Market Operations Specialist Eric Schmid runs the production system support for IEX. I make sure everything runs the way we expect it to. He and his colleagues look for a wide array of elements that connect to the IEX platform. We are looking for a lot of different things: market surveillance, monitor performance and try to optimize with our subscribers. We also look at our systems: Exactly how we are performing on a technological level every day.
"We're the day-to-day support for the subscribers so we answer clients' questions about their order flow and resolve any issues that come about," said Matt Hill, a Market Operations Specialist. His day has two views: A view of New York harbor from the 44th floor and the companys internally-built dashboard called the GUI that gives a view into the IEX system as well as the market. IEX is a cutting edge firms and Hill finds it inspirational. The people in this room are spectacular. You couldnt ask for a better place to work.
Rob Leff, IEX Business Development, has seen it all in his years on the Street. As a former portfolio manager for a $200 million fund, Leff has an idea what the buyside needs and wants. We interact with the clients and market participants directly to make sure their interactions are stress free and simple. It involves making sure we are fulfilling their needs and not forcing them to conform to the status quo. He added that the best thing about his job is connecting traders to liquidity that had previously been hard to find. They are now excited about the liquidity IEX provides that they may not had previously.
These are very interesting days for John Ramsay who serves as IEXs Chief Market Policy Officer. Ramsay has served at the SEC as head of trading and markets division but he wanted to be involved a in a wider range of activities. You can say I am in charge of trying to push the company's market policy agenda with the stakeholders and the regulators, people on the Hill and buyside firms we havent penetrated such as pension funds and endowments. Overall, he is pushing the companys market policy in a positive direction. Not just by doing well ourselves but by changing the overall environment.
System Reliability Engineer Ramon Gonzalez is on the front line for all technical issues regarding the IEX trading system. It involves tuning systems, deploying changes, testing changes but the basic day-to-day is running the system. If we are doing our job right plugging into the system is real smooth. The start of the day is the busiest time of my day, thats when the system is new If you can get that right, youre good to go as a long as the other participants in the market are ready.
Rob Salmans Business Development mission is to bring awareness of IEX to the street, especially buyside and sellside clients. Plus, talking about IEXs model and future plans of the exchange. I look at the internal trading system - we call it the GUI -which shows the client trading activity, what they are doing, where they are trading and try to use that information to help them make better decisions on how to interact. Working for a famous firm has its rewards but Salman still has work to do. People know IEX, but we still have to go out there and meet them and show them we want their business.
Chief Strategy Officer Ronan Ryan is responsible for communication with the buyside and the sellside from a sales standpoint. He runs the sales team and the marketing team as well as parts of infrastructure, but basically I play the role of spokesperson for IEX. I get out there and meet with the buyside and hear what their issues are and chat about what we can do, he told Traders. There is a misconception that we are some buyside trading venue. We only have sellside subscribers so the sellside are absolutely critical to the support of this operation. In his constant efforts to reach clients, he lives in Bloomberg IM. Its the best way to get through to people. We live in a very complicated market, so I tend to use IB to get peoples attention and ask if we can talk now.
In his former life at the Royal Bank of Canada, Quantitative Developer Daniel Aisen wrote algorithms. Here I built the smart order router, risk management and order manager applications. These days I work on data analysis, understanding the interaction with our customers, understanding the strategies our customers are running, how they interact with each other, metrics on execution performance, and so on. Admitting that programming is still 20 to 30 percent of his time, Most of what I do is interacting with the buyside and sellside to discuss how they are trading on IEX. Ive worked on the sellside so I know what their needs are.
QA Automation Engineer Andrews Afful has been with IEX for six weeks and his days are busy. My job is to make sure the systems works as it should so every line of code our developers write, I write and test the code for the exchange. We test the code. Afful knows how to keep track of several things at once: he played midfield and transitioned to defense for his minor league soccer team back in his native Ghana.
When IEX signs a new client, software engineer Billy Zhao steps in. Part of the new client onboarding process involves making sure that their firms and technologies can speak with one another. I make sure they follow all the rules to our specifications so they can send orders in that we can interpret. We want to make sure that nobody breaks anyone elses systems.
Is it hard working with shops with old technology? The other way around, said Billy. Weve had a lot of quant funds whose technology is so advanced that they do a lot testing without manual intervention. They are used to blasting in a ton of test orders, whereas IEX likes to tick off all the boxes that need to be ticked off and working through it thoroughly. Sometimes their technology is too new.
