# Nigel Heffernan > Software engineer at Dare Global Location: United Kingdom, United Kingdom Profile: https://flows.cv/nigelheffernan Trade floor developer, working with the technologies that give traders real-time pricing and risk. I am a front-end developer, with the user-facing skills that go with the role: it's a design skill, and a communication skill, requiring good business knowledge of the desks I work with: currently energy and oil, but recently swaps and rates exotics, repo trading, inflation, stock borrow/lending, and the funding desk - together with a thorough understanding of the underlying systems and processes of the trading floor. My core technical skills are tactical development, desktop tools, reporting applications and spreadsheets; so the technologies I use most are Excel and SQL, realtime market data, VBA and some C# and Python: it's an essential part of my work to pick up a basic capability in any technology I can use as an interface between the traders' workflow, trading data, market data, and the analytics libraries. The niche skill I enjoy using is small systems design and rapid development, for processes and problems that do not fit into larger systems: these projects are most often found in commercial banking and on trading floors, but I take a keen interest in the approaches used in other industries, particularly aviation and pharmaceuticals. Past projects include an integrated trading and workflow blotter for the funding desk; real-time ETF pricing and market-making, risk-based pricing for debt and structured loans, trading tools for short-term interest rate products, ratings tools for asset-backed securities and debt securitisation, and front-office P&L reporting. I am a dual national with both British and Irish citizenship, and I now divide my time between the trading floor in London and the developers in Dublin. My passports allow me to travel and work in the United Kingdom and throughout the European Union, and I maintain a wide network of friends and professional contacts in London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. I enjoy travelling for work, and I would welcome the opportunity to see more of these cities. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Dare Jan 2023 – Present | London, England, United Kingdom RAD Developer on the trading floor, working with energy traders ### Application Developer @ Bank of America Merrill Lynch Jan 2018 – Jan 2023 | London, United Kingdom 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. ### Developer, Repo Trading @ Crédit Agricole CIB Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | London, United Kingdom 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. ### Tactical Developer for Prime Finance and the Funding & Collateral Trading Desk @ HSBC Global Banking and Markets Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | Canary Wharf, London 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. ### VP, Valuation Control Group @ JPMorgan Chase Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | 25 Bank Street, London E14 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. ### Tactical Developer, Delta-1 and Structured Equity Derivatives @ HSBC Global Banking and Markets Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | Canary Wharf, London Desk developer on the trade floor for the Delta-1 and Equity Derivatives traders. Headline projects: 1: An ETF-pricing application, generating basket prices from proxy instruments in real-time and feeding them to the Horizon market-maker trading system. 2: Basket optimisation apps for the Index Arbitrage traders. The initial release used a liquidity model to generate basket orders containing a cost-effective partial basket for quoted indices, trading automatically at user-specified trigger prices against an index future. Further development by the quants in Paris added beta and correlation strategies, and volatility-based optimisation. The Basket Optimiser was redeveloped in C# in February 2013, retaining the user interface I built in 2012: it's a showcase example of rapid development as combined delivery and prototyping for a smooth transition to strategic IT solutions. 3: A new trade blotter for the Funding & Collateral Trading desk. Workflow-management and trade capture application for loans, repo trades and swaps to support the Funding desk and associated SBL trading. This was a RAD 'Greenfield' project to provide initial recording for all trade types, single-click operations for the desk's daily rolls and renewals, downstream despatch to all the OMS and PTS systems, live P&L and risk displays, with daily snapshots to provide a unified reconciliation and reporting interface. Other work: tactical sheets for index rebalancing, intraday tick capture for indentifying ETF arbitrage targets, takeover timetable generators feeding into Risk Arb strategy sheets, Market-Maker / Liquidity Provider performance analytics, and an FX hedge trade aggregator. Also: internal consultancy for VBA and SQL development, advising Prime Brokerage and Risk teams; I was sent to the New York Office to advise on rationalising a complex spreadsheet-based trading system for their LatAm Delta-1 traders; conducted technical interviews for Excel/VBA developer positions. ### Tactical Developer @ Credit Suisse Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | Canary Wharf Contract position: support developer with the Structured Credit traders at CSFB. Credit Suisse have the most complex spreadsheets I have ever worked with: this was a pure VBA/Excel role with a heavy emphasis on analytical skills and good working relationships with the Trading Desk. This contract was part support, including bug fixes and small enhancements; and part development work, assisting in the migration of these sheets into a template-based system. ### Support Developer @ Cheyne Capital Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 | West End Two jobs: Excel tactical developer for Equity Derivatives traders and ad-hoc report builder for anyone who asked - Compliance, 'Special Circumstances' fund managers, and the cost-control team managing brokerage fees. The other half of my work was managing the P&L system - support, troubleshooting, implementing pricing libraries for new products - and simplifying the organically-grown web of SQL stored procedures and overnight batches that ran behind the scenes for the morning reports. ### Tactical Developer @ Barclays Capital Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 | Canary Wharf Desktop developer with the IT team attached to the Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securitisation desk. I worked on Excel tools supporting Cashflow modelling for loan origination and CMBS securitisation. Other work: tactical development and support for structuring, note issuance, ratings calculations, and Experian data integration into credit quality models for securitised debt. ### Contract Developer @ RBC Capital Markets Jan 2005 – Jan 2006 | Queenhythe, City of London Contract developer working on the desk for short-term interest rate products. Short-term project to stabilise a trader sheet which had become a widely-used STIR (Short-Term Interest Rates) pricer; the project objective was to refactor the code and wrap it up as a centrally-managed add-in serving simplified spreadsheets. The simplification achieved several enhancements, giving the traders better control over curve-building, semi-automated data-source switching during the trading day, managed expiries and rollovers, and allowed us to expand the functionality to trade new Quanto swap products. This project gave me first-hand experience of swaps, FRA's, money-market instruments and forwards. ### Ratings model developer @ Rabobank Jan 2004 – Jan 2005 | City of London Project developer, Structured Credit, Credit Trading and CDO origination. Worked with the quants, implementing the structurer's risk & pricing models in Excel for submission to ratings agencies. ### Business Analyst, Credit Products Group @ TD Jan 2003 – Jan 2004 | Finsbury Square, City of London I worked in TD as part of a three-man desk-support team on the credit derivatives desk, mostly on-desk development for the traders and the Credit Quants, with some work as a business analyst and developer for an off-desk team coding larger projects. • RAD development, building, testing, and maintaining Excel interfaces for C++ analytic libraries written for new credit products. Real-time reporting with the Bloomberg API for CDOs and recovery swaps. • Major project: CDO Risk Reporting Engine, calculating the exposures at portfolio level to interest rate movements, FX, credit curve movements (using CDS prices) and predefined stress tests. • Assisting in implementing a Data Synapse Grid Server for massively-parallel calculations on CDO and CDO-squared products. • Automated client reporting: generating personalised portfolio performance reports for clients. This was my first exposure to the exacting standards required for regulated reports, where the end product is subject to strict audit and compliance procedures. • Regulatory reporting. Assisted the Risk team in generating regular and one-off analytics requested by the bank's regulatory authorities. ### Tactical developer, Equity Derivatives trading @ Credit Lyonnais Jan 2000 – Jan 2003 | Broadgate, London Tactical developer on the trading floor: recruited to build fast and simple Excel interfaces to the quant libraries. I also developed realtime volatility surface viewers, quote capture screens, correlation-spotting market monitors, visualisation tools for MathCad scripts, a Convertible Warrant trading data organiser, a sectoral research and 'pipeline' valuation tool for the Pharma analysts on the Equities desk, and worked on client reports for the commodities team. ### Programmer @ Zeda Ltd Jan 1998 – Jan 2001 | Nottingham Zeda took me on as a trainee: this is where I learned the art of programming and the business of consulting. I started out in small systems support and redevelopment projects in Foxpro, then MS-Access and Excel, and progressed to working onsite with Dresdner Kleinwort Benson's trading, research, and middle-office support IT teams. The 'Headline' clients were IPC magazines, Pearl Assurance, and Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. I also worked across teams, whenever there was a requirement for Oracle SQL, automated report generation (Crystal Reports and automated Excel tools) and desktop database work. ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nigel-heffernan-2a37308 - Website: http://excellerando.blogspot.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/nigelheffernan JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nigelheffernan/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05