Hedgd is a London-based startup that is “ready to disrupt the trade management market.”Actually they’re not. they’re facilitating it. which is a far better proposition. Fintnews asks the questions.
Fintnews: What’s it about?
Oliver: We are launching technology company in the financial services sector. I used to be a buyer and user, and manager, in this sector. We discovered we were buying old legacy platforms. Lots of them are decades old, they can be very strong, but if you’re running an old car it costs more to MOT every year… and this is one of the main problems for financial services companies, the maintenance of the platforms. That and porting to the cloud, which for old systems can be difficult and a big investment.
This is a recurring problem of legacy systems… not mobile, they pre date smartphones, and not cloud-based, for the same reason. “What we’re creating and offering is contemporary technology for financial services. Built for the cloud… not an old system that isn’t truly cloud-based… but a new truly cloud-based system with distributed performance and backups…”
Fintnews: What specifically are the products for, could you explain the user case please?
“It’s about facilitation of communications between various teams… for example, the portfolio manager decides what to invest in… and the execution traders, they actually do the trade. The communications between these parties, and there might be three or more traders for each portfolio manager, is typically done by email, which is easy to get wrong, or miss, there’s no audit trail, no compliance or controls built in, it’s just a poor way to communicate when it’s such a critical process.
What our system does is take a fairly standardised workflow and supply that on the cloud. We have the ability for people to work remotely, in a scalable and mobile way. Whereas a lot of legacy systems are awkward for mobile or tablet use, ours are designed for the actual way that people work and want to work.”
“Done through the platform, this creates a structured way for that communication to happen, audited, formalised, now they receive instruction in real time, and in an orderly way. It’s adaptable for each company. In some companies, everyone can see what others are doing, in other firms, not. Our system enables different portfolio managers… to collaborate or not… depending on their preferences and policies.”
“It’s simple but obvious. The existing legacy platforms prove the demand exists. They are just very expensive, not always efficient, and basically clunky and non-agile. New incoming regulation will further encourage better solutions. MIFID2 is also going to be important for traders, the regulation doesn’t specifically mandate it but it makes it easier to conform. And there’s huge EU wide changes and regulations all concerned with enforcing transparency and accountability.
The regulators are keeping up with the tech and actively encourage it, the codification of compliance, building in transparency, a very new thing for banking. Compliance was previously more administrative but now more technology based, and moving towards a place where your compliance electronically monitors your trading. In a perfect world.”
Hedgd will be soon launching its OMS (Order Management System) that enables investment managers to take control of data, costs and productivity. Hedgd.com.
Oliver South, CEO, Hedgd www.hedgd.com
Originally printed in the 15th edition of The FintechTimes
