Richard Balarkas, pioneer in electronic trading, joins ALFO Deep Tech

London, UK: ALFO, a UK Deep Tech company offering multi-asset, multi-currency and multi-market real-time risk management and hedging system for exchange traded and OTC instruments, today announced that Richard Balarkas has joined the company’s advisory board. 

Richard brings to the team over 30 years of experience in leadership positions for a number of multinationals. Widely regarded as a leading pioneer in the development of electronic trading and market structure, Richard has held numerous senior management roles at the London Stock Exchange, Instinet and Credit Suisse First Boston. He is a board member of CBOE Europe, Saxo Capital Markets Ltd, Chairman of SquareBook and will work with the ALFO leadership team on the company’s high growth strategy.

“I have known the ALFO team for years, and I know from first-hand experience that they build technology that wins. Their solutions will make life a lot easier for a lot of people currently struggling with slow legacy systems and outmoded technology, just like it did mine,” says Richard.

He adds: “ALFO’s SABR solution is an exciting launch product because anyone can hit a button on a spreadsheet and calculate a VAR number, but recent market shocks have exposed how legacy risk models are redundant in markets, where the relative behaviour of stocks bonds commodities and even crypto is increasingly unpredictable – unless you can crunch huge amounts data very quickly to feed machine learning tools that power a range of adaptive risk models that you can choose from – which is what SABR does.

Even then knowing your potential downside is nowhere near as useful as being able to do something about it, and this is where I think SABR really wins – I’m not saying it can predict the next shock, but it will identify what you specifically should be worried about and identify what you specifically should do in order to hedge the risk.

Traditional financial risk management is akin to black box recorder technology on airlines – not much use to anyone actually flying. They don’t actually make any flight safer, but post any calamity you might learn something from the data they recorded, which at best may avert a repeat of the events that caused the last crash. SABR is to risk managers what a paranoid black box with inbuilt survival instincts, autopilot skills and a very loud voice is to a nervous airline passenger.”

“It is fantastic to work again with Richard and deliver solutions needed by the financial services industry. Risk management is at similar crossroads to electronic and algorithmic trading in the late 90s and early 2000s. Add additional computing power, ever-changing technology infrastructure, and access to fast-moving data to the landscape. Fluid regulations and investor nervousness are a given,” says Florian Micu, Co-Founder and CIO of ALFO

“We are delighted to have Richard on board, whose wealth of experience will be immensely valuable in helping us to scale our business,” says Ali Mashoofi, Co-Founder and CEO at ALFO.

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