Solene Khy, Head of Product Management, Commodity, Equity, FX and Digital Assets at Murex, talks to Shanny Basar about the changes she has seen while working at the financial technology vendor for two decades, industrialising software, and building teams with a diversity of skills and opinions.
Solene Khy joined Murex back in 2003 in Singapore when there were about 25 people in the office, out of around 350 staff globally. Now, she is based in Paris as Head of Product Management, Commodity, Equity, FX and Digital Assets for a company which has grown to around 2,600 employees across 19 locations, with more than 60 nationalities, and a wide spectrum of around 300 clients around the globe.
Khy characterised Murex’s culture as very client-centric, so it fosters expertise, excellence, and innovation.
“It is important to me that there is a lot of humility and a strong internal focus on keeping a highly collaborative mindset, which is critical as the platform has become richer and the company is much bigger than it used to be,” she added. “Many of the people who work at Murex have stayed here for many years, like me.”
She described the office dynamic in Singapore when she started as very much like a start-up. Staff were doing a bit of everything, working long hours, and sending out versions of code to clients right after developers had just fixed issues.
As part of a small company she also travelled every week to countries in the region, including Malaysia, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Australia, as Murex was expanding its client base of banks in the region and deploying its second-generation platform. Murex has since released its MX.3 platform, which connects business processes and operations with advanced and specialised analytics for trading, post-trade and risk management.
“During the global financial crisis, Murex supported a diverse range of clients and adapted quickly to the new regulatory landscape,” Khy added. “We had the ability to invest heavily in technology and people at a difficult time to provide solutions that not only enabled compliance, but refocused business priorities, which helped us progress.”
Khy said a differentiator for Murex is the people who work at the firm and the engagement of its founders to develop over the long term. She said: “We are an independent company and the founders have always promoted long-term investment which insulates us from certain pressures.”
Murex has stated that it has invested more than €1 billion in MX.3 over 10 years. In June Murex said the MX.3 platform topped the IBS Intelligence Sales League Table Wholesale Banking | Treasury & Capital Markets category for the fourth year running.
Product management
While Murex was facing the challenges of industrialising the delivery of software and reorganising work across multiple departments to support its rapid growth, Khy chose to specialise in product management. Her role allows her to maintain contact with clients and developers to build products, while also being involved at the forefront of all the innovation in the market.
Murex has adopted new methodologies using the Scaled Agile Framework which Khy described as a huge and exciting change. Murex implemented the agile framework because the firm needed a methodology that was able to scale and deliver at a faster pace in order to meet the high ambitions for its investments.
“I had the chance to initiate the creation of a major agile structure from scratch, and to adapt the theory to our own practice,” Khy said.
Clients today want to lower the total cost of ownership and simplify their capital markets technology, and so the firm has made many investments including software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Standardisation. Murex is involved in a number of re-platforming programs onto its integrated platform.
One trend, according to Khy, is growing demand for carbon trading which is linked to the increasing emergence of new exchanges, the launch of products and a wave of institutional adoption of the voluntary carbon market.
Khy said: “Murex has been involved in global carbon markets for more than 10 years, including Europe, the U.S., Australia and now China ETS as this new market scales up.”
Murex has also been supporting clients to start trading the new CME voluntary carbon offset future contracts, Global Emissions Offset (GEO) and Nature-Based Global Emissions Offset (N-GEO). Some Murex clients are also among the pilot wave of financial institutions on Singapore’s new carbon exchange, Climate Impact X.
Before the collapse of crypto firm FTX, the demand for digital assets from clients had been growing since 2021. FTX’s bankruptcy filing highlighted the risks of financial institutions entering the crypto spot market.
“The new crypto-native trading venues do not have the required level of know your customer; there are challenges around custody, risk management and regulation,” Khy said. “The decentralised nature, the continuous innovation and uncertainty around regulation make these challenges quite hard to overcome for our client base.”
As a result, Murex clients are focused on getting exposure to cryptocurrencies through exchange-traded derivatives using their existing infrastructure before moving into over-the-counter products. “We help banks implement this quickly and follow best practices,” added Khy.
She argued that the decentralisation that comes with blockchain, the technology underlying crypto markets, brings more transparency, efficiency and standardisation of processes. For example, a distributed ledger technology (DLT) deployment of an authoritative datastore in a public or private mode will focus essentially on all the data known and public by both parties.
Khy said: “Murex adds value because we are able to map external transactions within the internal organisation of a bank, and we have the capability to enrich those transactions with private data, as well as produce all the risk and finance results.”
Murex is also receiving client requests for issuing stablecoins and tokens and is investing in its platform to cover these needs, while remaining active on its core positioning. Decentralised finance (DeFi) is also triggering a huge wave of new entrants, who will come with new needs, which can present new opportunities for Murex in the medium to long-term according to Khy.
Diversity
Khy was attracted to finance because she had a strong appetite for mathematics and analytics, and also wanted to work in an environment that was international and innovative.
“I joined Murex because I met very smart people who were open, passionate and came from different countries and backgrounds,” she said. “Diversity in all its forms is strongly anchored in the success of Murex, which has always been very thoughtful about bringing together smart and diverse minds.”
She felt an immediate fit with the diverse culture, the variety of topics that she needed to master about capital markets and being at the forefront of developing a software product. Khy was also attracted by the rapid evolution that the company offered, the wide spectrum of clients and that new joiners were given a lot of autonomy.
However, Khy highlighted that the financial industry still has a long way to go regarding gender diversity.
“There is still unconscious bias, although we all know that encouraging more diversity is going to foster innovation and productivity,” she added. “”It is important that organisations in our industry recognise that we are not where we would like to be and act to correct this imbalance.”
Women need more role models of all levels of seniority, but Khy said they should not just be “superwomen” who have given up their personal lives. She has noticed that the younger generation is driving the workplace toward more balance and that more men are asking to work part-time to take care of their children, which she believes is a good sign.
Murex receives more male job candidates than women, but the firm is trying to communicate and go to forums that encourage women to join. Khy would tell women who want to work in finance that it is not an easy journey, but it is a really rewarding and exciting one.
“The fast pace of change and innovation requires an ability to constantly adapt, but you get to learn something new every day so that is the reward,” said Khy. “I would also advise women to try to find something positive in difficult situations, because that’s how you learn and progress.”
Khy puts her success down to curiosity in a world that is constantly changing and innovating, as well as her perseverance and constant learning. She also said that at a certain level, soft skills play a key role. In addition to being an expert in their domain, managers need to put together the right people with the right skills, gain their trust and make them work well together to leverage everyone’s ideas.
Khy concluded: “I strongly believe that we need a diversity of skills and opinions to succeed and that is how I see my job as a manager.”
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