Expert Insights: An interview with our Commercial Director, Will Cowland

We sat down with Will Cowland, our Commercial Director, to explore his career path and advice for FX industry professionals. 

What is your role at Kooltra?

I am the Commercial Director here at Kooltra, which means I'm responsible for managing all the commercial sides of the business. So that includes things like contract negotiations, our pricing model, sales pipeline, and leading strategy calls with clients. I work closely with our customer success department, product team, and CEO to ensure our clients' needs are met and we support their business growth. My main priority is to determine how we can provide the most value to our clients by solving existing and emerging problems that key stakeholders have in our space and ultimately grow our business.

Can you share your background and how you ended up at Kooltra?

My whole career has been in FX software. I graduated from the University of Warwick in 2013 with a maths degree (which I wouldn't recommend to anybody) before I moved to London and joined a company called Fenix - an FX options, pricing, and risk management system. I originally joined their support team and worked my way up into business analysis and account management. I then left there and joined a couple of other FX software providers, primarily in an account management and pre-sales capacity, before I joined Kooltra in 2021 and haven't looked back. Ultimately, I'm a people person, but also a numbers guy. So, working in some kind of client-facing capacity in a complex industry like FX has been a perfect fit for me.

What made you excited to join Kooltra?

I was initially exploring opportunities, and I saw a demo of the Kooltra Platform from a good friend of mine who worked here, and I was struck by the breadth of it and how customizable and scalable the technology was relative to other players in the space, which I knew quite well.

I was intrigued to meet the broader team, and meeting those guys cemented my decision. The people you work with are so important to your enjoyment of work, and after meeting this group of super smart, highly motivated, ambitious, down-to-earth people, I knew I could work well with them. I wanted to bring value to a business that, in my opinion, was destined for great things, and I was excited to be a part of that.

What’s one of your favorite customer success stories? 

There are many, but I’ve really enjoyed working with our client, Onafriq (formerly known as MFS Africa), and collaborating with the team there to solve some of their more unique problems in our space. I think that alignment comes from the fact that at the core of our business is the desire to democratize the FX industry to make it easier and cheaper for people to offer FX services and then in turn, pass those cost savings onto their customers. 

Onafriq’s mission is perfectly aligned with that. They want to facilitate FX and payment services in Africa, which is obviously a historically underserved market. So we started there with quite a small deployment, helping their internal FX management team, but now have grown and also play a central role in their treasury management and provide real-time liquidity to their OTCFX customers through our client portal. Every time they have a problem to solve, it's interesting. And when they bring it to me, I get excited to get into the weeds and help them. 

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What advice would you give someone new to FX?

I think the key is not to let the jargon bamboozle you. When you're new to FX, it can feel like people are talking in tongues at you with all these different acronyms for things and euphemisms for other terms, and I found it really confusing when I first joined. Investopedia was a great tool to overcome that in the early days. Ultimately, the concepts themselves can be pretty straightforward. They just called things that you've probably never heard before. So yeah, just when you hear a term, write it down, and do the research, it'll probably be pretty clear afterward. 

The other one is probably just to stay curious. The FX landscape is always changing. It's an ever-evolving system, so every day can be a school day. So, just make sure that you keep your intellectual curiosity. Try to make the most of any learning opportunities that come your way. Often that will be through failure, but take those setbacks in your stride and use them to grow.

What advice would you give an FX leader?

I would give FX leaders a few bits of advice in our space. I think the main and the first one would be using analytics. It’s the key to making good data-driven decisions, from deciding what exposures to take, managing compliance information, or knowing which client segment to target. Getting the data and analyzing that data is key to making good decisions, so give your teams the tools they need to capture that information and then subsequently interrogate that information and encourage them to do that to extract insights and empower your decision-making. 

I've worked in places personally that both have and have not had those tools, and I speak from experience when I say I have brought the most value in places where I had those tools available to me. 

I'd say the second thing is to remain adaptable. The capital markets industry is always changing, and sometimes, that change can happen quite quickly. Be flexible, and make sure you can adjust your approach or strategy to capitalize on any opportunities. 

And finally, I'd say leverage diversity. I speak again firsthand when I say that the FX markets have historically been dominated by white men, recognizing obviously the irony in saying that as a white man myself. But the reality is that the markets are influenced by global events, right? So, having a diverse team with different perspectives is a huge asset you can leverage. I'd strongly advise you to make sure that you have diverse viewpoints around you and consider those viewpoints when making any decisions.

Are there any FX industry trends that you're excited about?

Yeah, I think it's an exciting time to be in our industry right now. There's a lot of innovation and change that's both in progress and on the immediate horizon. 

API-driven payment solutions are huge. Just making it easier to integrate FX and payments functionalities in software, which then obviously takes a lot of the pain out of making things like cross-border payments because there are fewer steps involved. 

Open banking is a big example of that driving innovation, allowing third-party developers to build on top of existing banking infrastructures. Europe is definitely ahead of North America in that trend, which is more of a necessity than desire, with regulation driving that change. PSD2, the revised payment services directive introduced in Europe in 2018, has played a big part in pushing that change. I think the UK alone is one of the biggest open banking markets now, including over 7 million users. And I expect that to continue and increase, particularly in North America. 

I think another big one is artificial intelligence and machine learning. Obviously, it's such a buzzword, and it feels a bit of a cliche talking about AI. Still, it's already revolutionizing the way some aspects of our industry are done. It will only continue to do so more and more as more use cases are explored and the technology gets more and more advanced. There are a few examples already of how it's being used. Things like scanning global news, social media, and financial reports to gauge market sentiment and inform decision-making. Also, trading algorithms that are AI-driven to automate those trading decisions, analyze real-time markets, and actually execute those trades at optimal prices. Detecting fraud and suspicious activity in real-time using AI to optimize payment routes and ensuring that the most efficient and cost-effective network or pathway is used to process a payment. So it's already used in many cases, but I fully expect that it will be leveraged more and more as the technology grows.

A big one, for us at Kooltra and for me personally, has been the increasing adoption of cloud technologies. When I started in the FX technology industry, back in the early teens, cloud technologies were relatively new, and people were broadly skeptical of them, having their data on the cloud and not in some physical server they had access to, and the security, in particular, was a big concern about it. But I think trust has built a lot over those technologies over the years, and I'd say now they're the market standard. Now the exception is having those locally deployed solutions rather than the rule like it used to be, which has seen huge benefits in things like obviously not having to have your own physical servers or access issues with getting to those physical servers, upgrading the software on them or indeed the hardware, having disaster recovery processes that were always a headache with the physical machines, performance issues, all of these things have been improved vastly by the access to these cloud technologies and the increased trust and security around them. So yeah, that's been a big one.

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