promotional and inventory systems into one result. The App only needs to call one API and is not concerned with what language the underlying systems are written in. By layering an API proxy over top of your legacy systems, suddenly, your legacy systems are no longer silos of information. Your system data can now be mashed up and leveraged by your sales staff, all via modern APIs. If you now require the same product information on your website, you can simply re-use the product API.

By Simon Pink, Lead Consultant, Harrington Starr Technology Consulting

MuleSoft (a large player in the API world) recommend three layers of APIs: System, Process and Experience layers. Implementing an interpretation of this layering concept allows for flexibility and a reasoned structure in your APIs.


3 1

Legacy products system

Experience APIs

Product webpage

Shopping cart

Products via SOAP protocol

Process APIs

Systems APIs

Sales app

Shopping cart

Product

Inventory

Order

Promotion

Pricing

Customer

Shipping

System APIs System APIs are proxies over your existing systems or datasources. System APIs hide the complexity of the underlying system and allow external connectivity. The only interaction with the underlying system or datasource is via their respective System API. These should change infrequently. System APIs may be exposed directly to clients; however, it is preferable to have a process APIs layered over top of System APIs. Experience APIs Experience APIs may be required to reconfigure or mashup the data for a very particular and purpose, or they may be required due to a mismatch of protocols. For example, an end client might need to communicate via SOAP, but your Process APIs communicate via REST. Experience APIs may call one or more Process APIs and/or System APIs. As they are the most tailormade APIs, experience APIs also tend to change the most.

Process APIs Process APIs capture more generic and common business processes irrespective of the underlying system. They exist for one of two reasons: 1) You need to mashup data from more than one System APIs, or, 2) You need to restructure the data into a more friendly and structured format, this may apply even if you only need data from one System API. This layer changes more frequently than System APIs. Typically Process APIs will start to become considered a model of your business. This shouldn't be considered the APIs entire purpose, but it is a natural side effect of the layering process. Therefore, a lot of thought needs to go into this layer, but it is important to note that you do not need to design this entire layer upfront. It will grow organically. Process APIs tend to be the most common way for clients to access your systems and data.

Embrace the chaos and transform your company

But won't this end up with a lot of APIs? Yes. You may end up with 10's, or even 100's of APIs. It's time to embrace the chaos with an API Gateway. What is an API Gateway? While each API Gateway solution differs, they commonly offer the following features: ■ Access control/Security ■ API directory ■ Performance monitoring ■ Quota control ■ Analytics and statistics ■ Caching ■ Protocol translation ■ Payload manipulation ■ API proxying ■ Governance By putting a Gateway layer in place, you can now take back control of your APIs. Now you and your clients have a single pool of APIs to utilise. The fact that data may be coming from legacy systems is completely invisible to your clients. Your clients can now search through your APIs and request access, you can have all your monitoring in one place and your security is consistent across all of your systems. Having a Gateway layer is also ideal if you want to monetise your APIs. For example, you may have a bronze, silver, and gold package available to your clients, and depending on the clients’ package, you might place a quota limit on the amount of calls to your APIs a client may do per hour. The API Gateway industry is seeing a boom at present and new Gateway features seem to be coming along every month. Some big contenders in this arena are Apigee, MuleSoft, Mashery, and Azure, but there are many, many more. Google has just entered the market by purchasing Apigee. – Your data is valuable. You know how valuable your data is. Share your data with those that need it – or they will find other sources of data from other suppliers. Organise your APIs correctly behind an API Gateway and you will continue to find new and interesting ways to create new products and reports, and you will find more and more creative ways to monetise your data. Apigee's motto is: “Adapt or Die”. This couldn't be truer in today's climate.


3 3

The Harrington Starr Technology Consulting health check By Gav Patel, COO, Harrington Starr Technology Consulting Someone call for help!

The sands of time stop for no one, least of all me. As we get older, the bad habits start to take their toll. We get a full medical done, and it gives us an indication, take this medication and get more exercise, always more exercise, basically more of the good habits and less of the bad. It’s always good to get a full medical; at least early symptoms can be spotted and treated

quickly enough to hopefully not cause further complications. Relating this back to software development and delivery, defects cost less in a test environment than production to fix. In an agile world with the possibility of frequent releases while the time in production can be mitigated, it can still be costly to have a defect out in the wild. For personal health, you’d call a doctor, “who you gonna call” for

your tech? Well… quite simply, us! Harrington Starr Technology Consulting can carry out a health check on your processes and systems. Why would you need a check, everything seems to be going well? There’s always room for improvement. We can all do things faster, safer and better. Alternatively, you could have problems with slow release cycles, problems accessing

environments, poor quality testing cycles, inefficient coding practices, unnecessary complexity or other areas that could require further investigation.

During the health check we will

The aim is for you to raise the quality and robustness of your production software systems, while reducing delivery cycle times and enhancing your ability to iterate and innovate in the market. Other aims include the ability to adopt and maintain an attitude of compliance to regulations and the ability to manage software delivery risks effectively.

■ Objective gathering – How are projects and work handled, what do teams rate as priorities

We look into the behaviour and culture along with practices such as development and operations collaboration, infrastructure automation, pragmatic agile processes, and test, release and deployment automation. This is to improve the outcome of your software delivery efforts. Previous assessments have highlighted improvements, where even the smallest of changes have had an exponential impact on productivity

■ Take a tour of the office – look at physical spaces, communications, use of boards

■ Interviews with the team – Talk to development managers, test managers, product managers, business analysts and other managers responsible for requirements ■ How is the team working, do they feel empowered to deliver? ■ Interviews with senior managers and stake holders – how is their work being delivered? ■ Process and role mapping with the development team followed by discussion and questions

It takes between 3-5 days with between 2-6 consultants depending on the size of the organisation. A typical health check we did recently took 3 days, with four consultants (1 Process, 1 Development, 1 Test and 1 DevOps). At the end there is a presentation highlighting key findings followed by a report of what’s going well and improvements that can be made along with the findings. Health checks can also be part of an iteration zero. We can assess how your current practices will impact the project about to be undertaken. Get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help to improve your technical health and enable you to delivery safer, better and faster.

[email protected] 0203 587 7007

We then collate all the information and feed it back via a presentation and report.


3 5

White paper on Enterprise Agile Adoption Harrington Starr Technology Consulting is formed of technologists who are proven experts in their fields, delivering world class projects across financial services. Our leadership team consists of a CTO who has risen through the ranks from development, and a recognised test expert in finance. We are experts in innovative Agile Transformation for our clients bringing a wealth of benefits such as hugely reducing time to market and exceeding stakeholder expectation. We help companies build environments where change is aged, new technologies and platforms are discussed and the culture is that of success. This example will showcase just one success story and show you how easily this could be applied to your organisation.

By Ehab Roufail , CEO, Harrington Starr Technology Consulting

Background

Misconceptions of Agile

Executives don’t have the time or inclination to observe projects or programmes from close quarters. They do not monitor progress day-to-day. They want a snapshot of how a department, programme and all projects are doing at a given point in time. This allows them to observe, approve and manage funding, resource allocation, and track against annual plans.

■ The cooperative, iterative and userfocused approach to developing software is often seen as something for smaller teams and organizations. In Agile, the same trade-offs and methodologies apply to different levels of scale in the organization. For example, a single scrum team may consist of seven to nine people and plan in two-week iterations / sprints with user stories. While a single Agile program may consist of seven to nine scrum teams and plan in one-quarter iterations with customer features.

Most organisastions employ an annual or biannual planning cycle to achieve targets. For IT, this implies finalising and approving a backlog of IT work at the beginning of a year. Through the year, you are no doubt familiar with the myriad of reports that start at project level and roll up to programme, department and ultimately enterprise level.

■ Agile methodologies are not suitable for the biggest problems and organisations? The cooperative, iterative and user-focused approach to developing software works with smaller firms and scales like a fractal to larger organisations

Business Outcome Focussed Agile delivery measures success on business outcomes of a project or feature delivery. Some of the key metrics being:

■ As an enterprise or project grows, Agile will cause teams to lose sight of bigpicture goals, such as managing demand, architectural runway, database standards, dependencies, and strategic planning. Planning at the development team level scales to planning sessions at the Project and Portfolio level with agile enterprise metrics that retain the focus > on company KPI’s.

■ What ROI was achieved? ■ What was the increase in production throughput? ■ How many systems where consolidated and rationalised? ■ What savings were made across a specified time period? ■ What was the increase in business opportunities? ■ How much was saved in procurement costs?

WWW.HARRINGTONSTARRTECH.COM UK: +44 203 587 7007 US: +1 646 381 2067 E: [email protected] 3 6

3 7

Potentially shippable product?

FIGURE 2: SCALING THE AGILE ENTERPRISE

TEAM VELOCITY

STORY

Enterprise Agile planning Agile portfolio planning at scale implies that the strategy is defined by the enterprise and decisions on how much to invest are driven by value measurement as projects are incrementally released.

Moving away from traditional planning

Organizations are moving away from traditional planning in order to capture maximum value and avoid unnecessary overheads / budgetary spending. Strategic planning with an agile mindset can provide a transformational shift that if scaled to an enterprise level can be a game changer. Then and only then will you see improved operational effectiveness through the continuous alignment of the business and technology teams. The conversation moves from where are we with a project, to how much value have we captured so far? If we have captured 80% of the value and only spent 50% of the budget should we stop there and go for something with a higher value to effort ratio?

Strategic level planning

This takes the overhead out of constantly having to refactor capacity / resource management, simplifying the process and empowering the portfolio level to make decisions aligning with the corporate strategy.

Portfolio level planning

Portfolio Managers are empowered to determine which projects to work on, so long as there are monthly checkins with executives to make sure that the organization is on track and in alignment.

Product level planning

The Product owner here defines a product roadmap of delivery based on the Portfolio plan. This roadmap plans multiple releases in a prioritised backlog of product features.

Sprint/iteration level planning

Here the team working with the Product Owner and their Scrum Master define short fixed-length subsets of releases, typically 2-4 week time frames that each deliver value to the roadmap.

Customer/market feedback, opportunity problem solving

GROOMING

SCRUM OF SCRUMS MEETING Y

U CT MARKETIN

MARKET

FIGURE 1: LEVELS OF AGILE PLANNING

Agile portfolio planning

Roadmap

Daily by team member

FINANCE

ITERATION

Customer acceptance?

TDD, C1, 800, automated acceptance testing

COLLA B O RATE

PROD

Potentially shippable product?

CT STRATEG

Epics

IO N

Bi-weekly by team

RELEASE

DAILY STANDUP

PRODU

RELEASE

CT TECHNICAL VALIDAT

Quarterly by PO and team

PRO DU

PRODUCT/PROJECT

THE TEAM 1-4 WEEK SPRINT

Small stories and tasks

METASCRUM MEETING

G

EXEC UTIVE SCRUM MEETING

Bi-yearly by PO

Greatest business value to customer

GROOMING

PRODUCT PORTFOLIO

Features

Yearly by PO

SPRINT BACKLOG

SMALL STORIES

Greatest business value to future market

BUSINESS STRATEGY

Stories

PRODUCT BACKLOG

EXECUTIVE SCRUM MEETING

ES ING AND SAL

Enterprise Agile artefacts Roadmap

The product roadmap is a strategic product planning tool that shows how the product is likely to grow across several major releases. This creates a continuity of purpose, facilitates stakeholder collaboration, helps acquire funding, and makes it easier to coordinate the development and launch of different products. Ideally this is a goal-oriented product roadmap that clearly states the benefits provided by each major release.

Epics

These describe the reasons why a project has been initiated, the objectives that the project will achieve, and the metrics that will be used to measure its success. Epics are comprised of a large collection of features.

Features

These comprise: ■ Capabilities that the Product Owner is interested in ■ An outline of the value to users ■ A collection of user stories

Stories

Stories describe how various stakeholders will interact with the solution and the needs they have in performing their assigned tasks and activities. They should contain a set of documented outcomes that will comprise the tests for successful delivery.

Product Backlog

The Product Backlog is an ordered list of everything that might be needed in the final product. In other words, a wish list of requirements. All items are described in simple, non-technical, business language, and all of them are presentable to every stakeholder. The Product Backlog is always dynamically changing and improving, it is never complete. Product development should not wait until the backlog is complete before starting delivery of the requirements. The first Sprint can be started as soon as the Product Backlog has enough stories defined.

Sprint Backlog

The Sprint Backlog is created during the Sprint Planning event, which is the first event in a Sprint. During the Sprint Planning event, the development Team collaborates on creating the Sprint Backlog, based on their estimated work and the estimated capacity of the Team. The Sprint should have a Goal, which will help describe the real meaning of the items and direct the efforts of the Development Team. The items in the Sprint Backlog are frozen after the Sprint Planning, and the Development Team will focus on delivering an Increment of “Done” based on this plan. Although the stories are frozen during the sprint it might be necessary to get more information and justify or remove some of the items. This should be done with the Product Owner.


3 9

A success story: Enterprise Agile Adoption

Measuring the value to the company Sprint burndown

Measuring Delivered Value is the most important emphasis on metrics for Agile software development. Merely tracking to a plan is not sufficient to manage risk. Thoughtless allegiance to the original plan, in fact, could assure failure if market conditions (mission parameters) or assumptions made while building the plan have changed. The iterative nature of Agile methods protects sponsors and developers from this trap.

Completed tasks

Remaining effort

Day 20

Day 8

Ideal burndown

Day 18

0

Day 16

0

Day 14

5

Day 12

50

Day 10

10

Day 6

100

Day 4

15

Day 2

150

Day 0

20

Remaining tasks

Earned value chart

Release burndown

Earned Value reporting measures whether the amount of money spent so far on a project justifies the amount of work completed at a point in time. There are a few variables: Budget – the estimated cost of your project. This is usually decided at the beginning of the project, and reviewed infrequently or not at all. Actual cost (AC) – the proportion of the original budget your team have spent so far. Planned value (PV) – the proportion of your project scope that was expected to have been delivered by this time. Earned value (EV) – the ‘real’ value of the scope that has actually been delivered so far.

With each completed sprint, the delivered functionality grows, and the release burndown chart depicts this progress.

Projection

200 150

Our client's Agile adoption had spread throughout the technology department but now needed maturing. The client needed help with: ■ How to organise and safeguard delivery across multiple delivery teams ■ How to align delivery with various business functions ■ How to safeguard delivery across the enterprise for traditional, Agile and third party projects ■ How to report on relevant metrics for the monthly board pack that relates to the organisation’s KPI’s

50

PRODUCT STRATEGY PRODUCT ROADMAP RELEASE PLAN ITERATION PLAN

The Solution

DAILY PLAN

■ Consolidation to four key portfolio streams ■ Product Managers from the business leading each portfolio ■ Product Owners from the business leading individual feature delivery teams within each portfolio ■ Multiple Scrum teams per portfolio – with twice monthly joint planning and review sessions ■ Each Portfolio inherits board level KPI’s and each feature development across and within teams is prioritised according to the ROI versus estimated effort

Metrics

Executive Cross Portfolio pack contains the following per portfolio: ■ Release burndown ■ Sprint burndown ■ % of features completed ■ User satisfaction ■ KPI vs ROI vs cycle time Drilldown to portfolio level contains the following per Scrum team in the portfolio: ■ Sprint burndown ■ % velocity in story points ■ % features completed ■ Feature cycle time ■ Defects discovered after deployment

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Sprint FIGURE 3: RELEASE BURNDOWN CHART

Cost Variance (CV) (Time) t2

Schedule Variance (S) (Time) t1

0

Schedule Variance (SV) (Time) t1

COMPANY VISION BUSINESS STRATEGY

100

Money

Story points

25

200

And to avoid metrics such as: ■ Lines of code ■ Hours worked ■ Number of defects in development

Measured progress

FIGURE 4: SPRINT BURNDOWN CHART

FIGURE 6: LEVELS OF ENTERPRISE AGILE PLANNING

The Challenge Remaining & completed tasks

Remaining effor (hours)

250

In measuring the value to the enterprise we suggest metrics such as: ■ Release burndown ■ Sprint burndown ■ Number of features accepted ■ % of features completed ■ User satisfaction on delivered stories ■ Feature cycle time – how long similar sized features take to be delivered to production ■ Defects discovered after deployment ■ Revenue per feature

250

How the success of agile delivery in multiple technology teams spread to the enterprise

As stories in the backlog of work are completed, the chart displays the rate and amount of progress.

Results

Actual Cost (AC)

■ Delivery focused on actual business benefit ■ Transparent metrics ■ Aligned deliveries ■ Empowered high preforming teams ■ Key business owner engagement ■ Agile responsiveness to change

Planned value (PV) Earned value (EV)

t1

t2

Time

FIGURE 5: EARNED VALUE CHART


4 1

Conclusion

More and more, organisations and their systems are moving away from traditional waterfall development practices in favour of Agile methods. Agile methods are effective for shortening delivery cycles, delivering incremental value as early as possible in the development lifecycle, and managing costs. If the benefits of Agile are to be realised effectively for these organisations, those leading these enterprise wide Agile development programs and portfolios must be fluent in metrics used for monitoring.

Of course, the best measure by far comes directly from working software and solutions. It’s best for teams, Agile Release Trains, managers, program management and portfolio managers to pivot most of their measuring attention to this critical fact. Other metrics outlined above are subordinate to the objective of keeping the focus on rapid delivery of quality, working solutions that deliver the identified value and return on investment. Nevertheless measures are important in the context of enterprise and to that end we provide some of the approaches that we have implemented successfully in this white paper.

We continue to learn new and inventive ways of demonstrating progress and diagnosing performance from Agile implementers. The value of this approach is that it represents a narrative driven by realworld experience.

Summary

This is just one of many examples that we have to highlight the impactful changes we can make by helping your enterprise in its digital transformation journey

■ The approach outlined here provides transparency and the effective means to observe, approve and manage funding, resource allocation, and track against annual plans at enterprise, department and programme level.

■ Agile methodologies are suitable for the biggest problems and organisations in this world.

■ Agile portfolio planning at scale implies that the strategy is defined by the enterprise and decisions on how much to invest are driven by value measurement as projects are incrementally released.

■ Agile enterprise delivery focusses success criteria on business outcome of a project or feature delivery.

With its different rhythms, patterns, roles and processes, Agile Scrum is inherently more measurable than prior documentationoriented, indirect, waterfall-based measures of progress.

To transform your business, see the details below. Alternatively, get in touch with me directly on: Email: [email protected] Mobile: 07984 442 883 WWW.HARRINGTONSTARRTECH.COM UK: +44 203 587 7007 US: +1 646 381 2067 E: [email protected] 4 2

4 3

Robo-advisory on the brink of adoption: will firms tumble or be embraced? By Alexandra Cheung – Cruxy & Co.

F

ebruary kicked off with a day of provocation and challenge at the Robo-Investing 2017 conference. Led by UBS SmartWealth, Moneyfarm & WealthWizard, the event delved into the depths of robo-advisory; from challenging the current business models to analysing further potential for technology and market progression.

Why robo-advisory?

Robo-advisory has taken over from the distributed ledger as the hot new topic. VC funds like Balderton, Anthemis and Index Ventures have jumped to invest in a variety of stand-alone robo-advisory firms. Nutmeg, Betterment and Wealthfront being the three most known.

The numbers don’t lie

It is undeniable that the AUM robo-advisors manage is significant reaching £224 billion. The US, China, and the UK are leading as the top three markets. AUM are expected to grow by 47.5% annually, with at least £1 trillion expected by 2021. Morgan Stanley predicts that global robo-advice AUM could even reach £6.5 trillion by 2025.

So who matters?

In Europe alone, there are 64 robo solutions live with 100 under development. In our view the players in the current market sit under three pillars: The new kids on the block - The fully automated: ■ Mainly start ups - e.g. Nutmeg, Betterment & Money Farm ■ Fully automated with limited human interaction ■ Risk options are limited ■ Investments are solely with passive funds ■ Their edge - early entrance in the market Those hungry for change - The incumbents: ■ New to the robo space - the likes of J.P Morgan are hoping to launch by the end of 2017 ■ Benefit of their existing brand and client network However, their adoption to robo-advice is still a question. UBS has spun out a specific SmartWealth ‘business in a business’ take on the robo opportunity. This has meant contracting outside developers and building

the technology and proposition from scratch. Although the product and service will still be tied to the splendour brand name, the department is run like a nimble start-up. Imagine the gravitas, history & imbued knowledge of the Swiss giant poured into a nimble, client obsessed robo firm. A hungry team access the investment strategies and balance sheet of UBS but with a very different attitude and approach. Not only that, the team moved fast and are focused on serving their dream customer with precision: “The only way for incumbents to succeed in this space is if they have clarity to what they are trying to achieve in the first place and manage how they will engage with legal, risk and compliance within their firm” - Nick Middleton, Co-Head of UBS SmartWealth. The players applying a layer on-top - The ‘cyborg’ ■ Often wealth management firms who have added a layer of robo-technology to their system e.g. Vanguard and Schwabs, who are the most known to be adopting this method ■ Injecting a “cutting-edge” and “innovative” approach in order to stay fresh for their long term clients ■ These players are trying to generate edge, using the tech to give them competitive advantage

What’s next?

With an estimated 5 million people lacking advice, there is undoubtedly a market to be served. The technology has proven it can shift this outdated industry, the next question to ask, how will the market scale beyond early adopters? Whether firms are incumbents, wealth managers or fully automated start ups, to achieve mass adoption, they must have a better understanding of the drivers behind the psychology advice. Why do some people choose to use robo-advisors? What are their drivers? How can the market enhance the engagement and propositions to create the tipping point? How much human interaction is necessary to build trust?

A word from CRUXY

We believe the tipping point will come when roboadvisory firms become obsessed with the specific audience they’re trying to serve.

Whether firms are incumbents, wealth managers or fully automated start ups, to achieve mass adoption, they must have a better understanding of the drivers behind the psychology advice. Some are trying to win over millennials. How does having limited savings and knowledge about finance change the proposition for them? How will the onslaught of advice help if a base layer of knowledge is missing. This is where we are watching the big players going for this audience. How will they build partnerships with the likes of BlackBullion and Cleo? On the flip side, in Europe where UHNWs are typically 50 plus and very traditional in their thinking and approach, the fully automated firms must accept that this segment do not all think and act in the same way. How will they balance focus together with finding those who will look to more technical ways to manage their nest egg? What are the emotional and physical signals these firms can send to people who might be fearful of not having one IFA to call? Or does that mean IFAs will sit on top of the technology and generate a new business model of their own? EQ Investors, Austym Smith Associates and Financial Management Bureau are prime examples experimenting with this idea.

SO WHAT?

The current market is only the tip of the iceberg. Robo is more than a building block to transform the dated wealth management industry. It is a fundamental shift that will drive a different relationship with wealth. The democratisation of winning strategies at UBS demonstrates that. In order to win and survive in this market, robo-advisory firms must become uncomfortably narrow and win over the single silo dream audience, before trying to convince the rest.


4 5

What makes a great sales CV in FinTech today? By Ricky Singh

A

huge misconception when it comes to sales candidates searching the market is that the resume doesn’t need to sell them, but the in-person meetings do. Whilst true to a certain extent, it is still very important to put the effort in to write a proper CV to sell themselves on paper, even down to the basics such as spelling and grammatical mistakes because making them can be perceived as laziness to clients. When it comes to the actual content of a CV, detail is of the utmost importance and the idea that it should only be a page is a myth. Candidates often make the mistakes of assuming hiring managers or HR know that, just because they include the company, title, and basic responsibilities, they know what they do and should want to talk to them. What they don’t understand is that companies want niche sales specialists that are difference-makers in the space, know the technology, and understand client needs. Let’s be honest: every sales person in today’s tech savvy world has managed, updated, and knows how CRM systems work; this won’t separate you from the hundreds of other people applying to the job.

So, what exactly needs to be on a proper CV today to stand out? The first piece of advice I can give is a simple format, no graphs or pictures are needed. Sales Managers have limited time to look at each CV between client meetings, managing, interviewing, etc. so they just need the basic information to get you through the door. As such, the information you should have for each role is as follows: 1. Company, job title, location and dates worked (months included) 2. What the company does, the products you sold and the verticals or types of companies you sold to (i.e. banks, asset managers, PE, etc.) or even more specific than that. 3. The responsibilities should be what exactly you were doing from a sales perspective to drive business (not admin duties) and important key words include: prospecting, lead gen, hunter, hybrid, account management, individual contributor, player-coach, manager, etc. 4. Quotas and achievements, big wins, awards etc.; show them you can make their business money! Realistically, it should be in a consistent format throughout so they can scan it relatively quickly and keeping a consistent format and order does just that. Ideally, you want to have around five bullet points, give or take a few, just around these points with little fluff and the straight facts. Of course, having a brief summary and core expertise prior to the professional experience is just fine and including important things such as skills (CRM stuff here) and education is important as well. There are a lot of little nuances that can make a big difference in a job search and this is definitely one of those. When it comes to the work experience, this is the best way to maximize your value to a sales manager. Open the door, then let your sales skills do the rest.


The definitive interview guide

The main thing for me is to have the right mind-set going into any interview. Don't be disheartened - you can never know everything in technology but you can have the right attitude to learning. Convincing yourself is half the battle and once you have done that, you will be able to convince those around you that even without the right answer you have more than enough of the ability to do well at the job.

by Nadia Edwards-Dashti Previous sections can be found in previous issues of The Financial Technologist Magazine

PART

9

P

Mistakes happen – it’s how you recover

erforming well throughout an interview isn't just about giving the right answers or making that connection with the interviewer. I've often seen people lose out because they have capitulated from a mistake or have hit a hurdle that's thrown them off the entire interview. There are so many variants within technology that I have spent years encouraging people to prepare for the hurdles they can’t jump over. This can sound almost back to front but the idea is that when an applicant focused on how they would tackle the problems they don’t necessarily know they answers to, they will more likely remain cool, calm and collected throughout the strains of the interview. Managers want to see how you react under pressure. They know that, in any technical job, you will have to be constantly learning new tools, new methodologies, new skills and new technologies so, rather than seeing how well you perform explaining something you do know, they like to see how you cope when there is something in front of you that you don’t know. They want to see if you understand the steps to get to a solution and get to that solution calmly and efficiently without negatively affecting those around you. Essentially, managers are interested to see how you will bounce back in a pressurised environment. In addition, will you let one wrong answer in an interview ruin the

entire interview or will you be able to take every question as a new one? They will equate this to a working day – will one challenge ruin your day? Your week? The entire project? I have, therefore, always encouraged people to enter an interview expecting to make three mistakes and moreover, planning what they will say or do to recover from these:

1. Will you reassure the interviewer you will go home and learn this? 2. Will you reassure them that you can get this answer quickly with the use of your tools? 3. Will you buckle or will you convince them that this is something you are willing to invest time into 4. Will not knowing one thing make you give up on the entire interview? 5. Will you have the courage to tell the interviewer you have made a mistake in a previous question?

PART

10 Errmm… The significance of “Dog Words” in interviews "Y ou will never get a second chance to make a first impression” are the immortal words of Will Rogers and never is this truer than in an interview.

The “eeerms,” the “ummmms”, and the use of “honestly” or “obviously” can really ruin your credibility so it is vital that you are conscious of how, and more so when, you use these dog words. In the technology world, the art of communication has become paramount to any additional hire. As technology has evolved so has the typical technology professional. The new technologist is very much part of business strategy and therefore their ideas need to be communicated successfully.

We have seen a large increase in failed interviews being attributed to lack of communication skills and in particular, the use of dog words or sounds that take away from the message the candidate is trying to portray. People tend to be liable to use dog words when asked to describe what their specific responsibilities are or to talk through a project in detail or to explain what they are trying to achieve in their career. The reason people do this is to buy time and give themselves a second to think about an answer. Unfortunately, what it also does is leave an impression of uncertainty or distrust in that it gives off the air that they don’t know what they are talking about or, even worse, are taking time to come up with a lie or fabrication to embellish what they were actually doing. Technologists don’t often talk to their friends about the systems they are working on and whenever they talk to their colleagues about their projects those colleagues are normally on the same page or have some prior understanding of the system. With this in mind, no wonder this seemingly very simple set of questions can actually become a minefield that encourages people to fall into the treacherous world of dog words! The best way to get around this hazard is to take the time to practise responses to the generic questions asked around projects and job responsibilities. Whether it be with a friend or a colleague or even in the mirror, take the time to go through what it is you actually do, details of projects you have taken part in and where you worked as part of a team. Write out what you want to say then rehearse saying it out loud enough times that you don’t need to look at what you have written. If with a friend, get them to through in some left field questions and to hold you accountable every time a dreaded “ummmm” comes out and you will become conscious of yourself doing it and be better situated to prevent it happening again. Practise helps people describe their experiences with clarity which leads to not just a more concise response but one that will fill the interviewer with confidence in what you are saying. So obviously, it would eeerm be a good idea to errrrrrr practise what you would like to say in interview to put you in a better position to get the job.


4 9

FINTECH FOCUS

HARRINGTON STARR TALK TO SOME OF FINTECH’S MOST EXCITING BUSINESSES

1 STEFAN HENDRICKX Founder & Executive Director, Ancoa

Can you give us a bit of background on Ancoa? Ancoa is a market surveillance technology vendor providing contextual surveillance and insightful analytics for financial services companies. We launched in 2010 at a time when the dust of the financial crisis had started to settle. Increased surveillance was on the horizon and an avalanche of market manipulation cases were coming to light, specifically the LIBOR and FX scandals which exposed serious gaps in market surveillance. We saw that there was scope to innovate and bring new technology to the market to close these gaps and ultimately prevent such large scale manipulation. Since that time, we have seen an increased regulatory drive to improve market transparency and uphold the integrity of the markets, ultimately protecting the everyday investor. Because of the resulting demand for user-friendly market surveillance tools from the financial services industry, we are pleased to have secured significant funding to support our strong growth ambitions. Tell us a bit more about your industry and how Ancoa fits in? As a result of the 2008 financial crisis and other wrongdoings, the financial industry must now comply with a wide array of new regulations. Technology, in turn, is being progressively applied by industry and regulators alike to help alleviate the workload of compliance officers and avoid the opaque practices that led to mistakes in the past. Ancoa helps improve market integrity by providing greater visibility over trading behaviour on a single platform. We have an independent and real-time approach to monitoring, analytics, alerting and reporting which helps exchanges, buyand sell-side and regulators identify blind spots in their operations. Ancoa believes in applying a contextual approach

to surveillance and offers powerful visualisation tools, providing firms not only with robust regulatory compliance capabilities, but also with business intelligence that can, in turn, be used to benefit the compliance, trading and operational functions of a firm. Where do you see the opportunity for you in UK and European markets? With the rise of legislation aimed at ensuring safer markets, the number of asset classes falling under regulatory scrutiny has grown. Due to new surveillance requirements, we have seen the demand for Ancoa’s capabilities expand from cash equities to swaps, futures, options, derivatives, fixed income, currencies, energy and commodities. Now that they have laid down the rules, regulators have their work cut out as they need to verify regulatory compliance within financial institutions. For firms, this means ensuring that appropriate surveillance systems are in place with training being given to all members of the team from compliance to traders alike. If we look at the scope these regulations cover, this is not an insubstantial task. How does your company differentiate itself from its competitors? Ancoa uses a contextual approach to surveillance, meaning monitoring for manipulative trading practices needs to encompass both structured and unstructured data sets, and real-time monitoring of trading behaviour needs to be mapped against historic trading data to establish if any behaviour patterns are irregular. Moreover, traditional data sets (such as order data) need to be contextualised against financial news as well as electronic communications (email, instant messaging, voice communications and Twitter) to detect potential market abuse and efficiently gather relevant evidence to investigate and submit a case to the regulators.

We also pride ourselves on the agility we bring both to our technical development and deployment processes. We develop with and for our customers. In the case of trading firms, for example, we configure and deploy the product according to their particular requirements, including trading and risk appetites, to produce a set of meaningful and manageable alerts. We work differently to other incumbents operating in our space, for example, by allowing compliance officers and other users to easily configure alerts and reports to make them suitable for their business and back test historical data without our involvement. What do you feel are the biggest obstacles facing the industry? We find that the biggest challenge firms face is the decision whether to buy an off-the-shelf vendor solution or build their own platform in-house. Vendor solutions are better at taking an integrated approach to surveillance, which is important in terms of avoiding mistakes of the past where monitoring of siloed departments and communication channels led to gaps. Vendor solutions have been specially designed to incorporate existing systems, including voice and electronic messaging services. Solutions developed in-house, whilst popular because of the preference for proprietary systems in certain organisations, are often not peer reviewed or used by other firms, and the cost of building and maintaining these systems can run very high over time. The clock is ticking, especially for those firms with asset classes falling under regulatory scrutiny for the first time. The chosen solution needs to consistently perform within this fastmoving environment as regulations are being constantly updated.

The clock is ticking, especially for those firms with asset classes falling under regulatory scrutiny for the first time.

How do you plan to overcome those obstacles? Our objective is to help create a wellinformed and empowered customer user base, ultimately assisting them to meet their compliance obligations and analytics. The deployment of systems such as Ancoa can, at first sight, seem like an ambitious step in terms of the breadth of the functionality. We provide training modules aimed at educating firms on the regulatory pressures facing them and the capabilities of the platform so that it is configured for maximum advantage and used with ease. What makes your company an employer of choice? Let’s face it, it is exciting being at the forefront of prevention of insider trading, ultimately protecting pension investments. We consider ourselves positioned at the front end of traditional financial services businesses within London’s Square Mile. FinTech and RegTech are changing the culture of the City for the better by helping it move towards a level of greater transparency.

We have a diverse team at Ancoa that has tripled over the past two years. We are based at Moorgate’s WeWork which is a collaborative working space that reflects the approach of how we work with our clients. Ancoa prides itself on being in the company of the City’s younger firms building exciting technology with small, agile teams, ultimately making a difference in how the financial services industry performs today. What do you think the financial services sector will look like in five years’ time? Financial markets are in the flux of change driven by regulatory demands for markets to be more transparent, less risky, with more investor protection. In five years’ time, we believe the level of market manipulation will be lower than in recent years because major pieces of regulation will have been implemented, but also because surveillance technology will continue to evolve to outsmart manipulation attempts. Fundamentally, new FinTech and RegTech innovations are creating solutions in order to help overcome regulatory obstacles and we are thrilled to be a part of this industry during these exciting times.

www.ancoa.com


5 1

TV

StarrTech

FINTECH FOCUS


Watch, feature, and subscribe to our brand-new channels!

most business-effective method of competing. The world is changing and user habits are changing too. Wherever we may find ourselves next month or next year, we will have to be ready to act quickly and decisively. Banks will have to act in the face of the changing business environment, customer habits and new cutting edge devices. If you are innovative, you can implement new solutions as the first market player and your competitors will have to react. Being proactive on the financial services market is a far more effective business strategy than being reactive.

Starr Tech TV brings you the most influential figures from across the enterprise and gaming worlds, discussing everything from Virtual and Augmented Reality, Robotics, Data, Security, and the latest technical advances from this thriving industry.

2 ANDRZEJ SZEWCZYK Vice President & Managing Director, Efigence

To feature your business on either of our channels, get in touch today! UK: +44 203 587 7007

www.harringtonstarr.com US: +1 646 381 2067

E: [email protected]

In what digital areas should retail banks compete? The area in which banks currently compete, and will continue to compete in the foreseeable future, above all is Customer Experience. When choosing a bank, customers tend to attach importance to such features as ease of use, convenient and rewarding interaction, oneto-one communication channels, and a high level of innovation. The strategy for building digital channels in retail banking should aim to reflect the mantra ‘always exceed customer expectations’. Carrying this out requires investment in two key areas: design of user experience and technology. Is it the right time to innovate? Innovation is always the best and the

How can banks avoid getting left behind? It is true to say that a digital banking platform should be first and foremost innovative. However, this does not mean that customers expect revolution. Rather, the innovation should take the form of cherry-picking the best solutions on the market, in banking just as in telephony or in entertainment. A lot also depends on the type of customer the bank wishes to cooperate with. For example, a younger customer might expect instant transfers, request for money and friend-to-friend transfers. For others, a family account with shared billing services and common budgets may be required. What are the current trends in digital banking? Without doubt, the implementation of PSD2 in Europe will assume key significance. The customer can come to expect wider access to information about their banking products. Each bank will seek to persuade customers to choose its platform to manage all finances. In addition, institutions from outside the traditional banking market, particularly those supplying technology or record-keeping systems, will have broader access to this

financial information, requiring banks to fortify their positions so as not to lose out. This brings us back to our main point: banks must innovate. Another important trend is the development of conversational interfaces. Banks have become de facto advisors, communicating with customers using friendly language. The development of various types of bots and artificial intelligence mechanisms will be very helpful in building oneto-one communication, enabling a financial institution to treat each customer individually and according to his or her particular needs. How should a bank start the process of innovation implementation? Everything begins with a change of perspective. Each of us uses modern equipment. We make full use of our smartphones. Likewise, bank employees are perfectly aware of the needs of their customers, and can perceive and understand the technological changes in the world around them. Harnessing employees’ talents in a proven and systematic process of innovation implementation should be the first step in the digital transformation process. Especially helpful at this stage is the outside-in perspective of an outside organisation. Implementation of some - even small - innovations can change and shape the organization in the direction of the new culture, making the implementation of further innovation easier. In each project that Efigence implements for a bank, the key success factor is convincing stakeholders and the banking team to adopt a common goal. We can then convince everyone that we should not fear innovation, and the benefits will follow very soon.


FINTECH FOCUS


What can you tell us about your business? Duuzra is a global cloud-hosted software and services company which delivers into the events, meetings, sales, and training environments. We are well known for our product’s ability to facilitate a fully interactive experience for users and audiences, whilst at the same time capturing data and analytics to increase commercial insight for our clients. Our software operates on all Apple and Android devices.

3 JON WHITE CEO, Duuzra

sales and training environments. These environments exist in all companies regardless of region, therefore the growth opportunity is fantastic. What are some of the major challenges facing the industry that your company overcomes? There are numerous challenges, but that’s what makes the industry exciting. However, our industry is in a period of brief stagnation….there is nothing particularly new that clients value and we aim to change that.

Duuzra works with some of the world’s best corporate and agency brands. A significant proportion of these are financial services companies. What has been your journey to current position? Duuzra was formed in 2011 initially as an event technology provider. The journey has been both exciting and challenging. What we have learned most is that our product has the versatility and value for use in the additional environments listed above, not just the event forum. What interested you in this space? Providing digital interactive solutions to live corporate environments and the freedom to develop new concepts in a young industry sector. How have you settled into the business? I’ve settled in very quickly out of necessity and love the learning potential that the opportunity brings. What lessons did you learn in your previous role? The value of knowledge sharing and applying other more mature industry sector insight into a relatively new sector. Where do you see the opportunity for you in the UK and European market? The opportunity is to scale our software under licences across the event, meetings,

We are well known for our product’s ability to facilitate a fully interactive experience for users and audiences, whilst at the same time capturing data and analytics to increase commercial insight for our clients.

Interactive corporate technology will, we believe, become a necessity due to its analytical capability and the need for organisations to go paperless. How does your company differentiate itself from its competitors? We provide much more than just an event and meeting app, albeit that a large part of this means most of our clients want to consolidate from using multiple software applications to one platform that provides the same digital experience and insight in multiple corporate environments. The cost and efficiency savings by consolidating to the Duuzra platform are enormous. We also provide a bespoke, special to client, product and service. Where do you see the future of the market heading? Interactive corporate technology will, we believe, become a necessity due to its analytical capability and the need for organisations to go paperless. What do you feel are the biggest obstacles facing the industry? One of them is the emergence of very basic app providers. As with other industries, clients in the short term believe a basic app “will do”. The risk is that events, for example, are left unmanaged from a technology perspective and the data capture usually one dimensional. How do you plan to overcome those obstacles? By applying best in class project methodology to support clients in their environments and investing in the analytics suite of our software.

What makes your company an employer of choice? Like others, we adhere to company values that were chosen by our staff. We have the maturity to allow staff to input ideas and provide an environment for them to be themselves. Delivery is our core statement. What are your plans for 2017 and beyond? Duuzra is working to a five-year plan with the strategic goal of providing worldwide in-house software and services to our clients. What areas of financial services do you see as most ripe for disruption by technology? Private Equity funds and asset management companies. Investors in these funds currently have the upper hand and research their choices in more depth than ever before. Interactive and data capture technology allows these companies to bring their investors closer and understand how they weight their investment decisions. What do you think the financial services sector will look like in five years’ time? I think most companies in the sector will adopt a smarter front-end digital strategy if they haven’t already. Any live data captured directly from customers/clients, rather than second hand, obviously carries an extremely high value.

www.duuzra.com


5 5

New York City

New York City

From across the pond

Harrington Starr Inc reports How does the new President affect the FinTech World? By Rob Grant I’ve been in America for a little over seven months now and during that time one thing has dominated the conversation in bars, in the office and even at home. It’s not one of the greatest sporting comebacks ever witnessed with the New England Patriots winning Super Bowl LI and it isn’t even the arrival of Harrington Starr on USA soil…although arguably it should be! The topic is, of course, that of the Executive Office of the President of the United States or more specifically its incumbent; Donald Trump. Everyone has an opinion on the 45th President and it’s fair to say that whatever your own thoughts on him and his policies he is something of a divisive figure. However, this article is not an attempt to offer any

form of political commentary but instead aims to offer

speculation as to what his appointment means for the fintech community. ■ Reduced regulation. One of Trump’s campaign promises was to scale back or repeal Dodd-Frank. In February, the president signed a directive to review the act which perhaps signalled phase one of making good on this commitment. He has also been quoted as saying that he “will issue a temporary moratorium on new agency regulations”. According to a recent Business Insider article “this could be a significant blow for fintechs which have been calling for specific regulations in order to simplify their paths to compliance and stimulate further growth”. Regulations can offer clarity and knowing what the problems are and offering a solution can only benefit fintech firms.

■ Access to talent. The President’s recent attempts to ban travellers from several countries has been widely condemned in many business quarters. One of the major concerns from a fintech perspective is this could dramatically restrict access to talent. Taavet Hinrikus, the CEO and co-founder of TransferWise, was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that “immigration is key for innovation and economic growth”. Clare Flynn Levy, founder and CEO of Essentia Analytics, told the same publication that “many parts of the financial technology sector require access to massive pools of talent and that such protectionism slams the brakes on all of that” ■ A strong economy. Confidence in the economy has soared since Trump won the election and US GDP is set to grow by 2.1% in 2017. Coupled with strong positive movement in jobs creation it could mean that candidates previously hesitant to make their next move may now be more susceptible to overtures from competing companies and savvy recruiters. The downside for fintech companies is that given a positive jobs outlook and restrictions on talent the market will be become increasingly candidate driven and could cause a rise in salaries as firms compete to secure top tier talent.

Professional services in the USA. By Sarah Philby 2017 marked the launch of the Harrington Starr Inc. Professional Services desk and so far, it has been a whirlwind of exciting opportunities and general market appetite for top talent. Exposing ourselves to the project side has given us some great visibility and appreciation of just how much major projectsbased work is going on across the industry! This seems to be the result of a highly productive 2016, many of our smaller vendor clients saw their best year last year and astonished themselves with the number of new clients and high-level business won. This has led to a massive push of professional services hiring across the states, we are currently running searches in NYC, Houston, Austin, Carolina, and San Fran, to name just a few regions. Our major hubs have been NYC, Chicago and Houston but we are also supporting our clients in building out new offices. Q1 has seen major growth across the buy-side, but we expect to see more sell-side players expanding their teams in the next couple of weeks.

However, as demonstrated over the past 12 months… no one really knows anything and all the above might prove woefully off target when the dust has settled. Indeed, given the fact that the much-touted healthcare bill, or Trumpcare as some have labelled it, recently failed to even make it in front of Congress, and the numerous legal challenges to the travel ban, it could be a case of ‘as you were’!

With the launch of Professional Services, Team USA now has access to the end-user space across buyand sell-sides. We are focussed on building out our database and contacts here and building brand new relationships. Part of this focus is to include the end-users into our community and increase circulation for the magazine. One objective we had in launching in The States was to reflect the same value add in the USA that we offer in the U.K. with our networking events, magazine and now video channel offering our community visibility and networking opportunities with like-minded innovators in fintech!

Everyone has an opinion on the 45th President and it’s fair to say that whatever your own thoughts on him and his policies he is somewhat of a divisive figure.

If you are interested in working with us in the USA as either a client or candidate, or keen to find out more about our publications, events or general market intel then give us a call!


5 7

FINTECH/DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY

Market news & commentary

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is now impacting finance at the highest level. While we are all trying to assess how A.I. will shape the future, unbeknown to many of us, A.I. is actively shaping the world around us now. A.I. has caught everyone's attention, we have seen A.I. starting to penetrate deep into our organisational operations, with chief artificial intelligence officers, developing strategies to protect ourselves from any future threat posed by super-intelligent computers capable of thinking for themselves. A.I. technology is being used in and across the highest levels of government, medicine, defence and business. One industry embracing A.I.’s power is finance. The Bond Buyer website recently reported that three of the top credit rating agencies now fully use A.I. in all their risk assessments. This may be one of the most suitable applications of the technology: performing a repetitive task in an area that is difficult for the human brain to operate in. "A.I. is a strong fit for the industry. Great A.I. applications are found where you have expensive people doing repetitive, low-value tasks that computers can do faster and more precisely," Thomas Ryan, Head of Municipal Bond Valuations at Thomson Reuters, was quoted as saying in the Bond Buyer article. "The A.I. we leverage analyses 350,000 news articles a day, from tens of thousands of local and national sources, and identifies material changes that can impact a specific CUSIP. We are able to immediately assess changes in each of the 65,000 obligors and their CUSIPs with more precision than ever before." It is not important how sophisticated your Google News searches are, because it is impossible for there to be a single person or team of experts that can scan this volume of information. The Internet itself has become an obstacle, having grown to a size which makes it easy to hide critical information from prying eyes, but cannot hide from A.I. The human brain cannot filter through millions of search results to find relevant information, unlike A.I. search engines that can uncover millions of results relevant to your query, but not all are specific to what you are actually searching for. The financial industry has very specific information requirements. Consider Government and Corporate Bonds. At any one time, there are trillions of Dollars, GBP, Euros and Yen Bonds being traded and issued globally, in order to assess and monitor the myriad of factors that influence the risk assessments of all these bonds, a researcher would need the ability to identify issues at a granular level that do not surface with regular search results, e.g. a change in a government’s fiscal policy, a corporate merger, or fraudulent activities. Any of these issues could indicate that a government or corporation has a

Bite size news from the financial services and commodities technology markets

much higher default risk than previously assessed. This function was previously done by teams of highly trained researchers. Now however, humans must cooperate with A.I., this partnership of Humans and A.I. means the work is completed correctly and efficiently. This symbiotic relationship between humans and A.I. is also well documented. A 2016 White House report "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence" noted the following observation: "One example is in chess playing, whereas weaker computers can often beat a stronger computer player, if the weaker computer is given a human teammate — this is true even though top computers are much stronger players than any human." The same report describes another example in medicine, where a human pathologist incorrectly diagnosed cancerous lymph nodes 3.5 percent of the time, whereas A.I. made incorrect diagnoses 7.5 percent of the time. When they combined their input, the error rate was reduced to just 0.5 percent. The Financial Industry is almost ten years from the global liquidity crisis. A crisis that was blamed in part on the inability to piece together business critical information about the reality of credit risk. A.I. which can quickly uncover information regarding the health of the Financial Markets will make it almost impossible for any business-critical information to be missed, and when A.I. is fully accepted and correctly implemented across the industry, the effect of A.I. could well be the end of the Bull and Bear cycles which plagues our modern economy.

Ireland and Germany are battling it out post–Brexit, to fill the void as leader of Europe’s FinTech scene once the UK has officially left the EU. When the UK leaves the EU, we will lose easy access to Europe’s financial industry. It is difficult to pre-empt the effects that the Brexit vote will have however, it is certain that it will have an impact on the FinTech industry. There are many differing opinions however, it is thought that London is going in the direction of a tough Brexit. The consensus is that Ireland and Germany will battle it out and one of the two will step up and take the reins from the UK post-Brexit, as leader within Europe’s FinTech scene. ‘DEVOPS’ is already well-established as a multifaceted, complex term and 2017 is not looking likely to be the year where the concept becomes any simpler, especially with the emergence of ‘DevSecOps’, incorporating Security into the Development and Operations ideology. 2017 promises to be the year of security where software will be made better, faster, and above all safer. With DevOps, the ultimate aim was to bring the ‘Ops’ team into the ‘Dev’ team so it wasn’t just something which was considered at the end of the project. DevSecOps is similar, in that it basically means that security can no longer be seen as an afterthought that only one department considers, it is instead, something which is integrated at all stages of a project and even after the project has concluded.

INNOVATIVE START-UPS have a real marmite-like quality to the candidates we speak to. Without doubt, almost all candidates are driven by getting to use new and exciting technologies and methods of solving problems, but the perceived risk-factor of joining a start-up is hugely dividing. Whilst some candidates love the prospect of diving in at the start and being on the cutting edge of change, there are almost the same amount that have no interest in putting themselves in a position that ‘might not work out’. Horses for courses. THE BANKS ARE SAID TO BE FINALLY BENEFITING FROM FINTECH INNOVATION. The first way this is happening is through powering expansion as global tech sector giants are engaging in FinTech opportunities e.g. Alibaba Group are rumour to be targeting promising FinTech companies as part of its expansion plans. According to KPMG, venture capital funding to global FinTech companies reached $13.6bn in 2016 and overall FinTech investment reached $24.7bn. Keith Fingleton, Chief Technology Advisor for financial services with IDA Ireland said “the general narrative two years ago was that FinTech was synonymous with disruption and that banks are dead. That has really changed: now, the majority of FinTech companies are not disrupting, they’re enabling- and that’s a very interesting dynamic.” CLEARBANK, the first new clearing bank to be authorized in the UK in over 250 years, launched on February 28th. It is free from the constraints of legacy technology and built on cloud infrastructure, ClearBank delivers open access to payment, current account and transactional clearing services. Regulated FinTech start-ups to incumbents will be able to access all the UK payment schemes through a single API integration. It is the only UK clearing bank that does not offer services direct to the consumer - a neutral and independent platform service that does not compete with its own customers. In addition to accessing all the UK payments schemes, it is a member of Swift, and all client funds are held at the Bank of England. This project has been kept under wraps during the last three years which is impressive considering the number of project participants. THE FINTECH START-UP ARENA IS HOTTING UP FOR 2017. So far, this quarter we have seen a number of exciting companies coming to the market offering a range of systems and applications. What has been even more interesting in this space is the number of well-established companies breaking out and forming new “Fintech Tech” companies and using their current systems and applications to increase market share of their respective markets. This, in actual fact, is a brilliant idea. Harrington Starr is currently working with a client who is a specialist platform provider in the FX Real time trading space and Exchange. In order to increase the >


5 9

Keeping up with every technology is hard, but being adaptive to minor trends and patterns is more easily achieved. company’s market share, they have broken out into a new company that will become a challenger of its current organisation and also compete against the rest of the market. Thus eventually making the boss brass the number one provider in the FX Real time trading space under two brands. Great idea; this creates more competition and more jobs which is a healthy win-win all around.

market are currently setting up RFIs to pick solutions which will solve their reporting problems. This is an exciting space which shows the opportunities that vendors are finding under regulation. PE POWERHOUSE VISTA EQUITY PARTNERS has cut a deal agreeing to acquire Canadian based FinTech DH Corp for $2.7bn. With DH Corp having just about $2.1bn in debt, the firm picks up a total tab of $4.8bn in the acquisition that is still in process of being finalised. Reportedly, the plan is to merge it with UK based start-up Misys, creating a global FinTech powerhouse in excess of $2bn in revenues.

A NUMBER OF INTERESTING PROPOSALS have been released from a variety of avenues, from cloudbased financial software to modernising business architecture seeing a revamp on the technology and product front. Keeping up with every technology is hard, but being adaptive to minor trends and patterns is more easily achieved. Several FinTech firms in the City have changed their hiring process. From listing every JS Framework ever on a spec instead of a concentration on a solid JavaScript engineer who identifies and understands key functions which is much more attractive for a perspective employer. Technologies such as ReactJS are still hot, however the training required can be very minimal and quick if your JavaScript understanding and experience is much stronger.

Automated Banks? Many experts believe that the next big disruptor within the banking world will be automated banks. It has been said that within the next decade, automated banks could replace 30% of jobs within the banking industry. It also looking likely that Financial Advisors and Analysts could also be replaced by robo-advisors. BLOCKCHAIN/DLT continues to gain momentum with an increasing number of businesses providing platforms, consultancy and working instances of the concept.

TRADEWEB HAVE PARTNERED WITH THOMSON REUTERS to launch a suite of tools to solve post-trade transparency requirements ahead of MiFID II. Approved Publication Arrangement (APA) under MiFID II allows an authorised firm to provide the service of publishing trade reports on behalf of investment firms. Thomson Reuters is working with Tradeweb to deliver this and allow incorporated users to take advantage of Thomson Reuters Elektron platform using existing infrastructure to connect to trades reported via Tradewebs APA.

HOUSTON BASED QUANT TRADING FIRM, QUANTLAB, has acquired a particular technology and intellectual property from Teza Group. Quantlab are also upping their recourse with approximately 20 new technologists and quantitative researchers joining the business. Quantlab’s Cameron Smith has been reported as saying: "Quantlab has taken the opportunity to add selectively to its research and technology capabilities, reinforcing its strong position amongst the leaders in this industry. The assets we have acquired from Teza are outstanding and will further our ambitions to provide liquidity in a fair, efficient and transparent way across all the world's major financial markets."

NEX GROUP, who recently acquired Abide Financial and deliver services into the post-trade risk and information services business, has now bundled its services together to launch a regulatory reporting platform powered by Abide Financial’s technology. The platform offers full transparency of the transaction lifecycle process and data and makes it reporting ready for any reporting regime.

THERE IS AN INCREASING IMPORTANCE for FinTech to invest in areas outside the USA. Several VC investor firms are starting to turn their attention to potential opportunities within Asia. A rebound has also been experienced in the EU, initially this rebound was only really witnessed in the UK but Germany has really taken off over the last couple of years.

THE POST-TRADE REPORTING SPACE is in overdrive with a large range of vendors applying to be ARMs and APAs under MiFID II. Also, Investment Firms across the

THE US MARKET is experiencing challenges thrown up due to the nature of their current political environment as well as the opportunities evolving from emerging technological developments for the FinTech industry players. The US has experienced significant growth in technology over the last ten years. Certain industries which have never been impacted by technology before are beginning to be affected by it in a positive way, such as transportation and healthcare. This is particularly exciting for VC investor firms. The current political climate is proving to be a bit more of a challenge. There are many questions about what this disruption will do and result in however, it is thought that the relentless drive forward of innovation and technology will not be slowed down by the geopolitical environment.

transformation of their Securities Clearing platforms and the continued growth of SwapClear, the Interest Rate Swaps & Listed Rates clearing platform that clears 95% of the world’s vanilla IRS trades. BIG NEWS THIS WEEK AROUND VIRTU FINANCIAL, the Electronic proprietary trading firm, making a bid for its rival KCG which has sent shockwaves throughout the HFT world. This move signifies a change in focus for a number of HFT organisations with volumes down significantly in the last year. Although the firms compete, there are some big differentiators in terms of geographical footprint, product, and KCG’s Agency business. Either way, if it does come to fruition over the next 3-6 months, a senior source said, they would expect a big fallout which, for some of their peers would be a great hunting ground, as KCG have several stellar individuals, hand-picked by CEO Phil Allison.

BROKERAGES, EXCHANGES, TRADING HOUSES, MTFS, A LT E R N AT I V E T R A D I N G V E N U E S

NETWORK/INFRASTRUCTURE/ SERVICE PROVIDERS

LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE are looking to go it alone and sell infrastructure services, whilst ICE are looking to sell data as part of their business strategy of acquiring many different elements in the FS space and trying to tie them together.

THERE ARE JUNIOR NEW BUSINESS ROLES coming through, however the hiring managers are being extremely picky about who they will see and hire. Roles are going unfilled in the light of not enough candidates being presented that qualify for the exact requirements of the business.

THE LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE AND DEUTSCHE BORSE MERGER was put into turmoil in March, following a report that the LSE had to sell off its Italian subsidiary MTS Markets. However, there is significant growth within their FTSE business, following their acquisition of US financial data company Mergent. This has had a positive effect on recruitment with significant headcount growth across technology and operations in London and the US.

DONAL BYRNE, CEO of Corvil, has been chosen as one of Institutional Investor’s 2016 Trading Technology 40 – a yearly ranking of some of the most influential individuals in Trading Technology. This caps a fantastic few years for Corvil which has seen a 400% increase in new client acquisition and a 40% year on year revenue growth.

EURONEXT’S MINORITY INVESTMENT into Algomi is an extension of the JV they formed to offer better liquidity to their clients for European corporate bonds trading. This partnership between businesses is endemic in the industry now and is a fantastic example of two great firms seeing the value in combining their strengths to solve industry challenges.

INVESTMENT BANKING

LCH ALSO CONTINUES TO GROW its technology and operations offering focused around the

It is thought that the relentless drive forward of innovation and technology will not be slowed down by the geopolitical environment.

Death By a thousand cuts! The Future of Banking. Banking like any other industry, is not immune to fragmentation and disintermediation, this will change how banks operate and behave. From how financial marketing specialists see their customers, to how new products are created, and services delivered. Beware the traditional banks who sit on their hands and do nothing, they will see their existing customers break away after being seduced by larger banks, online banks and innovative FinTechs. It’s not difficult to see the clues and understand the havoc that will fracture the banking industry, simply look at what happened in other sectors of the economy. For example, we have seen in the entertainment business, where product and service fragmentation, and digital channels have crippled broadcast TV, killed Blockbusters stores and rewarded personalities with staggering multimillion dollar contracts. Consumers know what > they want, and they really don’t care when, how or


6 1

where they get it from. When there’s a demand, the market responds…. either existing providers rise to the challenge, or new players will swoop in and steal their lunch!

Today, if you try to appeal to everyone, you could end up appealing to no one! THERE HAS BEEN A LOT OF TALK over the last 5 years’ of a possible “brain-drain” in the investment banks, especially in the quantitative space which is going to dominate the financial landscape for many years to come. Banks seem to have been muddling through, but they have a problem coming and that problem stems from anybody with 1 – 5 years IB experience wanting to move to the buy-side and take advantage of their experience. The banks offer an exceptional training ground, with coding standards and a clear training program offering a very good place for any graduate to start their career. The problem is that candidates become pigeonholed and can’t get involved in the range of interesting work that is available on the buy-side. As such, 1-3 years in an IB is a perfect spring-board and the best people are making that jump. This will almost certainly create a big problem for Banks in the next 5-10 years as their best Quants keep leaving and finding shelter on the buy-side.

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS in every industry sector allows media and delivery channels to speed up massive fragmentation and disintermediation in all other industries. But because regulators had previously offered the banking sector a certain level of protection against new competition, traditional financial institutions were insulated from the fallout of the Digital Revolution. This has now changed! FINTECH’S ONLINE AND PHYSICAL HIGH STREET START-UPS have upset the once stable banking market place by stepping in to accommodate customers’ needs. They have, and are constantly, redefining what it means to be “a bank”, both from the provider’s and from the customer’s perspective. Fintechs use social media and other non-traditional techniques to evaluate customer’s credit worthiness, moving away from a century of conventional wisdom dictated by the credit scores from Experian and other traditional credit scoring providers. The ability to adequately address customers’ needs now will determine the fate of every bank in the market today. The pace of change is also accelerating and there is no sign that it is going to slow down any time soon. What is current, cool and trendy today might be passé tomorrow. It is a constant battle to stay relevant. If an organisation is not constantly pushing itself, they could lose the competitive fight and become a dinosaur, extinct in the blink of an eye! All the disruption and fragmentation means financial marketing specialists can no longer view their customers as one large monolithic group, responding to the same generic marketing message. One customer’s preferences can vary by the day and depend on context. Each situation demands marketing messages and media channels that are suited to the customer audience. The banking industry’s half-hearted attempts to fulfil their customers’ needs leave customers ripe for picking by über-convenient Fintechs and because most consumers view their banking relationship as strictly transactional and not advice-based, they find it relatively easy to cut ties. This all adds up to death by a thousand cuts! Fintech’s eye banks as fat, financial targets, and they are carving off every juicy slice one at a time, until there is nothing left. The solution: to embrace the trend and build their own strategy around “fragmentation;” learn how to accommodate the customer; become a narrow, specialised bank offering a select number of products aimed at your specific customer audience; develop a strategy that will allow your bank to prosper, and become a market leader in a niche sector.

DEUTSCHE BANK loosened its grip on the European Investment Banking market last year and is now tied with Goldman Sachs in the race to be the second biggest investment bank after JP Morgan. Having been outright second in the first half of 2016 and for 2015 overall, it shared the number two slot with Goldman Sachs for the full year of 2016. This is resulting in Deutsche falling from one of the world’s top three investment banks for 2014 to sixth at the middle of 2016, following the bank cutting resources and general client fears about the bank’s financial position. AS IS FAIRLY TYPICAL FOLLOWING BONUS PAYMENTS, a number of candidates from the investment banking space are on the market and looking to move to new organisations. In particular, this year, there is a real drive towards the emerging tech and FinTech space. Our advice to candidates looking to make this switch is to really work hard on creating a high-impact CV which very clearly demonstrates your achievements and highlights the value you can bring to a new organisation.

Investment and retail banks are slashing their compliance headcount due to new automated and efficient regulatory technologies. their customer base is still using branches, but only for advice and consultations purpose. The mobile banking technology has taken a firm grip on the way people can interact with their banks and bank accounts, how they spend money and track it too so I expect a number of companies to follow in the footsteps of RBS in the coming year. GONE ARE THE DAYS OF THE COMPLIANCE CONTRACTOR as well as many permanent compliance professionals. Investment and retail banks are slashing their compliance headcount due to new automated and efficient regulatory technologies. RBS, Deutsche, UBS to name a few, are set to replace their compliance professionals with savvy regulatory computing software and systems to handle the ongoing regulatory obligations, facilitating in-depth regulatory and data analysis, and detect moneylaundering activities. QUOTE FROM BLOOMBERG: "Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc is preparing to eliminate as many as 2,000 jobs checking new customers for suspicious traits as it digitizes the process. Other lenders are also replacing compliance staff with computers as they face pressure to cut costs, including UBS Group AG, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private."

RETAIL BANKING has almost completely changed over the last ten months and we have seen several Retail banking methods come to light. Mobile banking apps have very much caught on and now they are the most preferred way of moving money and checking balances in this space. We have companies such as Starling Bank and Tandem Bank taking the lead here.

IT WAS ANNOUNCED THIS MONTH that Vista Equity Partners have agreed a deal to purchase Canadian lending, payments, and financial solutions software supplier D+H for around C$4bn including debt.

WITH THE MOBILE BANKING APP TRENDING NORTH, that must have a knock-on effect somewhere else? RBS has announced this week that they will be looking to close a number of branches up and down the country for basic transactions purposes. They stated that

IN A MARKET WHICH HAS BEEN PREDICTED TO ACCELERATE, this acquisition is the most significant development we have seen so far this year with more to come for sure. But the development is perhaps much more

SOFTWARE VENDORS

significant than the value of the deal. That’s because Vista Equity partners already owns one of the biggest banking software development companies in the UK, Misys, and has made clear that it intends to fully integrate the two companies. This integration will create a company that will instantly be recognised as a global giant in the fintech industry, employing 10,000 people and generating in excess of $2.2bn of revenue. The clients of the combined companies currently span 130 countries and include 48 of the world’s 50 biggest banks. THERE IS AN INCREASE in both new business roles and Customer Development roles becoming available to work on the market. Traditional Software vendors are looking for New Buss people and the salary levels range between £70k and £90 k plus up to x 2 uncapped OTE. THE ROLES FOR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGERS are lower and circle the £55k mark plus or minus £10k. THE VENDORS ARE SEEING a little churn with people looking to leave, where they have been with the vendor for some time. Also, where new managers have been hired, they are looking for new staff to help with their bottom line. FACTSET CONTINUE ON THEIR M&A PATH with the acquisition of BISAM, a provider of portfolio analytics software to the buy side. This follows CYMBA Technologies and Portware in becoming Factset businesses and helps the company to offer a broader range of products. By adding these businesses to their portfolio they are now able to provide portfolio management, performance measurement & attribution and execution management capabilities to complement their core areas of data and analytics. “Over the past 20 years, we have continuously invested to evolve our analytics solutions through innovation, acquisition, and strategic relationships. The combination of BISAM and FactSet allows us to better serve the critical workflows throughout the portfolio lifecycle and fulfil our clients’ need for more consistent performance and risk data, throughout their organizations.” Phil Snow (CEO of Factset) SS&C TECHNOLOGIES, a global provider of financial services software and software enabled services, have announced the official release of Vision FI. SS&C demonstrated the platform at TSAM in London last week. Vision FI is an end-to-end solution for designing, producing, and distributing both online and printed client communications. PE COMPANY, Warburg Pincus has partnered with Avaloq to accelerate growth. Avaloq is a core banking system that delivers to banks and wealth

>


6 3

managers. Having historically been known as a pure software company, Avaloq have recently expanded their offering to in include integrated service as well and this latest partnership will allow them to gather and strategies for this recent growth and expansion with secure backing in place for the next seven years. TOKYO GAS, the largest natural gas utility in Japan, selected Allegro Dev software to run their power trading operation. This is a great win for Allegro and further demonstrates the strength of their product. The versatile and easy-to-use system that has cutting edge technology will help Tokyo Gas expand their power trading business. BELGIUM BASED START-UP SILVERFIN, a cloud connected accounting platform, has raised $4.5M in their Series A round. The barely 4-year old company plugs directly into existing popular accounting software allowing both internal and external financial representatives to gain real-time insight and a better understanding of their daily financial data. SilverFin plans to use their recent cash injection to expand the small team globally, starting with the UK. TRADEWEB are now offering APA services in support of MiFID 2 reporting. Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and J.P Morgan have already committed to the Tradeweb APA services. GUY SAIDENBERG, Managing Director of the Securities Division at Goldman Sachs, said: "Our choice of Tradeweb as our non-Equities APA provider is reflective of Tradeweb's strong and proven history of delivering comprehensive and flexible regulatory compliant solutions, and their track record as a key partner to the market." THE TRADEWEB APA will receive trade data electronically via a FIX API and via a user interface. The solution will include data collection, monitoring, validation, exception processing and management information statistics, as well as determination of both standard and enhanced deferred publication arrangements. All relevant information will be made public electronically and via a website, satisfying both 'machine readable' and 'human readable' regulatory requirements. Tradeweb will apply for APA status once registration opens later this month.

A S S E T / W E A LT H / I N V E S T M E N T MANAGEMENT & HEDGE FUNDS AMUNDI is one of Europe’s leading Asset Management companies and they have announced that they have signed a binding agreement with UniCredit in order to acquire Pioneer Investments for a figure in the region of €3.5million. As a major part of the acquisition and merger, Amundi will enter into a long term strategic partnership with UniCredit for the distribution of

asset management products. Pioneer’s Dublinbased office will be integrating with Amundi's London office and this is expected to happen over a 12-month period. THE BIG NEWS IN ELECTRONIC TRADING has been the unsolicited bid of $1.5 billion for KCG by Virtu Financial. There have been a number of theories as to the reasoning behind the bid, including Virtu’s belief that they could streamline KCG’s operations to make them more profitable and a suggestion that it may simply be a way to try to eliminate a competitor in the market. Either way, there is little doubt that KCG’s shareholders will want the firm to take the bid seriously. With the HFT market being squeezed, a merger may be the best way forward for both firms. HSES has seen a growth in control function mandates as firms tighten their compliance, risk, and audit functions across the buy-side. There are also more candidates looking to move on post-Brexit and the US elections, and this could well be precipitated by increasing demand. Mandates in the front office are focussing on raising assets and retaining profitable clients rather than in the portfolio management/research and manufacturing functions. Geographically, we are seeing client demand in Switzerland, London and the UAE within the areas previously mentioned. THE BUY-SIDE MERGER AND ACQUISITION TREND CONTINUES, fast on the heels of the recent Henderson Global Investors and Janus Capital merger, which will create a new fund house of more than $320 billion. In Q1, a merger deal between Standard life and Aberdeen Asset Management was announced, the deal would create the UK’s biggest fund manager with £660 billion under management. A reason cited for the rise in mergers in the fund management industry is due to the pressure to cut costs driven by the rise in passive investments. The new combined Standard Life Aberdeen Asset Management however, view the merger as an opportunity to grow and challenge US rivals such as BlackRock and Vanguard. It will be interesting to see the merger unfold and

Bloomberg are losing staff due to natural attrition, as opposed to redundancies, this is mainly due to the banks and brokerages cutting back on the number of people looking at screens. However, the enterprise data side of Bloomberg appears to be doing well. Thomson Reuters have let some 2000 people go, over the last quarter and, if rumours are correct, then there is more bloodletting to go. This is due to the lacklustre performance of their terminal business and heavy competition from aggregated data feed suppliers in an increasingly homogenised market. Other vendors are not in a growth phase at this time, although, as previously mentioned, ICE is growing their new business function.

see where it leaves employees from both Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life. Already, it has been touted that the CEOs of each organisation will share the role as co-heads. In a merger like this, it is highly likely the best-performing managers with the strongest investment propositions will win out.

Will it be left to Hedge Funds to save Europe? European governments are looking to Hedge Funds to help them meet their borrowing needs, as banks are now coming away from being active in the sovereign debt market as pressure mounts on their balance sheets. The intellectual arms race between quant driven funds is particularly hot at present, funds are looking for systematically driven trading opportunities, which provide an alternative to latency arbitrage. The half-life of latency arbitrage-based strategies are decreasing which means more effort has to be put in for diminishing returns. Some funds are switching to machine learning or low frequency and data analysis intensive methods to avoid the latency race. Apart from trading firms, generally we continue to see an exodus of experienced front office, quantitative, and technology people from the big sell-side banks disillusioned with constant change and questioning their longer-term career opportunities. Hedge funds and other buy side organisations seem to benefit as they continue to upgrade and diversify into different markets and products.

ETFs ETFs are increasingly being utilised to reduce trading costs within asset management and we have seen a large trend towards hiring professionals with a deep understanding of this product.

C O N S U LTA N C I E S Congratulations to Baringa who this month were announced as the winners of Market Policy and Advisory from the Commodities Business Awards. This shows great recognition for the hard work, dedication and knowledge Baringa consultants bring to the commodities industry. They truly are the industry leaders and the brand choice for all the major trading and utility firms across Europe.

BONUS SEASON across the banking sector has been diverse with a definite move towards closing the gap in total comp from VP to Director and MD trying to put blocks in place to retain the stars of the future. WE HAVE ALSO SEEN A NUMBER of new financing businesses pop up, mainly from banks, where appetite has significantly diminished- whether it’s a hedge fund looking to deploy cash into the SME market, leveraged or structured finance around Real Estate or Infrastructure and, more recently, refinancing legacy debt/credit transactions, there is a definite new market developing, which is attracting some very impressive talent, so watch this space.

M A R K E T D ATA P R O V I D E R S

With the HFT market being squeezed, a merger may be the best way forward for both KCG and Virtu Financial.

The acquisitions made by Factset and the Thomson Reuters’ acquisitions of, broker-neutral EMS vendor, REDI, are further examples of market data providers expanding their product portfolios. This is a logical step with many financial firms looking to consolidate the number of vendors they use in order to drive costs savings. We expect to see more of this over the course of 2017 especially with some of the usual M&A names having been quiet for a relatively long period of time.


6 5

INSIGH R R TS A T S

INSIGH R R TS A T S

They try to make me go to rehab and I say… that could be a good idea?

AWS Vs Azure

My name is Scott, and I am an internet addict. In the modern-day era, we are increasingly connected yet some would argue we have never been more distant from one another. The anomaly on the underground, or any form of transport for that matter, is By Scott the person who isn’t hunched over Richardson their device; whether it be a smart phone, tablet or heads-up display whilst driving, we are consistently connected whenever we are on the move. So, what about when we stop? Well, again, I would argue that our natural reaction to a break in play or down-time, is to pick up the phone and have a look on whatever social media site of choice we are drawn to and be transported to a world of baby pictures, motivational quotes, or be reminded of exactly what we were doing on this day nine years ago, which I can guarantee wasn’t prying ourselves away from our smart devices to have a look at what is right in front of us! I am as guilty as anyone of being distracted by the technology at my fingertips. Just this weekend gone, I remember having a basketball game on the TV, a rugby game playing on the tablet and still scrolling through Instagram to see what rugby and basketball players from other teams were doing post-game. Time was, you would be lucky to get one game a week and, depending on the time of year, your exposure to the variety of sport on would depend almost entirely on your geographical location. Now, we have any sport you could wish to watch at the touch of a button and not only that, a constant stream of highlights straight to your device pose the question why you would ever watch an entire game in one sitting? This is obviously a very sports-focussed take on the situation but it is reflective of the way we receive any information. We are in the Twitter generation meaning that, instead of reading an entire article, we get the gist of the piece in 140 characters, or less.

Do we have to look at the way we disseminate information to this new, bitesize generation? Are presentations a thing of the past? Instead of an hour-long key-note, will our audience react better to a sub-five-minute video of “the best bits”? I think there is still room in the professional world for longer forms of information sharing, but I accept it may not remain this way for long. In an interview conducted with Virgin, research psychologist Max Blumberg compared the effect of being constantly distracted by internet content to the symptoms of ADHD. Our cortex is what differentiates us from the animal kingdom allowing us to be able to ignore stimuli whilst focussing on one task whereas animals react to every stimulus, regardless of what they are doing. ADHD sufferers are similarly challenged, which is why

I am as guilty as anyone of being distracted by the technology at my fingertips. Just this weekend gone, I remember having a basketball game on the TV, a rugby game playing on the tablet and still scrolling through Instagram to see what rugby and basketball players from other teams were doing post-game.

they take Ritalin to reignite their cortex, yet people are voluntarily allowing themselves to become overwhelmed with information every time they go online. So, is there a cure for this self-imposed ADHD syndrome? Well, internet addiction is due to be added to the DSM and therein recognised as an official psychological disease. If it is a disease then, by its nature, people will be looking for a cure. What form this cure will take is interesting: will it be a case of self-regulated restriction to such content? Or even a “cold turkey” approach in the hope that it will speed up the re-ignition of the redundant cortex? Personally, I think the cure is social. Instead of automatically heading for Google (other search engines are available, apparently), Twitter or Wikipedia every time you have a question, have a conversation with someone about it. This was the original way information was passed on from one person to the other, from generation to generation, “his story” became “history” and from houses made of thatch, came cities made of steel, as a result. The more we take the easy option and give in to the technology available, the more liable we are to be left in a helpless (and more worryingly, jobless) position as Artificial Intelligence becomes more sociable than we do by learning in the exact same method that we have used for millennia. AI is coming and I, for one, welcome its arrival. However, the day I spend more time talking to Alexa or Siri than the people that sit within feet of my desk, is the day I accept I have succumbed to the easy option and check myself into internet rehab.

The topic of cloud computing has been big news over the last few years and it is playing a huge role in anything involving improving work flow processes within the public, health care, and schooling sectors. We have also seen an increase in cloud computing across finance, By Jon more specifically within the FinTech Kay sector but it is clear to see the sell-side sector is struggling with adapting these cloud technologies due to the concerns over regulation, security, compliance, and control. However, the powers of turning to AWS or Azure can give your technical infrastructure greater scalability, flexibility, efficiency and improved costs. London was recently crowned the king of FinTech ahead of Silicon Valley, Chicago, Singapore, Tokyo and many more. This is due to innovation remaining high in the UK’s capital. An example of this that anybody can relate to is how Netflix beat Blockbuster; by setting up a business model, which didn’t focus on late fee’s as their main ROI and built a model that offered a greater service with emerging technologies, enabling videos to be streamed. This is how FinTech is keeping ahead of the banks and offering a greater service with cloud computing technologies. The question is, which service do you use? With AWS and Azure competing for the crown for the best cloud computing service, who do you go for? Comparison between AWS & Azure ■ AWS are leaders with around 31% market share compared to Azures 9% ■ The 2 giants remain competitive in the pricing structures, but the main difference lying between them is Microsoft charge per minute, whereas Amazon charge per hour. ■ Both platforms have renowned security certifications and audits, but Microsoft possesses the industries recognisable security certifications and were the first to be recognised by the European Unions and International > data protection standards.


6 7

INSIGH R R TS A T S

The sharpest axes in recruitment ■ AWS has flexibility around the development platform technologies but isn’t as flexible on infrastructure choices. Azure has a wider selection for operating systems, but doesn’t have the flexibility to support all technology languages and tools. ■ AWS is easier to use open source tools, whereas Azure is stronger with Microsoft tools and perhaps technologies more companies within the financial technology space know and trust. ■ Microsoft has a strong focus on data storage being kept simple with readily available SQL database availability. AWS boasts an API access to do almost anything and everything. ■ For financial services technology, AWS can be seen as more risky due to their hybrid cloud strategy.

Something has become very apparent to me since joining Harrington Starr: we have a better conversion rate of 'open vacancy' to 'successful placement' than any other recruitment business than I have worked for and by quite a stretch. Whilst we do have a lot of very talented recruiters here, our By Tim success rates aren't born purely out Dobie of innate ability, we have a number of tools at our disposal which I believe are key to our success here. There is, though, one which, to my mind, makes the biggest difference. If you are a client of Harrington Starr, you may have seen our job qualification form. When I first saw it, I must admit, it was a daunting sight. It is possibly the most thorough document I have seen in recruitment. Once I got my head around effective use of it though, this four-sided behemoth of a form guides both recruiter and customer through every aspect requisite of consideration before the process of finding the right candidate is embarked upon. At Harrington Starr we talk about the concept of 'sharpening the axe'. Based on Abraham Lincoln’s mantra that if he were given six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend the first four hours sharpening his axe. In essence: the more you prepare, the easier the task at hand becomes. Our job spec form is what we use to sharpen our axe. It is likely that a Harrington Starr consultant will take more of a customer's time to qualify open positions than our competition. We will also ask more probing and possibly even awkward questions. Once that consultative process is complete however, we are in position to be able to effectively and accurately market that job to the appropriate tranche of the market, beyond the capability of our competition. This creates a win-win-win scenario for our customers, our candidate network and ourselves in providing efficient, informed and accurate service. Admittedly this is a pretty simple concept, at Harrington Starr, however, we often draw similarities between recruitment and sport, in that being successful in sport is often about executing the basics well and this is a great example of how we do that on a daily basis.

There are a large amount of pros and cons for using AWS against Azure or vice-versa, but it is clear for all to see they are both powerful cloud computing platforms that can enhance software platforms and performance. The pros seem to outweigh the cons for utilising these storage facilities for FinTech with either open-source platforms or Microsoft environments. Many top-tier Banks and Buy-side Firms that I deal with are already using cloud computing and my prediction is that it won’t be long until the rest follow. With Microservices playing a huge role within the new breed of software developers, the infrastructure provided by cloud computing is ideal for keeping the best technologists within FinTech.

6 8

a v a J t n e n a m Per t n e m p o l e v De Disrupter/ Start-up

Back Office/ Settlements Junior £30k - £40k 0k Mid-Level £40k - £7

- £100k Senior/Lead £70k 0k+ Architect £65k - £9 nce outside Senior with experie £65k of finance £50k -

Junior £30 - £45k 5k Mid-Level £45k - £7

- £100k Senior/Lead £75k Architect £90k+ nce outside Senior with experie £80k of finance £60k -

Vendor

Front Office

Junior £30k - £40k 0k Mid-Level £50k - £7 - £120k Senior/Lead £70k Architect £80k+

Junior £30 - £55k 0k Mid-Level £50k - £8 - £120k Senior/Lead £80k Architect £100k+

nce Senior with experie £50k - £65k outside of finance


Risk/Middle Office

Exchange/ Brokerage

Junior £30 - £45k 5k Mid-Level £45k - £7 - £110k Senior/Lead £75k Architect £90k+ nce outside Senior with experie £80k of finance £60k -

Junior £30 - £50k 0k Mid-Level £50k - £8 - £110k Senior/Lead £80k Architect £80k+


6 9

Permanent C#/.Net Market C# .Net Developer Buy Side/ Commodities House £35k - £50k £45k - £65k £60k - £100k

Quantitative Trading Salary Trends Traders generating PnL/Portfolio Managers

SQL Developer

Vendor £22k - £33k £40k - £45k £70k - £85k

Buy Side/ Commodities House £30k - £40k £45k - £55k £60k - £90k

Junior Mid Senior/Lead

Investment Banking £120k - £200k

Vendor £20k - £33k £33k - £45k £45k - £60k

Mid Tier Hedge Fund/Proprietary Trading Firm £80k - £120k Top Tier Hedge Fund/Proprietary Trading Firm £100k - £150k For experience Traders/Portfolio Managers there tends to be a

Exchange/ Brokerage £35k - £55k £45k - £65k £65k - £100k

Sell Side £40k - £45k £50k - £65k £65k - £100k

Exchange/ Brokerage • £40k - £50k £50k - £70k

Junior Mid Senior/Lead

big shift in the proportions of base salary and bonus versus Investment banks as professionals get more Senior. In a big contrast to earlier in their careers, Investment Banks will start to

Sell Side £40k - £45k £45k - £60k £60k - £80k

pay dramatically more on their base salaries versus Hedge Funds/ Proprietary Trading firms who will start to pay more on the bonuses.

Masters or PhD Quant straight out of University Front End/UI

Data Science/Vendor Position £40k - £50k Investment Banking Role £60k - £65k

Angular JS £30k - £40k £40k - £55k £60k - £80k

React JS £40k - £50k £55k - £60k £65k - £100k

HTML5 £25k - £35k £40k - £50k £55k - £70k

Mid Tier Hedge Fund/Proprietary Trading Firm £55k - £70k Top Tier Hedge Fund/Proprietary Trading Firm £65k - £80k For anyone with a degree or PhD in a mathematics, scientific or quantitative subject this continue to be a well trodden path to head down however the competition is incredibly fierce and the real top roles are very hard to come by. A number of people apply and few are able to secure positions. There is a higher acceptance rate amongst Data Science, Vendor and Investment Banking positions but the work/salary is as lucrative as the buy-side.

Researchers/Traders with 1-3 years experience Investment Banking £65k - £90k Mid Tier Hedge Fund/Proprietary Trading Firm £70k - £100k Top Tier Hedge Fund/Proprietary Trading Firm £80k - £120k


7 1

Permanent Testing Market 2016 Manual Test Analyst Junior to Mid-Level £35k - £45k Mid-Level to Senior £45k - £60k Senior to Lead/Head Of £60k - £75k

QA Automation Engineer QA Test Analyst Manual/Automation

Junior to Mid-Level £40k - £50k Mid-Level to Senior £50k - £70k Senior to Lead/Head Of £70k - £95k+

Junior to Mid-Level £35k - £45k Mid-Level to Senior £45k - £60k Senior to Lead/Head Of £60k+

Developer In Test (SDET) Junior to Mid-Level £50k - £60k Mid-Level to Senior £60k - £75k Senior to Lead/Head Of £80k+

QA/Test Manager Junior to Mid-Level £65k - £75k Mid-Level to Senior £75k - £90k Senior to Lead/Head Of £100k+

7 2

About Harrington Starr Imagine if you had a Recruitment partner whose purpose was to help you grow.

Imagine if you had a Recruitment partner that believed better people made by better clients, better candidates and better people. Imagine if you had a Recruitment partner that cared as much about putting the right people into the right businesses, as they did about investing back into the community they belonged.

For more information, please contact: Toby Babb at Harrington Starr

You can! Harrington Starr. Your Success, Our Business. In 2010 we launched Harrington Starr and over the past five years we have become the Global Leaders in Financial Services and Commodities Technology recruitment, insight, events & consultancy. Delivering high quality opportunities for professionals on a permanent, retained, contract, and interim basis, to over 500 partners within the sector.

7 3

T: 0203 002 2850 F: 0207 022 1750 E: [email protected] Harrington Starr Company Registration Number: 7246003 Company Headquarters: Vintners Place, 68 Upper Thames Street, London EC4V 3BJ Company Telephone Number: 0203 587 7007 Company Email: [email protected]

EDITORIAL TEAM C

Tom Kemp

James Hounslow

N

T

R

Hari Sopal

I

B

Elliot Parfitt

U

T

O

Richard Twumasi

R

S

Lee Harding

Tony Marshall

Rob Grant

Harrington Starr Limited W W W . H A R R I N G T O N S T A R R . C O M T: +0044 203 587 7007 E: [email protected]

Lee Cohen

Tim Dobie

Lee Farthing

Gav Patel

Lewis Bickerton

Ehab Roufail

Luigi Negri

Caroline Friel

Harriet Lamplugh de Smith

Claudine Eastwood

Dominic Worthington

Scott Childs

Ricky Singh

Antonio Ciarlegio

Ian Bailey

Ryan Waters

Toby Babb Editor

Jonny Kay

Ed Manley

Vikki Miller

Harry Vane

Scott Richardson Assistant Editor

Felix Symonds Russel Adams Robyn Harper

Sarah Philby

Bradleigh Golder

Stephen Quinn

James Platt

Michael Paterson

Ani Lputian

Donna Gaerty

VINTNERS PLACE, 68 UPPER THAMES STREET LONDON, EC4V 3BJ

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

@harringtonstarr

FOLLOW US ON LINKED IN

(search Harrington Starr)

DOWNLOAD OUR FREE APP

Harry Anderson

Elliott Broom

Dan Biddulph Art Director


77 55

DESIGNED BY DANIEL BIDDULPH ~ [email protected]

Nadia EdwardsDashti

O

H A R R I N G T O N

S T A R R recruıtment consultancy

DEVELOPMENT

BUY & SELL SIDE TRADING SYSTEMS

COMMODITIES IT

QUANT DEV AND ALGO TRADING

BIG DATA, DATABASE & BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

TESTING AND QUALITY ASSURANCE

JOIN THE EXCLUSIVE COMMUNITY FOR FINANCIAL SERVICES AND COMMODITIES TRADING TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONALS

SALES, PRODUCT & MARKETING LOW LATENCY, FIX, CONNECTIVITY & MARKET DATA

SENIOR & EXECUTIVE HIRES

TRADE, OPERATIONS & SYSTEM SUPPORT

LOGISTICS & SUPPLY CHAIN

RISK & COMPLIANCE

OVER 500 OF THE WORLD’S LEADING COMPANIES IN FINANCIAL SERVICES AND COMMODITIES TECHNOLOGY TRUST HARRINGTON STARR TO DELIVER WORLD CLASS TALENT.

JOIN THE COMMUNITY

www.harrıngtonstarr.com 0203 587 7007