In today’s challenging market of increased volatility, interest rates, and inflation, secure cloud-based architecture is an essential component to achieving long-term efficiency across operations and mitigating risk.
Today, we sit down with CloudMargin’s Director of Technology, Nicky Lawrence, who gives us a behind-the-scenes view of our tech philosophy and how tech sets CloudMargin apart.
What is your role at CloudMargin?
I sit in our technology leadership team and I’m fortunate to work closely with colleagues across Product and Engineering to help steer the delivery of our SaaS Collateral Management platform.
What is your approach to CloudMargin’s tech?
Technology is a significant differentiator for CloudMargin. Our job as technology leaders is to ensure we have a forward-looking strategy that leverages the latest trends and innovations to deliver maximum business value for our customers.
Our Architecture, Platform, and Engineering teams collaborate daily to craft nimble, composable, scalable, and secure cloud-native solutions. We are passionate about bringing contemporary, Agile development practices to an area of financial infrastructure often encumbered by large, outdated legacy systems.
As a leader on our tech team, how do you ensure the team reaches our ambitious goals?
So much of our role as technology leaders is figuring out how to get the best out of the exceptional people we work alongside. Our engineers are elite problem solvers with phenomenal technical experience. Our job is to create spaces that unlock their potential, challenge their abilities, and structure their efforts to deliver the best product possible for our customers.
We have six guiding principles that steer the decisions we make and inform our overall strategic objectives. Those are:
- Ownership & Pride
- Agile
- Data-informed
- Growth Mindset
- Lean & Efficient
- Safety & Support
How have you seen clients benefit from CloudMargin’s team’s efforts and approach?
We work closely with our Product and Client Services team who help craft stories around user needs and anticipate market trends, so we deeply understand client needs to stay ahead of the curve. With the volatility experienced in today’s market, we have seen many clients able to automatically scale their margin call volumes to ensure they are covered, and risk is mitigated.
During the volatility the market has experienced this week, margin call volume on the platform nearly tripled. Our tech was able to auto-scale and ensure clients were able to meet their obligations. Last year alone, the platform facilitated more than $1.5 trillion exchanges in collateral and nearly 1 million margin calls.
What is your outlook for the future?
The compelling thing about technology is that it’s always developing at an incredible pace, there’s something new to learn every day.
CloudMargin is a disruptor in a complex and highly regulated business domain. Our goal is to create solutions that give our customers a differentiating technological advantage and greatly improve their business processes. We do that by looking ahead and continually testing our assumptions. Success for us is about leveraging the right technology opportunity to solve our customers’ most challenging problems.
As McKinsey recently noted, every company is now a software company, and as we look ahead to the next few years, we see integration and composability as major trends in the post-trade technology space. We also see a continuation of process automation and machine-enhanced decision-making as motivations for those seeking to drive technological change within their organisation.
CloudMargin is well-positioned to continue leading the way in leveraging these trends to deliver innovative solutions that provide our customers with a competitive edge in their segments. Our commitment to staying ahead of the curve and investing in the latest technology will ensure that we remain at the forefront of the post-trade technology space.