I’ve been part of the Trading Application Support desk at CMC Markets for the last eight years. Until 2019, I was in London where I worked my way up the team, before being given the opportunity to move to our APAC hub in Sydney and manage five staff here.
I think the fact we have a team of skilled individuals located on both sides of the globe is something that delivers real value-add to our retail and institutional clients alike. It means we can offer genuinely seamless support on a 24x5 basis and because of our collective years of experience, we are in a position to be putting things right without having to wait for another team or office to come online. Regardless of where you are in the world, you can be confident that you’re going to get a consistent level of service from CMC Markets at any time of the day or night.
The option of transferring to Sydney certainly presented a great personal opportunity, but it’s also delivered some strong benefits to the way we run the wider Trading Application Support team. Not only am I enjoying living and working in Australia, but my hands on experience has also helped accelerate the up-skilling of my colleagues, which again goes to underline this idea that the highest levels of support are always available for our clients, whenever they need them.
Often the necessary fixes can be quite straightforward, for example the FIX API connections our institutional counterparties rely on to derive pricing are designed to run continuously. Should the counterparty need to do some work on their servers, the connection will be broken and although re-establishing this needs some intervention on our side, it’s typically a very simple problem to resolve. We’re on hand to sort issues like that quickly. I also take a proactive role when it comes to liaising with clients – issues may be flagged with the institutional client services team first, but I’m always eager to work directly with our customers. Experience has shown us that removing additional links from the chain of communication invariably ensures we see the fastest resolution. And for more complex problems, our service level agreements for incident management enable us to escalate matters quickly, involving the necessary staff across the company.
The job is certainly high a pressure one, but we get the right results by having a skilled team with the flexibility to deliver for our clients 24 hours a day. Ultimately, we’re a first line of defence, so are continuously monitoring the critical systems to ensure everything is running smoothly - and when issues do crop up, we are in a great position to restore services quickly.
