This week we are featuring two women from MarketAxess who will be speaking at our event on January 14th for How the "Tech" In FinTech is Built: How Emerging Technologies Intersect & The Impact o FinTech.
Elizabeth Abbott: Product Owner – Operations, Credit & Risk
Elizabeth works closely with Operations, Credit & Risk teams to help set the objectives for each Program Increment with the Product Managers, plan each sprint iteration, and design features and user stories. She works with these teams daily on reports, data analyses, and general functionality questions. She also host design sessions with both the business and development teams to determine optimal routes to deliver new functionality and features.
How do you navigate the financial regulatory space when you are building products pertaining to credit and risk?
As part of my role, technology works closely with our Legal & Compliance and Credit & Risk teams to ensure everything we do is in line with current regulatory requirements and aligns to our credit and risk guidelines. MarketAxess is growing in all global regions so we need to work closely with credit analysts to ensure we are developing features to best align with risk reporting and credit monitoring as our business grows, scales, and moves into new regions and markets.
What are some your goals for 2020 within the product development space? What are some of the products that you are looking to develop for 2020?
Our teams’ goals for 2020 include automated QA and unit testing, cloud initiatives, and moving applications to newer technologies in order to make our products more scalable and easier to support. We will continue to deliver on our mission to make internal operations at MarketAxess as seamless and efficient as possible. Ultimately, both teams I support will cut dependencies with other teams and become self-sufficient and self-contained. We are working towards deploying on our own with AWS-certified members on both teams and fully automating our QA testing as a team.
How is MarketAxess staying relevant and ahead of their competitors in the space?
MarketAxess has a history of developing technology in partnership with our clients – it has been and continues to be a true differentiator for us versus our competitors. Our shift to Agile development helps us respond even more quickly to client issues and feedback. Our technology team globally is tightly aligned to our relationship managers and with Agile, technology is front and center, working directly with clients to prioritize end user satisfaction while improving our development cycle.
Elizabeth Brand: Cloud Engineering Manager
Elizabeth's role is to enable the organization to adopt and excel in the cloud. The cloud ecosystem offers innovative technology and automation capabilities. These capabilities allow organizations to capitalize on agile, high velocity workforces to ultimately produce an increase in confidence of changes performed and reduced time to market.
How has Amazon Web Services and cloud engineering changed the landscape for finance in the past 5 years for MarketAxess but also your competitors?
Many companies, MarketAxess included, have adapted over the past 5 years and transformed from not just financial, but financial technology organizations. This transformation is enabled and heavily driven by cloud, and more specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS), innovation. AWS’s main mission is to meet customer demands, and lucky for us, our developers are the part of their large customer base. AWS stays at the forefront of innovation and as a result elevates the development standards for MarketAxess and the entire financial technology industry.
What are your goals for your team in 2020?
The only goal the cloud team at MarketAxess has for 2020 is to enable our developers. Financial technology organizations are built on the foundation of development. AWS has more services (165 to be exact), and functionality than many know what to do with, which is why MarketAxess has a team partnered to assist with new releases, functionality, and self service automation so that developers can do what they do best, develop.
Where do you see the landscape of the Fixed Income and cloud engineering changing in the next 3 years and what are you doing to stay ahead?
Automation is changing everything, and access to features and systems that enable automation of infrastructure and operations will remain key. This means keeping an up to date tech stack and constantly pushing the boundaries of technology capabilities to ensure we are maximizing usage, and ultimately value of the products.
MarketAxess has over 1600 clients; how are they able to navigate changes in technology with respects to their clients?
While 1600 clients is a lot, that does not mean that we have 1600 different ways to manage a change. MarketAxess focuses on the design and ensuring we are establishing patterns to apply a resilient, scalable, and reliable experience that works for our clients. Keeping up to date on the latest technology ensures that we are constantly designing to meet the needs of the industry ahead.
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