Kirk Wylie

Kirk Wylie started his career working for technology companies in Silicon Valley (including Broadbase, BEA, Radik, and M7), before relocating to London and turning his hand to developing software solutions for the financial industry. Initially, he worked at SmartSpread building a bespoke risk and analytics platform for the Vega Asset Management family of hedge funds. Following that, he worked at KBC Financial Products, building a system to help one of Europe's largest CDO issuers structure and manage their portfolio of deals. Although the CDO business turned out to be a bit of a disaster, he used the RESTful techniques he applied to building a system to manage over $100Bn in notional assets to other projects internally at KBCFP, ending up in a Technical Architecture role.

He is currently advising several technology startups in the London area while consulting for financial services firms.

Presentation: "RESTful Approaches To Financial Systems Integration"

Track: Architectures in Financial Applications

Time: Wednesday 15:45 - 16:45

Location: Westminster Suite

Abstract:

While RESTful architectures have attracted a significant amount of interest amongst the architecture community recently, they are particularly attractive in solving many financial services integration problems. Financial services firms have large silos, massive distributed development teams, and face constant pressure to integrate their systems faster and better. In addition, the unique regulatory and user management issues that financial firms face mean that they need to be careful about applying any technical architecture that's widely perceived to be of interest in web-tier systems.

Drawing on his experience from some of the projects he's led, Kirk will present the advantages of a RESTful architecture to develop integrate systems in the financial services arena, in particular how to leverage the types of infrastructure, skills, and systems that these firms are likely to already have. The talk will also cover precisely why a RESTful architecture fits so well in developing and integrating the systems financial firms use. He'll also address perhaps the most important problem financial services developers face: how to make their traders happy.