Expert Insights: An interview with our Head of Product, Steve Smith

We sat down with Steve Smith, our Head of Product, to explore his career path and advice for FX industry professionals. 

What is your role at Kooltra?

At Kooltra, I'm the Head of Product. I lead the product management organization as well as the design organization.

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

Before Kooltra, I had a bit of an interesting career path. First, I worked in derivative sales at Citigroup in Toronto. I worked there for several years on multi-asset derivatives, building a strong finance foundation. From there, I moved to tech by joining a fintech in Toronto, leading their product management. I then took a leadership role with Wish, a large US e-commerce company, and participated in their IPO. And then ultimately, I joined Kooltra after that. 

What made you excited to join Kooltra?

It was a great fit for my collective personal experience and interests in institutional finance, as well as product and design. Kooltra is on the leading edge for all of that. The FX and payments space is finance-heavy and requires a lot of subject matter expertise to be successful. The team is also really trying to do things properly from a product and engineering design point of view, which really attracted me to the company. 

What’s one of your favorite customer success stories? 

So, my favorite customer success story would be Mercantile Exchange, one of our big MSB customers here in Canada. What's really exciting from my point of view is that we really support their whole business cross-functionally across trading, compliance, operations, finance, and senior management, which is really where I see Kooltra’s product shine the most. I appreciate our modular structure which allows us to offer a ton of deployment flexibility, but the clients who see the most value are those who leverage the product across their entire organization. 

It was also an exciting project because we built a ton of the product with them, especially on the compliance side. So it was really great collaboration between our two teams. 

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What advice would you give someone new to the FX industry?

So, if you're considering working in FX, make sure you love it. I think many people may come to FX for some of the wrong reasons, and it can be lucrative but it’s also very competitive. It's a tough business, but it's super interesting. You're going to see many things that challenge you both from an asset class and a technology point of view. That’s what makes our team so strong: the combination of industry expertise and passion. 

What advice would you give compliance leaders in FX? 

The first thing that comes to mind is just being open to the different technology alternatives that are emerging within compliance. It's a really complicated space to work in, and many compliance leaders are hesitant to adopt some of the emerging technologies. 

But what we've seen is that when compliance leaders embrace these new technologies, they're doing much better on a lot of the reporting obligations, including passing their audits a lot easier. An openness to change and the use of new technology to drive the business forward is what will give some a competitive advantage. 

Another piece of advice would be to work with technology providers that can grow with your business and support your entire business across departments/functions. Kooltra is really comprehensive in our approach to FX operations and compliance - it’s not solely a regulatory reporting solution; it also includes pre-trade risk checks, KYC/AML onboarding workflows that include identity verification screening, etc. Platform solutions in this space will provide a greater ROI than point solutions. 

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

By far, the biggest industry trend I'm most excited about right now is putting the power of technology within the hands of subject matter experts and business users. We've seen this trend for a long time in technology with the rise of no-code solutions developing with apps like Zapier, Webflow, etc. And I'm excited about bringing this trend into finance. 

One of the biggest challenges with legacy FX solutions has been the lack of customization. Many MSBs, banks, and brokers have unique business processes that give them a competitive edge, so a one-size-fits-all solution just doesn’t work. Tools like Kooltra that empower the subject matter experts to customize the product to meet the unique needs of their business is what really excites me. 

Learn more about Kooltra

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