A Front-Row Seat: From the Financial Crisis to the FCA, Nearly 20 Years On.

In 2007, I had a rather uncomfortable front-row seat to what was about to become the Global Financial Crisis.

I was at UBS, working on the credit derivatives trading floor, where I built a quantitative engine for synthetic CDOs. It used complex simulations to assess the credit risk of reference entities and identify names for substitution.

If that sounds complicated, it was.

At the time, it was a fascinating quantitative problem. But as the crisis unfolded, it became painfully clear just how difficult it was to see where these layers of credit risk ultimately sat, and how interconnected the market had become.

That experience has stayed with me.

So there is a certain symmetry in finding myself, nearly 20 years later, appointed to the FCA and Bank of England's Transaction and Post-trade Reporting Harmonisation Taskforce.

Much of today's transaction and derivatives reporting architecture has its roots in the lessons learned from the financial crisis: regulators need accurate, timely data to understand markets and identify risk.

But nearly two decades on, the question has changed.

It is no longer simply: how do we bring greater visibility to opaque markets?

It is: knowing what technology can do today, and anticipating how markets will operate tomorrow, how would we design reporting if we were starting again?

How do we give regulators the data they need to identify systemic risk, detect market abuse and conduct effective surveillance, while making reporting simpler, more accurate and less burdensome for the industry?

That is what makes this Taskforce particularly interesting. The FCA and Bank are looking at the long-term architecture across MiFIR, EMIR and SFTR, including how technology, data and infrastructure could simplify and streamline reporting.

For Qomply, having a seat at that table matters.

We spend our days seeing where reporting works, where it doesn't, and where seemingly small differences in interpretation, data and technology create very large problems for firms.

As a technology company, we also get to bring a different perspective: not simply how we improve what exists today, but what the architecture could look like tomorrow.

I am looking forward to bringing some ideas to the table, listening to others and hopefully, helping shape what comes next.

It feels rather fitting.

In 2007, I was building technology inside the market and learning first-hand why visibility of risk matters.

In 2026, I have the privilege of helping think about how the infrastructure designed to provide that visibility might work better.