Greg Higgins Email & Phone Number

Slough, Gb

Using my experience in trading, management and IT development I am currently developing innovative solutions for the fintech industry to exploit potential opportunities. Launching Fluxtion as a new paradigm in event processing. Fluxtion is the world's first event stream compiler, see http://fluxtion.com/

Copenhagen Area, Denmark

Principal software architect

While at Nomura I was responsible for the complete re-write of the existing electronic trading platform for FX known as the Nagare project. This included a new low-latency architecture that was deployed in co-located environments, performing Nomura's first co-located FX trade. This was a large project with teams in NY, London and Singapore reporting into myself. The system has moved into production with full trade lifecycle support in a co-location environment. This was the first EFX co-location trading for Nomura. The exchange reported we had moved from the back of the queue to the front with respect to latency of price distribution.I was responsible for all aspects of the project, architectural design, initial coding, building up the team from scratch to a size of nineteen. My regular meetings were with heads of business to discuss future developments and how this would fit into the long term strategic plan. I would prepare budgets, forecasts for work and team sizes stretching over the next 18 months, all for agreement with the business. At a detail level I would allocate work to all the developers globally and measure progress against the agreed plan. Day to day management of resources would be agile in nature running a two or three week release cycle. To support the project I developed a formal definition of software development lifecycle to match the corporate mandated notification periods. This prescriptive process covered all testing, documentation, meeting schedules, code management and release process.The Nagare container based architecture has proved so popular that it was adopted as the strategic electronic markets platform in Nomura. Other asset classes developed and released applications on the Nagare platform, with minimal involvement from myself including FX Options, Interest Rate Swaps, NDF's and credit.

London, United Kingdom

To continue as an independent proprietary trading company the founders from Edge created a new partnership in conjunction with Algo Engineering Limited. Algo Engineering provided the core infrastructure and design. The strategies, features and trading logic were ported from java to C++. The system was high performing with a sub thirty microsecond response time tic to trade. The signal generation and trading decisions I coded operated in the sub-microsecond range. As with Edge I had three main roles, management, technical and risk management. I was responsible for porting the strategies and features over to C++ from Java, and combining the Java GUI to a C++ server. My management and risk management roles were similar to those I performed in Edge, the additional technical skills I acquired while at FX Partners are:• Coding strategy and features in C and C++.• Code generator for strategies written as a maven plugin using Velocity as a template engine.• Code generator for Java to C for messaging and data.• EOD reporting with execution analysis.• High performance analysis of system using packet inspection.• Back testing framework.• Matlab coding.

London, United Kingdom

Edge Capital Investments is a HIgh Frequency proprietary trading company specialising in trading Foreign Exchange in the primary market. I founded the company with my partner Quentin Miller with whom I developed all the software for the company. We secured investment for the company for both development and running a prime brokerage account from external investors. I was responsible for many activities while at Edge, including running and managing the trading book, technical architect for the entire system, hiring technical staff, execution data analysis, developing trading strategies, building the core trading software.My management duties included:• Securing finance for the company.• Engaging with lawyers and accountants to create the company.• Board meetings and meetings with investors.• Interviewing and hiring technical staff.• Chairing staff reviews and remuneration.• Negotiating contracts for premises, leased lines, co-location, brokerage, PB fees, employees.• Preparation of monthly accounts and company tax returns.

While at RBS I worked in the FX high frequency trading team. I architected and developed a trading infrastructure for the FX business. This infrastructure was used to connect to markets, manage order lifecycle for multiple execution venues deployed globally. Both the flow business and the hft proprietary trading used the same core services. I architected the pricing and risk management for the flow business. Other responsibilities included, identifying key roles, interviewing and hiring individuals. When the core team responsible for proprietary trading left I took over sole responsibility for the technology and became jointly responsible for the operational aspects of the proprietary trading. I rewrote all the existing strategies from scratch and developed a suite of back-testing tools. I deployed all the software, maintained the servers, organised new projects, fixed bugs and ensured the smooth running of the system. I worked intimately with the lead quant developing and testing new strategies. I also created a set of end of day reconcile tools, historic trading analysers and designed a realtime reconciler used to identify any intraday failures.

Working as a team lead on a new Fixed Income high yield product, Non Performing Loans, in a team of 6 developers. The system is a new platform based on j2ee architecture, with a struts front end and ejb server components, jms, tibco, spring, hibernate and Sybase back end. I work as the technical team lead with responsibility for all technical issues, liasing closely with the business, tracking progress of the team, interviewing and organising infrastructure requirements.

I worked as the lead java developer on a new trading application that amalgamates FX prices from several market sources and distributes them to internal traders as a single price ladder. The java swing client was a new development based on the existing code, it provided delivery of tradable prices in real-time. Responsibilities include designing and writing the implementation, performance analysis, creating stored procedures, deployment, interpreting discussions with the business into actual deliverables and working to tight deadlines. As well as re-engineering the existing framework I also improved performance and maintainability the existing code base by profiling the swing client and analysing the communication between the client and server and optimising where necessary. I worked as the lead java developer rewriting the pricing engine for FX cash prices. This was a substantial change to the core functionality of the fox application and required a complete re-working of the existing code and full regression testing.

London

Technical lead for a new java swing GUI re-write of an existing foreign exchange trading system. The existing system is a web-based dhtml GUI, with streaming feeds provided to a client-side applet. I investigated and recommended the new design, producing initial prototypes and uml for all aspects of the proposed system. This included recommending gui toolkits, ide and form designer, component based architecture, dynamic runtime configuration, installer and updater, error handling with server reporting, network communications, extensible multi-product architecture for use by any business unit, full internationalisation and white labelling, screen persistence, desktop integration, com-excel-java integration, message bus architecture. I produced a reference implentation of several trading screens for other developers to use as a base. The new system comprises an installer, network updater and a java swing gui that has an IOC runtime architecture and uses messaging to decouple components at runtime. The architecture is fully extensible allowing any product to be deployed at runtime depending upon client permissions. It was also important to wrap up boiler plate code such as swing event dispatch thread handling or menu creation preventing less experienced developers from making basic errors. This made outsourcing screen production easier. My duties also included code reviewing, developing build scripts and deploying the client.