Introduction

In our experience, each client is different, context is always king. However, because many financial institutions start off with end-user programmers, people who program for themselves, usually in Excel with VBA, the organisations tend to follow similar growth paths. In the end, financial institutions end up with a consolidated engineering team, what is often called the ‘Engineering Hypermarket’. The hypermarket is a place where the financial institution can ‘shop’ for:

• A bug fix.
• A new pricer.
• A desk quant who can sit in the trading room assisting with features, analysis or coding.

The hypermarket is characterised by high levels of automation, discipline and rapidity; they do things quickly. Building a hypermarket is a bootstrapping process that starts with the smoke test. Continue reading →