RAD Developer on the trading floor, working with energy traders

Trade floor developer, working with the swaps traders and the inflation desk.

The role is partly development and support, and partly a control project to stabilise, manage and rationalise the tactical applications and user-developed tools on the trading floor.

I work with all the tasks of an active trading desk: pricing, realtime risk, trade capture and reporting, for flow and exotics trading, market-making, and structuring bespoke cross-currency basket trades.

I am currently dividing my time between the Dublin office and the London trade floor, and building skills in the front-end technologies that are replacing Excel RAD tools.

I was hired by Crédit Agricole as an analyst and developer in a major project to retool the Repo Desk.

This project gave me a mixed rôle of development, analysis and coordination, working with the lead trader on the Repo desk in London, the London tactical developers, Business Analysts, the Project Management team, and domain experts in the Murex and Apex trading systems.

I also worked with my counterparts on the Paris trading floor, adapting the suite of Excel and .NET add-ins they had built for P&L reporting on the Inflation Desk, to build the core User Interface components for the Repo project in London.

As of April 2018, my part of this project is largely complete, and I will be moving on to other work.

Back in HSBC, working as a tactical developer for the Prime Finance and the Delta-1 trading desks.

Principal project: the Trade Blotter and reporting tools for the Funding & Collateral Trading Desk.

I expanded the Funding Blotter's functionality to new products, integrated a new messaging and internal funding request microservice, extended the user interface to manage related transactions and shell trades; and ended my stint with HSBC with a 3-month project in a larger team, migrating the application off the desktop and onto a SQL Server database with a server-based web front-end.

Other work at HSBC: I assisted the Collateral/Treasury project with business analysis, calculation support and reporting prototypes; and I provided general support and development work for small systems across the trading floors: tactical tools for pre-trade checking, SQL Server and SSIS in reporting systems, small Excel projects (reconciliations, DTCC uploads, basket optimisation & maintenance tools), rebuilt a pricing and realtime price publication app for Market Access Products, and built desktop reports for fees and margin management.

I was recruited as a technical lead for the Excel part of the spreadsheet control and redevelopment project in JP Morgan's Valuation Control Group, in June 2013.

This was a high-profile project to change the way a major business unit managed tactical applications and user-developed tools, leading to further projects to retire and redevelop Excel-based applications using Python in the Athena application development framework.