Mike Ubis

Challenge:
The clearing and custody industry has traditionally involved manual processes, hard documents, and required increasing headcount for investment firms to grow

Action:
I identified the opportunity to use technology as a differentiator that would allow fintech companies, online brokers, and digital wealth advisors to quickly scale their operations without the need for a significant increase in staff. Working with a distributed team of engineers, we created a suite of microservice APIs that allowed users to perform all the traditional activities related to investment accounts online and in a fraction of the time for legacy systems

Results:
• Saw an increase in funded accounts of 63% within the first year.
• Decreased the average time to open an account to under one minute from an industry average of two days.
• Accelerated asset transfers between brokerage firms by 25%.
• Eliminated the need for hard documents and wet signatures.

Challenge:
The company was looking to launch a new hedge fund that was outside its traditional core competencies and needed to modify existing systems and find new solutions to meet an aggressive go-live date

Action:
I partnered with trading staff to determine which functionality was considered to be proprietary and kept in-house and which could be outsourced to third-party vendors. I also worked with engineering teams to assess a timeline for new development. We also created pods of traders, developers, product managers, and business analysts to test and validate changes to decrease iteration time to the absolute minimum. I then performed vendor due-diligence and partnered with IT teams to manage all system integrations. Working with the firm's stakeholders, I also identified and mitigated the impact on projects already on the company's roadmap.

Result:
• The hedge fund launched on time.

Challenge:
Despite the modernization for managing the holdings of securities, physical certificates still exist and present a unique problem that required manual processes. The staff routinely needed to spend a full day over the weekend to inventory and reconcile positions.

Action:
I created a system that scanned physical documents and placed a QR code on them to allow the easy tracking and entry into a centralized database. This removed the need for anyone to actually retrieve the certificates from storage and allowed for instant, ad-hoc reconciliations of position holdings.

Result:
• Employees were no longer required to manage this process during off-hours. This added efficiency allowed the in-housing for all physical certificates and eliminated an annual $4-million vendor cost for their storage and management.