Omgeo, the global standard for post-trade efficiency, today announced the appointment of three executives to the European product team from the banking industry.
Janet Coughlan, Omgeo ALERT strategic initiatives; Steve Higgins, product manager and Bill Meenaghan, product manager have joined the firm to further drive product development with a specific focus on European requirements.
The appointments mark Omgeo's move to create geographically distributed product executives with industry backgrounds to take responsibility for driving product management support. All three executives aim to translate regional voice-of-client needs into concrete product functionality. They will also work with the rest of the product team to ensure that Omgeo's product strategy directly represents the most pertinent client and industry demands. The new hires will report to Peter Hudson, director, product management and Kimberly Matthews, executive director, product management. Mr. Hudson joined Omgeo in June 2008 from Linedata Services, where he was UK head of product marketing. Ms. Matthews joined Omgeo in July 2008 from State Street Global Advisors. Previously, she was with Fidelity Investments.
Steve Higgins, who joins Omgeo from UBS, will focus on Omgeo Central Trade Manager (Omgeo CTM) by working closely with the industry and clients. At UBS, Mr. Higgins was head of EMEA prime brokerage settlements, where he was responsible for the team which provided prime brokerage operational services to hedge fund clients. Prior to this, Mr. Higgins was an assistant vice president at Credit Suisse in prime service operations, where he ran a team which managed pre- and post-settlement duties for equity/fixed income products for Credit Suisse's prime brokerage clients.
Jan Coughlan has extensive experience with settlement instruction data and in dealing with the challenges in settling with non-compliant information. At Omgeo, she will be working across Omgeo's data management offerings with particular responsibility for advancing Omgeo's quality data initiatives (QDI) for Omgeo ALERT. Ms. Coughlan also joins Omgeo from UBS where sre she worked for 18 months as a business consultant. During her time advising the bank, her main remit was to improve straight-through processing rates for the cash securities business through focusing on activities such as instruction processing and use of client data.
Before this role, Ms. Coughlan was a vice president at Credit Suisse where she led multi-functional teams implementing, developing and testing new projects, as well as managing the strategic exception processing stream for component architecture. She was also closely involved in business analytics, having re-engineered various business processes to provide significant cost savings and was involved in detailed analysis covering the entire transaction lifecycle.
Bill Meenaghan, who will also focus on Omgeo's data management offerings will be responsible for providing regional leadership in Omgeo ALERT launch activities for 2009, as well as providing regional research and analysis to help inform the global roadmap with deliverables required to grow and enhance Omgeo ALERT.
Mr. Meenaghan joins Omgeo from State Street Global Advisers where he worked for five years, latterly as trade administration manager running the trade support teams for equity, fixed income, foreign exchange and money markets. Before this, he was an Investment Services Manager, responsible for the cash and money market team and the trade support teams. Between 1999 to 2004, Mr. Meenaghan worked for State Street Bank and Trust running projects such as the outsourcing deal with Investec and the conversion team following the acquisition of the Deutsche Bank business by State Street.
Commenting on the appointments, Steve Matthews, managing director, product for Omgeo said, "Omgeo's product strategy is based upon three key areas of focus: adding new markets, asset classes, counterparties and client segments; increasing data quality; and enhancing the technology within our product set. These strategic hires will help us fulfil this strategy as we support our clients and the industry in their quest to increase the global community, mitigate risk and maintain and improve operational stability."
Adding to this, Leigh Walters, executive director, global sales and EMEA, Omgeo said, "Even in these tough market conditions we are committed to growing the European business and augmenting the domain knowledge we have through recruiting senior executives that bring first hand client experience with them. These industry hires are proof that the main driver for product development is the fulfilment of client needs, with particular focus on regional nuances and functionality."