Two former executives from a recognized bank decided to start a new Hedge Fund that traded electronically on the forex and futures market. They wanted to build their own electronic trading platform and be able to achieve the best low latency execution in the market.

Their goal was to setup a state-of-the-art High Frequency Trading desk, and they needed a heavy technological partner to start their operations.

Initial Goal

• Research on the current providers in this field to leverage our starting up time.
• Setup top team with a quantitative background
• Define the roadmap
• Establish a bold technical leadership

Problem(s)

• They had an endless variety of providers. We needed to choose the best in order to stay competitive.
• Lack of human resources
• Zero margins for miss-steps or errors

Solution

• Found reliable providers in the hedge fund industry and got a great initial deal.
• Recruited and hire top professionals: 2 quants, 1 researcher, 1 network support, FPGA support)
• Designed the procedures and plan for the next year
• Created a toolset that gave a comfortable framework to generate trading ideas.

A lead fintech that provides CRM tools for the “Merchant Cash Advance” industry, was growing rapidly year after year, and with that its demand for its software.

Their incapacity to scale up and lack of technical management was their main problem.

Initial Goal

• Learn about the company’s goals planned for the next 6-12-36 months
• Understand current team configurations.
• Set a new plan for the future.

The Problem(s)

• They were hiring new developers without having a clear path.
• Most of their employees have no experience in the fintech industry.
• Under-utilized their cloud services, hence spending more than expected.
• No processes nor methodologies in place
• The software was built under a poor architectural foundation, hence, no room to scaling up.
• Total lack of technical leadership

Solution

• First, we defined the goals and build a solid and realistic plan for the next year
• Over the next 6 months, we restructured the whole team, and we build a solid offshore development team, saving more than 60% on what they were already spending
• Designed a solid “SDLC” methodology using the best practices (Requirements → Prototyping → Development → Testing → Maintenance)
• Created automated testing methodologies
• Helped to reduce their bugs by a 90%
• Speeded up their delivery process by a 70%

A fintech startup that was in its series B funding round, was losing its Chief Technology Officer after he gave them one month’s notice.

The Managing Partners contacted us to validate the different options they had to handle the transition.

Initial goal

• Evaluate the current situation
• Knowledge transfer
• Set foundations for a new in-house CTO

The Problem(s)

• Our initial findings were astonishing: the outgoing CTO was the only one who knew certain parts of the system and setups. Very common, particularly on startups with small teams.
• We have found that there were no clear goals, and the development team was working on ad-hoc mode, as issues and bugs popped out.
• The technical leadership was unclear.

Solution

Have meetings with the outgoing CTO to recount all the different company’s technical aspects and allow us to find out how they are organized.

Based on that, and after the approval of the management, and in the fintech startup industry, we designed two different plans with different goals: long term and short term.

Long term plan: re-arrange the team and help to hire additional people making sure everything is aligned with the plan. We define KPI’s for each role in the company for easy follow up. We also suggested different providers, that ended up reducing their overall budget.

Short term plan: find the perfect replacement for the CTO role. Make sure that the person will have a good affinity with the company’s culture. Have the field prepared with a plan in place.