Beacon with Mark Higgins | E255

Enabling quants and developers build better tools.

In today's episode of the Fintech impact, Jason is going to talk to Mark Higgins, Chief Analytics Officer and Co-Founder of Beacon. It is a company that provides cloud solutions to financial institutions to run their data and analytics and a number of other interesting and high-level things.

Episode Highlights

  • 0.33: Beacon is a financial technology company focused on the capital markets. These are the sort of wholesale trading that happens in foreign exchange and commodities and interest rate derivatives.

  • 2.00: Mark and his co-founder started working on trading desks and they started at Goldman Sachs which has an interesting internal system called SecDB and was different from a lot of the other bank systems in how to approach development on the trading desk.

  • 4.55: Mark had decided to start their trading and risk management system as a development platform that has all that enterprise technology stuff in it and so that quants and data scientists and people like that don't have to be experts at enterprise technology.

  • 8.00: The financial institutions have had a sort of 30 plus year history of on-premises data center computers and there is a particular kind of mental model that goes along with that.

  • 09.02: Mark shares how their product is this combination of two pieces. One of them is sort of an out-of-the-box set of trading and risk management applications and the second part of the platform is the developer environment where they can go and build their own tools.

  • 10.28: Mark says that they are very open with their underlying technology and development environment. Their clients get all of our source code, and they can write their own code in the environment. 

  • 12.02: In the early years of the company, Mark spent a lot of time being pretty reactive from a product perspective where basically their road map was whatever the next big prospects wanted them to build, and it kept changing all the time.

  • 12.35: Beacon is a big change for people. Jason talks about the implementation timeline for something like this for the people or companies.

  • 17.41: Institutions start using Beacon for one particular thing or whatever particular business problem they have and when their developers start using Beacon to build new stuff for the desk, then a new project comes up and they're like, why don't we just use Beacon for this, says Mark.

  • 18.57: While talking about his biggest challenge, Mark shares that their clients in capital know that the cloud is the future and that they have to get stuff on the cloud, but it's hard for them to kind of get their head. 

3 Key Points

  1. One thing where Mark helps people with Beacon is how to use the cloud in the right way because beacons sort of automates all the cloud infrastructure management in the elastic compute stuff.

  2. Beacon came into the market after 4 iterations Mark shares how he ended up having to modify and adapt this product that he didn't expect initially.

  3. Beacon gives you a lot more flexibility in doing the kind of ad hoc analysis because you have access to elastic computing, says Mark.

Tweetable Quotes

  • "Quants or data scientists are good at solving business problems as they come up on the desk using whatever tools they have available but they're typically not very good at enterprise technology." - Mark

  • "The quant has outsourced the most important thing that any developer can do, which deploys your change into production." – Mark

  • "The thing that we didn't properly understand about selling to big institutions is that it's really hard to sell to them when you're a little company." – Mark

  • "I just love the idea of helping the whole industry to get more efficient and productive through using better tools." - Mark


Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech