30-year industry veteren who pioneered co-location for electronic trading appointed CEO of Metamako

Quite the anathema to today’s Millennials who congregate each day in Shoreditch, London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ from which many new and innovative financial technologies are created that will likely shape the future of the global financial services business, Kevin Covington is a highly experienced institutional technology veteran with over 30 years experience.

Despite his career having begun in 1986 at CP Technology, some ten years before his graduation from the University of Greenwich with an MBA in Business Development and Change, Mr. Covington is not only a career financial technologist, but an innovator at the leading edge of modernity.

The existence and widespread use by electronic trading firms of co-location, the science of providing a data center in which equipment, space, and bandwidth are available for rental to commercial customers with rack space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms—and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers can largely be attributed to Mr. Covington who was one of the originators of this concept.

Server co-location for FX firms has reduced the cost of hosting, increased the speed and efficiency of connectivity to vital trading venues and banks across the world, as well as made the global market place a smaller world, creating an ultra-low latency environment which is vital for today’s highly liquid trading environment.

The vast majority of the trading infrastructure including matching engines, points of presence and dedicated connections that is in use among all global FX brokerages is now co-located at important data center locations such as Equinix’s LD4 campus in Slough, England, as well as the same company’s New York and Tokyo hosting sites, making co-located infrastructure instrumental to today’s environment.

A Mentor at the Techstars Barclays Accelerator, Mr. Covington’s avantgarde technological ability which encompasses London’s fintech leadership is backed up by a very solid institutional technology background.

Between 1986 and 1992 Mr. Covington spent six years at Kapiti, CP Technology and SG Warburg in technical sales and market data management positions before joining BT (formerly British Telecom) as Head of Strategy and Proposition.

BT is a fantastic development ground for financial technologists. I spent two years there myself (1991 to 1993) configuring PBX switches and Cisco routers for bank trading desks and managing deployable application integration projects which was the basis for my own 25 year career in this industry. That division of BT (now BT Radianz) is widely regarded as an incubator for senior technologists with a vast understanding of London’s trading infrastructure, which effectively translates into the world’s trading infrastructure.

Almost four years at BT concluded in 2009 for Mr Covington at which point he was appointed CEO of ITRS, a position he maintained for five years until July 2014.

At ITRS, Mr. Covington was instrumental in transitioning the Company from a founder-led organization into a professionally-run business with the structure and governance model required for institutional ownership.

Mr. Covington’s directorship at Metamako, a relatively new firm founded in 2013 under the ultra-modern ethos which has been benefiting from Mr. Covington’s extensive experience, he has several other non-executive directorship positions as well as being Managing Director of Change Alley Ltd which is a FinTech advisory firm.

Mr. Covington’s assuming the CEO position at Metamako this week at this critical stage in the business is indeed a major step forward for the firm.