Luiz Sol
Investment technology and data platforms. London.
Twice I have been the first and only senior technology owner at an asset manager, once at a discretionary value manager and once at a systematic fund, building the front office stack from nothing rather than inheriting it. The technology is what I was hired for. Most of what mattered was fixing how the firm ran.
After six years inside investment firms I did an MBA at London Business School, and I am now a consultant at Bain & Company in London, in the Private Equity Group.
Fixing how the firm runs
The work I am proudest of is rarely the software. It is coaching a chief investment officer through a period when his relationship with his team had broken down, and ending up a close friend. It is holding a critical investor negotiation together at the point it was collapsing, and closing it with agreed expectations. Small investment firms usually fail at management long before they fail at investing.
Front office technology
Portfolio management, trading, research, analytics and investment risk, together with the data platforms underneath them. At Atlas One I built the firm's investment risk, market intelligence, data lake and back office systems from scratch and led two engineering teams and two data teams. At Pandhora I rebuilt the research and trading automation stack, cutting downtime by over 90% and operating costs by over 80%, and migrated around two thirds of critical systems to cloud.
The commercial layer
At Pandhora I sat at partner level: strategic planning, market and competitive mapping, investor communications, and an end-to-end US$3M acquisition process including valuation work and negotiation. At Bain, in the Private Equity Group, I work on commercial diligence and value creation across financial services, software and insurance assets: how a business actually makes money, where an operating plan is fragile, and what a sponsor needs to believe before committing.
Background
- Certificate in Quantitative Finance
- MBA, London Business School, with an exchange term at Yale School of Management
- BEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Escola Politécnica, University of São Paulo
- Named inventor on a Brazilian patent for hospital fluid sensing systems
Contact
I am always happy to talk to people building or fixing technology inside investment firms, or running the businesses around them.