Ben Williams, Cfa Email & Phone Number

London

London, England, United Kingdom

I was promoted to Product Owner of one of the 4 scrum teams on the implementation. I am product owner for a team of 6 developers, TAs and Business members for the implementation of Calypso.It's is my primary responsibility to ensure that our back log is properly prioritised and specified for the team to maintain its velocity. This work involves close collaboration with the senior product owner for overall steer of the project direction as well as applying my significant domain knowledge to asses risks and to de-scope (with agreement from the business users) requirements that are deemed 'nice to have' or 'may be needed in the future'.Applying this lean approach has led the team to be extremely flexible and successful. Test driven development and definition of done have been agreed by the team and ensure that technical debt is kept to a minimum.I am also involved in the minimal regression testing, prior to release, for areas of the functionality that are not covered by the test automation that we have implemented using Fitnesse.

Hired as an SME for the futures and FX for this implementation of a middle to back office system. The roles involved investigating, suggesting and presenting requirements that the development team could then work with. This investigation involved the lead of acceptance workshops, promoting test driven development and specification by example. The role also involved significant input to UAT and specifying test scripts for modules of the implementation.

During this period I work for 2 funds. During the first 9 months I worked for a long short European equity desk. This role involved me executing trades, booking them and monitoring market risk using models and live P&L. The second part of this role was investment analysis. This involved fundamental and technical analysis and recommendations of equity stocks to portfolio managers for inclusion into their portfolios.The remainder of this period I worked on a global emerging markets fund (GEM), trading Equity, FX, Options and Credit. My roles involved similar responsibilities as the first fund but with the additional responsibility of managing some of the positions that I identified through my analysis.During this period I also worked with the IT development team to specify requirements for an OMS system and for improvements to the live P&L system.

During this period I started working in the simplest role within a middle office of 10 people and moved through all the roles that a hedge fund of this size would have. I dealt with middle office processing of; Equities, Bonds, Convertible Bonds, CFD's, Swaps, Futures, Options, FX, Repo's and ABS. I gained a very strong understanding of the operational risk and front to back processing required for each of these asset classes. I was also involved in specification and UAT for software projects to enhance STP.

During this period, I worked as a portfolio manager. My role involved buying and selling Equity, Bond and Government securities to model the client’s portfolio. I was responsible for c.800 clients and this role required me to be a FSA approved person, for which I gained my Investment Management Certificate.