Kirk Wylie

Kirk Wylie is OpenGamma's Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer.

Having started his career in Silicon Valley working for a variety of technology startups (Broadbase, WebLogic, Radik, Talking Blocks, and M7), he moved to London 7 years ago and immediately started working in financial services, focusing on front-office analytic and risk management applications. He built the trading and risk analytics infrastructure for Vega Asset Management, and acted as the global head of Front Office Architecture for KBC Financial Products.

After the credit crunch, Kirk joined with Jim Moores and Elaine McLeod to co-found OpenGamma, to build a modern platform capable of handling the needs of front office and risk technologists across hedge funds, broker-dealers, and investment banks. OpenGamma is backed by Accel Partners and FirstMark Capital.

Presentation: "Unifying Front-Office and Risk Applications Using The OpenGamma Platform"

Track: Solution Track: Friday

Time: Friday 16:50 - 17:50

Location: Rutherford Room, Fourth Floor

Abstract:

Financial technologists supporting front-office (sales and trading) and risk end-users are frequently divided by a common set of requirements. Both constituents want complex metrics calculated on securities, trades, positions, and portfolios, but almost always result in having different applications for each set of end users.

Traders want near-real-time calculations; risk managers usually want batch operation. Traders need to simulate the results of trades before they make them; traditionally risk managers are only interested in what's on the firm's books. Systems designed for the needs of traders rare satisfy the needs of risk managers, and vice versa.

But if firms *could* unify their software stacks for both constituencies, they'd reap massive rewards:
* The choice of near-real-time or batch operation would be a business decision, rather than a technical one
* The sophistication of calculations required for risk managers could be put into the hands of traders
* Developers could spend more time looking after the needs of the business and less time duplicating infrastructure already present in other applications
* New applications could be rolled out far more quickly than having to build a whole architecture from scratch
* Operations teams would have fewer different types of applications to look after, making them more effective in supporting the ones they have

In this talk we'll be covering the architecture and technical features that make the OpenGamma Platform an ideal system to act as a unified software stack to bring together the needs of traders and risk managers in financial services firms. We'll go over our backgrounds in dealing with vendors and how that led us to believe that only an Open Source solution could satisfy the needs of modern financial technologists.

In anticipation of the first Open Source release of the OpenGamma Platform, we'll also be showing some of the integration points demanded by customers and some sample code showing just how to integrate in with existing legacy systems.