Steering through rocky markets

Melissa Ellis, Electronic Sales and Product at Virtu Financial, talks volatility, clients and career.

Can you please tell me what is your day to day role at your firm?

I oversee Virtu’s Workflow Technology business in Europe, including our flagship product – Triton Valor (an execution management system). My main job responsibilities are generating new business for the firm and steering product strategy, but on a day-to-day basis I also work with clients directly to ensure their ongoing success. One of my favourite parts of the role is finding creative and innovative ways that Virtu can solve any problems our clients and prospects face; and many times, we do so for customers that have limited resources, which is a challenge I embrace to work as efficiently as possible. Virtu equips me with a broad toolkit across all aspects of client execution services, and I appreciate the opportunities I have to collaborate with the subject matter experts across the firm. Every client’s needs are unique and the market landscape is evolving constantly, which means that I have opportunities to learn and grow daily.

Market conditions have been volatile but what have you found to be the most challenging?

Clients depend on Virtu’s products and services on a daily basis, so it’s our job to make sure that those products and services perform effectively and reliably, especially during volatile market conditions. We work hard for our clients to ensure that our technology solutions can withstand shocks in the market so that we can continue to provide actionable insights, automation, and operational efficiencies without interruption.

In anticipation of the increasing demands on our systems, Virtu started a front-to-back, multi-year rearchitecting of Triton in 2017 to ensure that it continues to scale with increasing market complexity. This initiative put us in a very strong position through some of the more recent market events, including Brexit, Covid, Russian sanctions and other political events. In addition to making the system more secure and reliable, the revamp has also allowed us to address many client needs including asset class expansion, true global trading blotters, and interoperability across applications – both internal and external – such as our new multi-asset class Analytics Portal using Open Technology APIs.

What skill-sets are required for today and have they changed over the past couple of years?

As a client-facing business, the ability to build relationships is a constant and something we prioritise at Virtu, but in a continually evolving industry the skills needed to succeed and stay ahead of the competition change often. A couple of aspects that have become a focus in recent years in my area of expertise are the breadth of knowledge required across all asset classes and the ability to work with data. We’ve seen our customers increase their reliance on data in order to analyse and improve trading performance, and we have a number clients with sophisticated trading strategies that include automation based on historical trading data. In order for these clients to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible, it is imperative to partner with a technology firm like Virtu that understands trading across all asset classes and knows how to use the data.

There is no role at Virtu that escapes the need to understand and analyse data. Core to our recruitment process is identifying amazing people with the skills necessary to cross-train on all our systems and develop meaningful relationships. In the end, there is nothing more important to our clients than having a reliable technology partner that is available to assist them in real-time (we use instant messaging to service our clients) across all of the products they trade.

How did you get started in financial services and is this the career you envisioned? If not. what had been the plan?

My career has been extremely exciting and much better than I could have possibly planned. Ultimately, I love working with people and helping them solve complex problems with technology. I’ve always been fairly open minded and adventurous when presented with opportunities. Coming from a family full of traders on the floors in Chicago, I always felt most comfortable in the financial world, but when I graduated college my father and siblings expressed some concerns to me about the culture of the trading floors. Instead, I went to work in the marketing department of a market data vendor and was quickly promoted to product manager of an electronic trading application. After gaining a few years of experience, I decided to take some time out to sail around the world.

When I returned, I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to work in Italy and, without a second thought, I grabbed it. The same thing happened three years later when I was asked to open an office in London. I’ve now been here for almost 20 years! My time in Europe has taught me more than I could have ever hoped to learn about market structure, operations and trading needs across many types of client segments, cultures and nationalities. I am blessed to have been in positions that have exposed me to so many incredible people and different disciplines while keeping to my skill set focused around electronic trading. Sometimes plans are overrated.

What progress do you think women have made in financial services? How have things changed since you started? What needs to be done to move the needle further?

A lot of progress has been made for women in financial services since I started in the business, but there is still much more that can be done. Women make up about 30% of the workforce in FinTech at the moment, and an even lower percentage are in leadership roles. The hope is to increase both of these percentages and grow the representation of women within FinTech and financial services as a whole. To that end, there are many things that we can and should continue to invest in to attract women into the financial industry, and it starts at home as well as during the educational process.

Encouraging young women into the STEM subjects will increase the number of female candidates both in the recruitment pool for colleges and universities as well as in the workforce in general. After that, it is up to us to bring young women into the workforce through fair and unbiased recruitment processes and to help develop their careers through training and mentoring programs, flexible work-life balance and parental leave policies, and networking opportunities to give them to the tools to move up the organisational ladder.

How does your firm support women and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in general? How are you involved?

Virtu has always been a champion of women in the workplace and has a culture led from the top that encourages diversity, equity and inclusion. Over the last few years, we have formalised our commitment to these initiatives in several different ways, including the creation of both our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee and the role of chief people Officer – both of which are co-led by female chairs.

Through these initiatives, Virtu employees are encouraged to develop their unique skills and maximise their impact across the firm to ensure Virtu’s continued success. I am currently a part of the Awareness sub-committee of the DEI Committee, and I play my most active role in looking at regulations being proposed and suggesting ways they can be implemented effectively for firms of our size and profile.

To my point earlier regarding helping young women find a career path in finance, Virtu also began a partnership this year with the Women in Data Science (WiDS) organisation. The WiDS Virtu platform provides a forum for women – primarily in the financial services industry – to share data science experiences and practical skills as well as networking opportunities. The next event will be in March 2023 where we will discuss and celebrate the careers of some prominent women in our industry.

One of my favourite programmes at Virtu is our Women’s Winternship, a one-week program designed to introduce female college students to a career path in financial services. This early talent identification program helps us build a strong and diverse female pipeline for the firm. I enjoy assisting with the recruitment process and working with the young women who participate in the program. These candidates are all extremely talented and diverse which makes me excited for the future of FinTech. In addition to these many great programs, I have no doubt that Virtu will continue to find new ways to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion and promote women in the workplace.

There is a plethora of awards for women in the financial sector. In your opinion, what still needs to happen before we no longer need gender-specific awards?

I really appreciate Markets Media hosting the Women in Finance awards and think they play such an important role in the recognition of some amazing women in our industry. My prediction is that more representation of women in the financial industry will eventually negate the need for gender specific awards. A contributing factor of gender specific awards is under representation of women in leadership roles across the finance industry. Once that is resolved, it will be far less necessary to carve people out.