Chief Operating Officer with 15 years in IT/general management and strong experience in financial markets. Led a financial product unit; enhanced process maturity; recruited and retained talented teams; reengineered complex legacy systems; designed, delivered and marketed competitive new offerings.
[OPTIONS MARKET MAKING FIRM] Chief Operating Officer Apr 2006 – Present
Company develops, markets and supports a proprietary application for real-time valuation, risk/P&L management, auto-quoting and program trading of options and their associated underlying instruments. Application serves external customers as well as the market makers and proprietary traders within Company's trading division.
• Conducted an industry-wide survey of solutions for equity smart routing—ranging from off-the-shelf event processing engines to agency brokerage services—and provided recommendations based on cost/benefit analyses. • Developed a detailed model of technology-related costs and revenues, yielding ability to: - Understand the drivers of marginal cost - Assess the profitability of various pricing strategies - Estimate marginal cost/profitability of new customers • Recruited a seasoned Product Manager and guided the creation of sales demonstration materials. • Designed and implemented a system of performance metrics and load tests to identify sources of latency within the application; worked with IT managers to define infrastructure and software-related changes to improve system performance.
MERRILL LYNCH & CO. – BROADCORT EXECUTION SERVICES Director, Head of ISI Systems Group Apr 2004 – May 2005
The ISI System was a wholesale direct market access (DMA) offering supporting proprietary trading groups, market makers, regional specialists and trading system vendors. In 2004, Merrill Lynch took over ISI through its acquisition of ABN AMRO’s Clearing and Execution Services unit.
• Participated in the marketing of ABN AMRO Clearing and Execution Services to potential buyers; intimately involved in both pre- and post-deal integration planning. • Key organizer in the shutdown of the ISI System, involving the phased transfer onto Merrill systems of more than 100 customers and order flow in excess of 40,000,000 shares per day.
ABN AMRO, INC. – CLEARING & EXECUTION SERVICES Senior Vice President, Head of ISI Systems Group Sep 1999 – Mar 2004
Promoted from First Vice President to Senior Vice President in October 2001 Promoted from Vice President to First Vice President in March 2000
The ISI System processed 5 percent of the total daily volume traded on NYSE and 8 percent of the daily volume on AMEX. Managed an annual budget of $15,000,000 and a staff of 60 to 100. Functions within my scope included product development, project management, software development, quality assurance, systems administration, data networking, customer technical support and facilities management.
Recovered the Organization after an Exodus of Critical Management Personnel:
Took over leadership of the ISI Systems Group after the unexpected departure of ISI's three most senior IT officers. These included the inventor of the ISI System and the Managers of Software Development and Customer Technical Support. With the VP of Network Operations position already open from an earlier departure, the resignations left me to run ISI with only one experienced officer still on staff. • Worked intensively with customers and employees to alleviate concerns about the future of ISI. Success measured by the fact that no business was lost and not a single employee resigned. • Recruited seasoned IT professionals to fill all open VP positions within five months. • Led ISI through the industry-wide conversion to decimal pricing—requiring extensive changes to every component of the system—just five months after the departures.
Consistently Improved Quality and Productivity while Balancing Competing Demands:
Day-to-day responsibilities centered on satisfying the demand for constant change while maintaining very high levels of availability and functional consistency. • Employed continuous recruitment, stretch assignments and regular performance reviews to create a culture of excellence and shared responsibility. • Established a Quality Assurance team, a Software Architecture function and a Project Management Office. These improvements increased the productivity and effectiveness of development while simultaneously lowering the incidence of software faults. • Overhauled ISI’s real-time operating environment through change management procedures, better monitoring capabilities and incident response protocols. Lowered the frequency of major service interruptions from one per month to less than one per year and established ISI as the only DMA provider that proactively called customers with problem alerts. • Recruited an Information Security officer and implemented security policies, an intrusion detection system, regular penetration testing, daily vulnerability alert monitoring, and standard practices to expedite incident response. In spite of the dramatic rise in security threats from 2000 to 2005, ISI did not experience a single security-related service interruption.
Developed and Marketed an Innovative Front-End Trading Platform:
In early 2001, ISI began development of a front-end trading application to replace ISI’s older Market Machine product. We designed the new AACES Market Machine (AMM) to leapfrog competitive offerings with innovative software design. Key technological differentiators included: - Highly modular architecture, allowing AACES to offer the product in different functional configurations to different market segments - Quote-delivery system that adjusted refresh rates (within a customer-configurable tolerance window) based on network latency - Bootstrapping methodology that allowed a centralized operations group to easily and automatically push patches and targeted new functionality out to end users • Initiated and produced a quarterly newsletter to update constituencies on the progress of the AMM product and raise awareness of ISI’s offerings. • Released an equities-only version of AMM within one year. The product garnered consistently positive customer feedback for its reliability and highly customizable user interface.
Integrated and Improved IT Operations across the AACES Business:
In 2003, I was assigned responsibility for all IT Operations activities across the AACES organization while continuing to head up ISI. AACES employed an operational IT staff of 100 located in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. • Developed a financial model for the DMA business that captured the relationship between fixed and variable technology costs, execution volumes and profit margins on commissions. The model helped to justify more aggressive pricing to achieve scale efficiencies. • Defined and staffed an AACES-wide IT Project Management Office. By the end of 2003, business management performed IT project reviews using our weekly reports and relied on our cost-benefit analyses as a formal vehicle for IT spending approvals. • Led planning and implementation of a new wide-area network that reduced data communications costs by over 20% and provided simplified administration, enhanced reliability, and a five to fifty-fold improvement in bandwidth between key locations.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Jun 1991 – Aug 1999
Director of IT, School of Social Service Administration
The School of Social Service Administration is a top-tier research institution and graduate school of social work. I managed an annual budget of $500,000 and a staff of 6 in support of the school’s approximately 500 faculty, students and staff.
• Evolved the IT organization from an ad hoc, student-run cooperative to a professional IT service with full-time support staff, computer literacy courses, multimedia “smart” classrooms and customized consulting services.
Technical Supervisor, Campus Computer Laboratories
• Managed technology and user support, providing 7-by-20 services to over 10,000 students.
Fieldwork Supervisor, Service Learning Program Database Developer (Access/VB, FileMaker Pro, DB2), Various Units
EDUCATION MBA, Finance/Entrepreneurial Management, The Wharton School, 2005 MA, Education, The University of Chicago, 1998 BA, Philosophy, The University of Chicago, 1991 (graduated with honors)
LANGUAGES Fluent in French. Conversant in German. |