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Location
Diss / London
Member since
2014
Writes about
Security Regulation & Compliance People Retail banking Wholesale banking Cloud DevOps Start ups Markets Financial Crime Predictions

Steve's blog archive

2024 (2) 2023 (8) 2022 (1) 2020 (3) 2019 (2) 2018 (3) 2017 (1) 2016 (3) 2015 (1) 2014 (1)
Steve Wilcockson

Steve Wilcockson

Product Marketing at KX
Message Message me Posts: 26 Comments: 8
Bio I enjoy model-led and data-driven technologies in financial services. I work with quants, data scientists, data engineers, developers and business stakeholders on their research to production workflows on the buy-side, sell-side, front office, middle office, in insurance, and more. Career History At KX, our world-beating kdb time-series database and language q is used extensively across tier 1 front offices. With the tech fully supporting cloud-native real-time streaming analytics use cases and with terrific Python interoperability including embedded machine learning, I advocate its use in new places. I was formerly at Azul, a Java runtime specialist with a sizeable footprint in low-latency and big data applications such as trading, back-testing, pricing, payments, fraud detection and risk management. Before that, I was at altdata and sustainable finance satellite imagery firm Geospatial Insight, and until June 2018 I was Industry Manager for Financial Services at MathWorks, aka MATLAB.

Blogs

Capital Markets Technology

Niklaus Wirth, and How Financial Computing Can Help Save The Planet

11 Jan 2024

More than a few computing luminaries have sadly passed over recently, unsurprising given many pioneers from the fifties, sixties, and seventies reaching end of life. One who caught my eye was Niklaus Wirth who departed this world on New Year's Day. He was a Swiss computer scientist, associated most with ETH Zurich, but he also had sixties Silicon V...

Artificial Intelligence and Financial Services

Three GenAI Terms Financial Practitioners Learnt in 2023

03 Jan 2024

2023 was a troublesome year for many on our planet – wars, violence, population displacement, catastrophes, extremism, higher costs of living and poverty. Folks working in our industry were comparatively lucky, some of us invigorated by the exciting GenerativeAI tornado. Just as HFT transformed the vocabulary of capital markets in the 2000s, and d...

Big Data

Bitemporality, Helping Lower Costs for Financial Services Use Cases

15 Nov 2023

I was at an “all things data and analytics benchmarking” event last week. It was fabulous, most major banks were represented, also the hottest of hot hedge funds, a chunk of exchanges, and some of not-the-usual vendors. I found it refreshing, like most events where tangible analytics gets discussed. My early career was quant /data science/analytics...

Artificial Intelligence and Financial Services

From RAG to Riches in a GenAI World: Some Jargon Explainers and Current Trends

06 Nov 2023

What is RAG? Here's the simple 30 second definition, A deeper dive will follow. RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is the buzziest word on the GenAI internet right now, more jargon to confuse the uninitiated. RAG, stands for retrieval augmented generation. It simpy means you can apply and RETRIEVE knowledge in front of the LLM, to AUGMENT your LL...

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Steve is Commenting on

3 GenAI Use Cases for Capital Markets: The Power of the Vector

  Very good. I'd not seen it! Quite agree. Cassandra is my old stomping ground!

13 Jul 2023 Reply Read article

3 GenAI Use Cases for Capital Markets: The Power of the Vector

  Hey Ketharaman Swaminathan. Thanks for the comments! Great to hear from you. This dates me, but my baseball knowledge is centered on Randy Johnson and Ken Griffey Junior (apparently there's a junior version of junior I saw the other day).  Ex.3 - having just watched a webinar earlier today on the failure of stress testing models (admittedly capital/risk ones rather than bog standard portfolios) with GFC and more recently Covid, I wonder if I should have waited before posting it because I might have added extra layers. My inspiration at the time was less the model itself but more around the democratization of the human linguistic prompt that any non-Quant/coding PM might make. After today's webinar, though, I might be tempted to throw in the real extreme scenarios into the mix, the black swan scenarios which the LLM might be able to make sense of, but my model perhaps can't "imagine". Thus the LLM output could adapt weights and correlate up dependent factors, possibly make sense of related factors that inform the "copula"-like thing which seeds the simulation, etc. Your point is completely valid!

13 Jul 2023 Reply Read article

Is Embedded Finance the Future?

  Great article and extremely well-written, but the use of terms like "embedded technology" and to a lesser extent "embedded finance" has software engineering/development connotations, which gets morphed yet more when applied to finance.  

22 Sep 2020 Reply Read article

Banks are finally embracing the Open Source movement

  Good article ! Thanks ! I've written on this topic on few occasions, here (https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/18119/the-non-contradiction-of-proprietary-finance-and-community-open-source-programming) and here (https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/18315/financial-services-firms-must-contribute-more-software-repos-to-retain-staff-and-stay-relevant) most recently I think the leadership of banks in using Java, R, Python, even the C languages is testimony to their use of OSS; Goldman Sachs and a couple of other financial organizations are high up in the Java Exec committee too. Where I think they're less prevalant is in contributing back to open source, but that's changing !  Steve

04 Feb 2020 Reply Read article