BrokerDealer.com blog update courtesy of extract from 09 December story published in Markets Media and reported by Steve Marlin.

Agency Broker WallachBeth Raises Tech Bar

WallachBeth Capital, a provider of institutional execution for buy-side investment managers, recently appointed quantitative trading veteran Matthew Rowley to the newly created role of chief technology officer, signaling the firm’s commitment to delivering customized services that address specific and often complex order-execution and related business-process needs.

The company’s founders, Michael Wallach and David Beth, “have a vision of the industry becoming even more technologically driven,” Rowley told Markets Media.

Rowley joined WallachBeth from Crédit Agricole Cheuvreux, where he was credited with helping the firm attain a leadership position in the global electronic brokerage space.

“My main focus had been more on the algorithmic side — slicing and dicing of orders,” said Rowley, who holds an advanced degree in applied statistics from Oxford University. “Something that’s been really interesting to me throughout my whole career is artificial intelligence. I’ve been working on and off trying to integrate that into various firms I’ve been at, in different products. But it’s only in recent years that some of the cutting-edge techniques are such that you can get near-human performance in some aspects.”

Rowley’s background includes senior executive roles for several of the financial industry’s leading firms. Prior to joining Cheuvreux, he was global head of advanced trading products at financial software provider Fidessa. He began his career as a quantitative analyst in the strategic risk management advisory group at First Chicago Corp.

WallachBeth’s Tools Hope to Educate

Rowley’s current focus is on developing “trader intelligence” tools that filter information programmatically and algorithmically and put the information in the hands of capable traders who make decisions. These decision tools can be for traders on the buy side or sell side, or portfolio managers.

“Market participants are making decisions by relying on the tools they have,” he said. “A trader may have Bloomberg or another market-data terminal, and they have order management systems that give an idea of historical reports, clients order and history. Oftentimes, that information is disparate, and as a human being, you can’t quite process everything. You have to query and follow a nonlinear path to get the information you need and ask yourself questions.”

WallachBeth aims to educate clients about exchange-traded funds and provides “a very unique execution model around that,” said Rowley. “We’re looking to expand that across different asset classes as a one-stop shop. The quantitative tools we’re building are important to that whole process.”

 

To read the entire story from MarketsMedia, please click here.