2019 Year in Review

A Year of Fulfilled Dreams

For me, 2019 has been a year of fulfilling dreams. In January, one of my life long dreams came true when my family and I went to Revelstoke in British Columbia to go heli-skiing for the first time.  When we jumped out of the helicopter for the first run, I could not tell whether the thunder in my ears was coming from the pounding of my heart or the beating of the rotor blades against the air.  As the chopper lifted away and silence fell, we carved our trails side-by-side across the untracked powder. It was breathtaking.

2019 was off to a great start!

Tapaas Innovation Highlights

On the Tapaas side of life, there were many advances made by our product team.  One highlight was our release of the Trader Account Labelling feature. This simple concept, born from a customer asking for a Watchlist, has transformed how Dealers interact with the Tapaas Platform.

It has been a dream of mine for a long time that, in addition to delivering valuable insights through Visual Dashboards and Alerts, Tapaas becomes more interactive.  The Labelling feature is the first extension of the Platform that facilitate engagement and collaboration to help dealers discover issues; come to agreement; draw conclusions; and execute remedial action.  The Labelling function is a critical building block towards our vision of the Tapaas Platform of the future. We have been very encouraged by the imaginative workflows the dealers have been developing with it already.

Another major advancement is the application of Machine Learning techniques for Anomaly Detection in spreads and tick data.  This is the first of many business aspects which we plan to apply Machine Learning techniques to compliment the skills of the Dealers to address critical business challenges.  I will be writing more about this early in the New Year. So stay tuned.

In addition to our own innovation, we cannot overstate the importance of our continuous investment in keeping the Tapaas Platform current with all the advances and enhancements being released by the Trading Platforms and Liquidity Hub Platforms with which we are integrated.  These vendors are constantly innovating and this requires a large investment for us to remain compatible and support their new features and business flows.

We have also made extensive architectural changes so that our platform can handle the massive increases in trading data volumes as our customers have grown substantially in recent years.  At Tapaas, we see handling massive volume in real time as tantamount to our success. So, we are constantly investing in performance monitoring and optimisation.

Our Customer Success Team

In 2019, we also made progress on another dream of mine. When we hired Cagan Cerkez and Rose Sayegh, in Cyprus our Person in Cyprus, Andria, became our Team in Cyprus. Cagan and Rose worked together as the team leads for ThompsonReuters (TR) regional service desk, in Nicosia. They bring with them incredible depth of experience supporting TR’s mission critical financial markets applications for a very demanding customer base.  Tom and I are very excited to have them on board to help Andria build our world class Customer Success function which will support the growth of the Tapaas business globally.

Our First Salesperson

The other big milestone for Tapaas this year was to hire our first Salesperson.  Though we are very grateful for the years oneZero Financial served as the Tapaas Reseller, we are delighted that George Koutroukis joined us in June as our first Salesperson and Head of Sales EMEA.  George is a unique individual who has done everything from sailing ships for the Greek Merchant Navy to Business Development for forex brokers. He is extremely well connected and has a great understanding of how to get our message out and capture mindshare in the marketplace.

Since George has joined Tapaas, the number of conversations we’ve had with brokers throughout Europe about how Tapaas can help optimise their Risk Management Function has gone off the charts.  We’re very excited about what this will mean for our growth in the coming years.

Looking Forward to 2020

As you can see, 2019 was a very big year for the Tapaas Team.  Much of what we achieved in 2019 was foundational for growth in 2020.  So, I expect next year to be even better. I hope you are looking forward to it as much as I am.