About

Experience

• Work experience

• June 2021 - present
  

  Senior Product Manager

  Client: Fitness Technology / e-Commerce Retailer
  
  Problem/Opportunity: Growing the Freeletics training app from a bodyweight offering to one that includes equipment gives users a more complete workout experience whilst providing the business opportunity of fulfilling the demand for workout equipment.
  
  Product: An e-commerce platform and mobile app integration.

  • Shopify 2.0 using latest theme technology.
  • iOS and Android app feature to provide product recommendations at appropriate moments.
  • In app checkout experience using Apple and Google pay.
  • New workout modalities using equipment

  
  Contribution:

  • Senior Product Manager
  • Owned Product Strategy for all e-commerce related features.
  • Initiated and managed launch of a new store theme.
  • Pivoted the app from a bodyweight only experience to include equipment.

  
  Result:

  • Opened new revenue stream accounting for 25% in 4 months
  • Increase product adoption KPIs by 20% in 4 months
• January 2020 - May 2021
  

  Independant Consultant

  Client: e-Commerce Retailer
  
  Problem/Opportunity: As a brand growing its digital capabilities through e-commerce and mobile applications, lululemon had identified that strategically positioned product and query recommendations should drive engagement, revenue and other business KPIs.
  
  Product: A suite of recommendation APIs backed by Machine Learning models.

  • Models available that are driven by product, individual visitor, session, product category and query.
  • Scalable and cached API technology using AWS to support both web and mobile apps
  • Solr based backend
  • Models fed with all product views, add to carts, and purchases in near real-time
  • Standard UX components for integration at strategic points of a visitors experience
  • A/B testable

  
  Contribution:

  • Product Specialist/Business Analyst
  • Functional API design and documentation
  • Onboarding of data science team to supply models
  • Consulting digital teams on the type of recommendations to include, how to go about it, and how to A/B test

  
  Result:

  • A/B tests projected CAD$65 million incremental yearly revenue
  • API delivered, used and A/B tested for both web and mobile apps
  • 2 Contract renewals to continue building the capability
• May 2018 - July 2019
  

  Independant Consultant

  Client: Market Surveillance FinTech - Owned by KRM22 (UK Risk Management FinTech) and Cinnober (Swedish Trading Engine FinTech recently acquired by NASDAQ)
  
  Problem/Opportunity: There is a growing number of potential clients who require effective market surveillance.

  • Regulated financial firms and trading venues in Europe are required to conduct market surveillance under the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR)
  • Globally it is required under a range of local regulation
  • Un-regulated firms also use market surveillance to build trust in current and prospective clients, or in anticipation of becoming regulated e.g. cryptocurrency exchanges

  In a world of ever increasing volumes of trade data, legacy systems and technology are struggling to keep up with the processing demands. Its now possible to harness faster and more flexibly deployable technology to deliver a superior product whilst incurring lower costs. It has created an opportunity to disrupt the market.
  
  Product: A real-time market surveillance detection and investigation tool architected to support transaction volumes of modern firms.

  • Built using the latest open source big data technologies (Kafka, Flink, HDFS, Cassandra)
  • Brand new user workflows and suspicious activity visualisations (React, OpenFin)
  • Deployable on premises or "as a service" (docker, kubernetes)
  • Support exchanges, brokers and buyside firms across asset classes: equity, fixed income, listed derivatives, commodities, energy, cryptocurrencies, FX

  
  Contribution:

  • Product Owner/Specialist
  • Lead functional designer - from inception of ideas through to testing product before delivery
  • Built healthy client relationships to develop concepts in the product
  • Algorithm design for abuse detection
  • Data model and ingest design
  • Managed team of Business Analysts and UX designers

  
  Result:

  • Prospective client feedback that the product has market leading capabilities (particularly regarding back testing of data)
  • Product design completed from inception
  • Engaged as a Consultant based on performance at Simplitium (another Cinnober owned company)
• May 2017 - April 2018
  

  Independant Consultant

  Client: Data Publishing Company - UK subsidiary of Cinnober (Swedish Trading Engine FinTech recently acquired by NASDAQ)
  
  Problem/Opportunity: New European regulation (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II)) introduced the requirement for all Investment Firms and Trading Venues in the EU to provide greater transparency of their quoting and trading activities. The purpose of the regulation is to provide investors with greater visibility of prices for a much larger range of financial instruments than has previously been possible. It was a completely new requirement for many firms.
  
  Product: Based on this demand Simplitium developed data publishing solutions to assist Investment Firms and Trading Venues of all sizes to meet their compliance obligations:

  • TRADEcho - a partnership with the London Stock Exchange was established to develop a transparency product for investment firms
  • FacilitEx - an independent product was developed to meet the transparency needs of Trading Venues (devoid of conflict of interest with LSE)

  
  Contribution:

  • Lead product designer of features to maintain competitive market position vs 6 other firms
  • Designed products under opaque regulatory conditions based on assumptions, then successfully adapting designs as requirements became clearer. Resulted in the ability to maintain market position by meeting clients compliance demands effectively
  • Running client workshops to develop features including tier 1 banks and top 10 investment managers
  • Product delivery troubleshooting with technical teams
  • Initiated cross industry initiative with competing firms to collect and disseminate new critical market wide reference data. It was eventually tendered to Smartstream RDU
  • Development of functional testing harness to validate requirement delivery
  • Development of data validation service for new regulatory data

  
  Result:

  • Both products delivered on time to the market to meet regulatory compliance (3rd January 2018)
  • TRADEcho has a top half market position (revenue in order of £millions)
  • Retained by client to advise on new initiatives (1 contract renewal)
• Oct 2015 - Dec 2016
  

  Independant Consultant

  Client: UK Investment Bank with strengths in Rates, FX and Credit Derivatives and a corporate focussed client base
  
  Problem/Opportunity: As an Investment Firm within the EU, Natwest Markets was subject to European regulation including Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) and Market in Financial Instrument Directive II (MiFID II). To continue operating in the market, remain competitive and to avoid non-compliance fines, a vast amount of business, operational and technology changes were required.
  
  Product: For MAR, the biggest product changes were:

  • Deal Management/Control Room systems – greater tracking of when individuals have access to “inside information”
  • Research systems – collating and publicly disseminating “investment recommendations”
  • Surveillance systems – feeding surveillance systems with quote, order and trade data in order to detect market abuse and create Suspicious Trade and Order Reports (STORs) for submission to regulators

  For MiFIR/MiFID II the biggest product changes were:

  • Regulatory Rules Engines – determining whether quotes are subject to pre trade transparency, and whether trades are subject to post trade transparency (and when)
  • Quoting and publication systems – ensuring “firm” quotes are captured and have a public publication mechanism (based on the regulatory rules engines)
  • Transaction systems – ensuring transactions are published to the regulator
  • Legal Status calculator – use of internal trade and industry data to determine whether or not Natwest Markets should be registered as a Systematic Internaliser in the market place (e.g. a systematic, frequent and substantial trading firm)
  • Best execution reports – use of trade and quote data to produce quarterly reports to be made public
  • Reference data – obtain ISINs for OTC instruments that previously didn’t require identifiers

  
  Contribution:

  • Lead technical analyst accross MAR and MiFID II
  • Strategic architectural review of trading practices, protocols and technology to establish gap to compliance
  • Design of Regulatory Rules Engine and engagement of vendor to build
  • Data analysis to understand Systematic Internaliser status
  • Reference data design
  • Advisor to voice sales trading workflow changes
  • Delivered investment recommendation transparency via a website

  
  Result:

  • Delivered MAR changes with acceptance from Legal and Compliance that the risk of non-compliance actions were considered low (non-compliance fines would be in the order of £100millions)
  • Work completed on MiFID II changes have, subsequent to my departure, been accepted in the same way as MAR leaving only a low risk of non-compliance (non-compliance fines would be in the order of £100millions)
  • 2 contract renewals (before leaving for sabbatical)
• May - Oct 2015
  

  Associate

  Client: Private side of US wholesale Investment Bank
  
  Problem/Opportunity: Execution of equity Accelerated Book-built Offerings (ABOs) requires the involvement of a significant number of teams and business processes within a very short time period (2-3 hours). Due to the complexity of synchronising these processes a number of near misses occured involving the adequate allocation of captial to the execution. Emails and individual diligence were relied upon excessively for a successful execution.
  
  Product: A brand new product was designed using a Business Process Mapping Notion (BPMN) execution engine and web based user interface to allow traders on the syndicate desk to have confidence that all business processes are completed when executing an ABO. The product joined up the business processes by providing early communication to all affected parties and set in motion processes including:

  • KYC checks
  • Credit risk checks
  • Capital risk checks
  • Wall crossing of relevant Capital Commitment Committee members and any sales people
  • Legal reviews
  • Scheduling of a Capital Commitements Committee meeting

  
  Contribution:

  • Lead process designer and owner of BPMN
  • Business analyst working with all affected teams
  • Coordination of end-to-end functional testing
  • Contributed to the extension of the design to the Initial Public Offering (IPO) process

  
  Result:

  • Product delivered and adopted immediately by all affected teams
  • Reduced operational, reputational and financial risk (in the order of $millions)
• 2013 - 2015
  

  Senior Associate

  Client: Global Equity Trading desk at UK Branch of US Investment Manager
  
  Problem/Opportunity:

  • The Global Equity Execution desks were consolidated under a new Global Head of Trading who required unified data on trading volumes, desk performance and traders performance to make management decisions.
  • European regulation mandated that equity trading by asset managers was quantified using a methodology called Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA) to drive "best execution" practises. A new quant team was hired to the global desks to produce this but required adequate tooling.
  • Portfolio Managers running funds demanded global TCA data to understand how well the trading desks were executing different orders at different times to establish whether changes were required to the investment process (e.g. reducing slippage from the decision point).
  • The order and trade data required to perform TCA globally was from 3 entirely different order management systems.

  
  Product: GEARS - a new data warehouse and data visualisation product was designed and developed to unify the disparate global data, interface to market data tick databases, and run a single methodology of trading slippage and other TCA metrics across all data. It was composed of the following components:

  • Informatica Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) for the global order and trade data
  • KDB - big data equity tick database for market data
  • Oracle - database using a star schema
  • Spotfire - interactive dashboarding
  • Business Intelligence - report creation

  
  Contribution:

  • Technology Product Owner - backlog grooming with quant team and desk head
  • Scrum master to a team of 5 developers
  • SME on price slippage (key component of TCA) using market data from a big data tick source
  • Lead functional designer to unify disparate and legacy global data to a new design that ensured metric consistency
  • Design and built business intelligence dashboards in Spotfire (TIBCO) and reports in Business Objects (SAP)
  • Author of functional testing scripts for data quality (SQL)
  • Maintained wiki on the subject matter and product
  • Liaison between quant team and technology team
  • Managing multiple global stakeholders (Quant Team, Trading Management, Equity Management Team, Commission Reporting, and Compliance) particularly in EMEA and Asia

  
  Result:

  • First time global order data had been benchmarked and joined together
  • Immediate adoption of dashboards and reports by desk heads
  • The TCA data informed process improvement to the trading and investment processes that saved end investors collectively in the order of £millions/day
  • Promotion from Associate to Senior Associate
• 2011 - 2013
  

  Analyst

  Client: FX Trading desk of UK Investment Bank
  
  Problem/Opportunity: Following the financial crisis of 2008, the American financial regulator (CFTC) introduced regulation called the Dodd Frank act. Part of this initiative was to reduce the risk in the financial system between counterparties (credit risk) by the clearing of trades via a central counterparty. In anticipation of the regulation, the emerging markets FX trading desk at RBS Corporate and Investment Banking wanted to begin the clearing process for FX Non Deliverable Forwards with a secondary motive of reducing the bilateral margin costs when trading.
  
  Product: Front to back workflow to clear NDFs at London Clearing House (LCH), Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and Singapore Exchange (SGX). Included:

  • Internal trading GUI to request clearing
  • Electonic trading interface from external trading platforms (e.g. EBS, RTNS)
  • Rules engine to determine eligible clearing trades
  • Workflow engine to track clearing status
  • Affirmation with counterparties (MarkitSERV and internal status tool) - messaging using FpML
  • Feeding Credit Risk, Market Risk, Confirmations (to suppress confirmations), Settlements and Finance systems.
  • Initially Interbank trading, laterly Executing Broker trading

  
  Contribution:

  • Rules engine and integration design
  • Functional test designer - automated using excel and sql extracts
  • Global test coordination (London, Chicago, India, Singapore)
  • Technical debugging of messaging layer between systems
  • Author of trade back-loading requirements to clear large amounts of existing trades

  
  Result:

  • Reduced credit risk for RBS (potentially unlimited £)
  • Reduced systemic risk to the industry
  • Reduced margin costs of trading bilaterally

  
  Other:

  • FX Business analyst: designed data analysis to systematically detect rogue Historic Rate Rollovers which could allow the indefinite obfuscation of losses
  • Equities Developer: on the Fidessa platform, re-engineered the reporting layer in TCL scripting language
• 2009 - 2011
  

  Consultant

  Client: Defence clients
  
  Problem/Opportunity: A number of products including data warehouses, search tools and web based workflow applications required support.
  
  Product: Technically skilled support team.
  
  Contribution:

  • Ran a 3 man team covering 2nd and 3rd line support issues
  • Developed maintenance scripts in bash script and SQL

  
  Result:

  • Zero open incident count every week

  
  Other:

  • Business Analyst: Crown Prosection Service (CPS) - business study of case manage solution

• Education

• 2005 - 2009
  

  Electrical and Electronic Engineering MEng (specialising in wireless and multimedia technology) - 2.1