We were excited to speak with Vivek Pathak, co-founder of BroadPeak Partners, about why so many tech teams in commodities firms feel stuck, and how modularity can finally set them free.
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Picture this: a compliance officer gets a call from the regulator. Something doesn’t look right with a handful of trades.
In most firms, this triggers a scramble. Compliance teams spend hours, sometimes even days, trying to find the relevant records. But they can’t access what they need without IT. So they raise a ticket. Someone in tech stops what they’re doing to query the database and track down the data.
Now, imagine instead, the same compliance officer says: “Hang on.” They type in the trade details, pull up the relevant records instantly, and talk the regulator through it, live, with confidence, while the tech team remains none the wiser, focused on the strategic priorities they set at the start of the year.
This is not a fantasy. It’s what’s possible when the right people have the right data at their fingertips.
But most commodities firms have built their architecture like a three-legged race. Critical trading, risk, and compliance data are so tightly coupled within legacy systems that nothing moves quickly, and everyone’s dragging each other down.
And it’s miserable for everyone involved. Compliance teams are chasing answers they can’t access on their own. Risk teams can’t see the full portfolio, so their metrics lose meaning. Traders don’t have a clear view of how they’re performing. And tech teams, who were hired to innovate, are stuck doing thankless work.
As @Vivek Pathak explains, “It’s like hiring a chef and then making them take orders, cook the food, and deliver it to the table. At some point, the chef quits.”
And yet, that’s what trading companies ask of their employees. They are being pulled in every direction, and when they don’t deliver on what they set out to do, they get berated.
“Ask any CTO or CIO, how often in a year do you complete everything you thought you were going to get done? If they say ‘always,’ they’re lying. People can invent new things for technologists to do all day. And when they don’t get what they want, they blame IT.”
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The solution is modularity, which involves separating the data layer from the plumbing.
With modularity, you’re no longer trapped by underperforming systems. You can plug in a new risk system quite easily, what Vivek calls “freedom for the kidnapped firm” when it comes to vendor lock-in.
More importantly, it gives your teams the space to do their jobs properly, allowing
- Compliance to respond quickly to ever-evolving regulatory changes
- Ops to investigate issues instantly
- IT to spend more time building, and less time context-switching
Ultimately, modularity gives firms flexibility, speed, and clarity. It removes the friction between teams. And it frees technologists to focus on building value, not patching processes.
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