A day in the life of Kayleigh Venn, Head of Institutional Operations
I run the operational support team which acts as the day-to-day interface between the business and our ever-expanding number of institutional clients. The customer journey starts with the team of relationship managers (RMs), but once they have agreed on terms and signed contracts with a counterparty – essentially got that deal over the line - the more technical tasks of onboarding, configuring and integrating the relevant systems are handed over to my team. And once a client is set up, whilst the RMs will be constantly in touch to ensure institutional clients are aware of all the functionality we have available, my team is there to help with ironing out issues on the ‘back end’.
What that means is that on a day-to-day basis, I’m interacting not only with the institutional clients themselves but also with several internal departments at CMC Markets. That could typically be any combination of the legal team, the IT developers, the pricing teams and the dealing desk, underlining the fact that the Institutional Ops team exists to solve problems and ensure that B2B clients receive a service that’s as seamless as possible. We’re also working with third-party vendors on a regular basis and the most obvious in this cohort would be the bridge providers. To give an example here, continually expanding the portfolio of bridges we can connect across – both proactively and on a reactive basis as we win new business – is a cornerstone of ensuring our institutional offering can be seen as truly best-in-class.
One point that repeatedly stands out is the fact that CMC Markets is built on very sophisticated technology, so when we’re interacting both with vendors and clients, we often end up working in a truly collaborative manner. We find ourselves imparting a lot of knowledge to our counterparties and the objective invariably ends up being one of building bespoke solutions. The business is however continuing to evolve and projects such as the migration into LD4 have delivered some really valuable synergies for our work with institutional clients, especially in terms of pricing. And I know there’s more innovation to be seen here too. Technology gets ever more sophisticated and we’ll be harnessing this to present new opportunities for delivering even more powerful solutions both to ourselves and our clients.
