Going Live

In the last month we went live with not one but two products built entirely by our own development team. It was a culmination of team effort across departments and when a user came and thanked me for the product it gave a tremendous sense of satisfaction. However, the journey to this point was not an easy one and full of challenges and great learnings.

We are an Indian trading company that has recently embraced technology as its strategic driver. I joined around two years back to find a very nascent internal technology stack with some applications that did the job but could not scale to where the business wanted to go. The existing team was quite small and dependency on vendor platforms was high. Upon joining, I was given the direction of streamlining the many systems such that business scales with out increase in complexity. Hence it led to a vision of one integrated framework for the following use cases for the entire trade lifecycle:

1. Manual and automated trading (non HFT) for all asset classes across venues using FIX protocol and configurable pre trade risk checks
2. Real time risk analytics system and post trade risk checks and alerts
3. Trade capture, booking, reconciliation and settlement exception workflow for mid and back office operations
4. Complete MIS system with Business Intelligence reporting capabilities

However, the nature of the business is increasingly bespoke and thus complex. We thus needed a system that could easily adapt to the bespoke nature with a minimal turn-around time. The concept of Model Driven Development where all domain knowledge will reside in the database as models and code gets generated for those models fitted the bill to be the elusive solution for the above requirement along with the ingredient of Service Oriented Architecture.

The idea was evangelised and funding was obtained from the business to build a strong team and product instead of buying an existing product. The entire team worked in an environment similar to a startup. I enjoyed doing a lot of coding myself after a long gap and it was great to be back doing what I love the most. But what gave me a higher sense of fulfilment was watching the team with many fresh graduates aligning with the vision and taking higher ownership of the implementation.

Such a system needs time to build and it would not have been possible to embark on this mission if it was not for the patience and support of some business folks. Patience is however not infinite and like any other startup or journey also took us through the valley of despair. Now with the delivery of the first phase of the operations and trading systems success seems near but this is just the end of the beginning and we have a good way to go and am looking forward to enjoying this pursuit.

We are always in the lookout for new talent and if you are a Java or C# (WPF) developer or a Business Analyst in the trading domain and interested in building great products do connect with me through a personal message via LinkedIn.