Former Caplin Systems exec Paul Blank joins TradAir as VP Marketing

After 8 years at HTML5 web trading technology company Caplin Systems, Paul Blank has been appointed VP Marketing at HTML5 trading solutions optimization company Tradair.

Based in London, Mr. Blank joins the executive management team and reports directly to the company’s CEO Illit Geller.

Mr. Blank, an active blogger on all capital markets trends and author of singledealerplatforms.org has extensive experience in institutional trading technology which covers FX markets, electronic trading and the evolving regulatory landscape.

At TradAir, which has operations in Tel Aviv, London and New York, Mr. Blank will be responsible for leading TradAir’s overall marketing strategy, including product positioning and overseeing new launches, and will actively engage with the market through traditional and new social media channels.

The sales and marketing effort at TradAir has experienced a degree of change recently. In December, Andrew Gibson left TradAir to become Sales Director at North American ECN FastMatch.

Mr. Blank initially joined Caplin Systems in April 2007 as Director of Product Marketing, a role from which he progressed to Director of e-Trading Solutions and Partner Management.

Between 2006 and 2007, Mr. Blank was Product Marketing Director at OneSource Information Systems which provides business intelligence systems, where he was a member of the senior product strategy team with UK and European product line ownership.

Prior to joining OneSource Information Systems, Mr. Blank spent 3 years at MMS International as Global Head of Product Management and Marketing. The company provides real-time financial market commentary and analysis services covering global foreign exchange, fixed income and emerging markets, and during his tenure Mr. Blank restructured product management, content production, packaging, distribution and marketing to better align the company to serve its most profitable customer segments efficiently, and meet the needs of clients in new fast evolving financial markets.

Commenting on the appointment, Illit Geller, CEO of TradAir said “we are delighted to have Paul join the team with his vast experience. We have a strong pipeline of new products approaching launch, and it promises to be an exciting year ahead”.

Ms. Geller is a prominent figure among Israel’s institutional financial technology companies, and is a regular attendee at venture capital seminars where new talent and innovation are high on the agenda. She also is a champion for the success of female leaders in the interbank FX sector, having spoken in the press about breaking through the ‘glass ceiling’ of an interbank-dominated and male-dominated world.

“The 1% of banks have their own proprietary pricing engines which guarantee that they get the lion’s share of trades. We provide a platform that lets other 99% set their own markets and get in on the action” Ms. Geller told the Times of Israel last year.

Prior to TradAir, Paul spent eight years at web trading vendor Caplin Systems, where he held positions as Director of Product Marketing, and Director of eTrading Solutions. He has a background in FX, and spent many years trading spot FX for banks in London.

Speaking today on his appointment, Mr. Blank said, “TradAir is an innovative and dynamic company, providing a fully managed suite of FX trading solutions. Built using market-leading HTML5 web technology, they provide the ‘technical and business agility’ needed to enable regional and local banks, and brokers to more effectively compete, by running profitable, low-risk market-making or agency trading operations, enabling them to better protect, grow and service their client franchises”.

Commenting on e-trading business trends, Mr. Blank continued

“To remain competitive e-trading businesses must become data driven organizations. Understanding and interpreting data, will unlock the insight needed to adapt business models in response to changing customer trading behavior, the evolving regulatory landscape, and the demands of effective internal market surveillance. As such, actionable trade data analytics will become a competitive differentiator among firms, and an important requirement when selecting an e-trading platform”.

“I am pleased to see that TradAir is well ahead of the curve, having already built a truly remarkable, real-time cloud based analytics platform, using Google ‘BigQuery’. The platform captures stores and analyses every tick and action of the platform, presenting the data in highly visual, drill-down HTML5 dashboards, unlocking key metrics, and providing actionable business intelligence and insight into every aspect of the etrading business. Empowering management, traders, sales, risk and compliance teams, with the metrics and intelligence needed to optimize and fine tune e-trading operations, whilst providing, TCA style reports, for end-user customers such as asset managers, to satisfy their own ‘BestEx’ requirements”.

The FX markets are undergoing unprecedented structural and regulatory change, resulting in continued fragmentation of liquidity. At the same time, due to tougher regulation on risk capital and leverage ratios, many banks have reduced their risk appetite for market-making, creating opportunities for non-bank ‘alternative’ market-makers, with newer technology to step forward and provide market-liquidity.

According to Mr. Blank, “ against this background, TradAir’s strong pipeline of up-coming product launches will empower many more regional and local banks and brokers to become profitable low-risk market-makers, able to cost-effectively service their clients using TradAir’s suite of managed HTML5 e-trading solutions”.