Our new CEO gives us his perspective on technology, financial services and what drew him to lead MAIA into launch.
Tell me a bit about your background?
Technology has been a feature in my life from early on. I wrote my first program on a home computer aged 10. Although I went on to study Business at University, I returned to the technology field where my early career included teaching Microsoft certified training courses as well as working for an e-commerce company.
The cross roads for me was when the .com bubble burst and I moved sideways into Financial Technology. As a Technical Consultant, I worked for a broad cross section of Asset Managers in Europe and the US. I loved being at the coal face, finding solutions to help clients solve their problems through the application of technology.
As my experience grew, my roles evolved but I have remained committed to delivering value to clients through the combination of class leading technology and a dedicated approach to service and support.
What did you take from your early experiences that are applicable to MAIA?
Throughout my career I have been fortunate to work with great people and technology at the forefront of the industry. These technologies often allowed extensive customisation, which clients and vendors alike saw as adding huge value. Whilst this flexibility brings efficiency in the short term, it also builds up technical debt.
MAIA provides pre-configured investment workflows, but we also provide a framework which includes APIs and a Solution Developers Kit. Clients want to interact with their technology in a variety of ways but it always has to be an open system. MAIA delivers the flexibility and customisation required by our clients without building the technical debt.
Clients also need us to be as agile as they are, so we deliver automated weekly upgrades across the whole platform. This approach has been built in from day one and helps ensure we are always able to respond to client needs as quickly as possible. I like the way this model delivers flexibility for our clients, ultimately our innovations help them better serve their own clients.
What do you love most about ‘fin’?
The opportunities (and challenges) that come with a career in the financial services industry are unparalleled. We are surrounded by constant innovation,which creates a fast-paced environment so you never stop learning. While some industries place weight on seniority, the financial industry places a premium on quick thinking, rigorous analytical thought and consistent results.
What do you love most about ‘tech’?
I see technology as an instrument for change. In and of itself, technology can’t achieve anything but it is a facilitator and when harnessed correctly it can have a huge impact. Take the concept of big data or the impact of machine learning, technical developments like these have become increasingly central to everything we do. Technology has improved the quality of our lives and never more so than right now. Who could have imagined a few years ago that whole industries were able to shift from office to homeworking in a few weeks? It is in times like these, where there is significant disruption, that the best technology comes to the fore; legacy systems struggle to accommodate home working because of the restrictions around connectivity. Cloud-native solutions, like MAIA, continue to operate seamlessly and enable our clients to work efficiently.
What attracted you to move to MAIA – an unknown start up inthe market?
Two things really: the technology, of course, but also the team behind that technology.
Two things really: the technology, of course, but also the team behind that technology.
The first thing is that MAIA is cloud native. From inception, the platform has been built on a SaaS model using cloud technologies. The architecture of the system hasn’t been bent or stretched to accommodate this. It has an ultra-modern,distributed approach which uses a micro-services architecture, allowing us to extend the platform organically. In addition, the system doesn’t rely on a single relational database which means we are unencumbered by rigid datastructures which are often what makes change difficult.
At MAIA we are supplying a framework as well as an application. We are able to provide both structure and flexibility as part of the platform, when these can often be mutually exclusive. Our objective is to deliver workflows as opposed to delivering an application and it feels like an important difference to me.
Team
The team are both motivated and exceptional and share our stated mission and values around collaboration, finding creative solutions and continuous improvement. I’m interested in people who are inquisitive and like to challenge the norm but who look at issues objectively and logically. As a result our team are from interesting and diverse professional backgrounds from scientists and a helicopter pilot to Financial Service industry veterans. This helps us look at solutions from multiple perspectives, which is always better.
About
MAIA Technology provides SaaS solutions designed to meet the unique needs of the Financial Services community focusing specifically on the Investment and Operational workflows of Asset Managers and Hedge Funds. MAIA’s proposition is a unique solution to the “Build versus Buy” question combining pre-configured workflows with custom and client-maintained engines. Follow us on LinkedIn and at maiatech.io.
