Adaptive Adds Tradition, Former Citadel, Saxo Execs to Board

London-based real-time trading systems advisory firm Adaptive Financial Consulting, has recently appointed Matteo Cassina, a former senior executive at Saxo Bank and Citadel Europe, and Yann L’Huillier, CIO of interdealer broker Tradition, to its board as new non-executive directors, to provide expert guidance on areas such as strategic growth and technology development.

“We realized about 12 months ago that we needed to make some structural changes at Adaptive to enable us to keep growing at the same rate and continue to allow us to focus our clients and delivery,” says Adaptive CEO Matt Barrett. “The different skills that these non-executives bring are key, and reflect the focus that we have.”

Cassina has more than 20 years of experience in the financial markets, including most recently as EVP and a member of the global executive committee at Saxo Bank, and as CEO of Saxo Capital markets UK, as well as a member of the board of Borse Berlin and Easdaq, and president of Citadel Securities Europe. Before that, he was head of Merrill Lynch’s Total Trader DMA and algo trader platform, and head of Goldman Sachs’ PrimeAccess prime brokerage platform.

Barret says Cassina’s executive experience and market structure knowledge will play a key role in helping the company developing and position “the right technologies today, to be in the right place for the future.”

As board member at Adaptive, he will be responsible for targeting clients, strategically growing the firm, managing teams and internal structuring of the business, and for providing the kind of proactive leadership support that emerging technology providers and consultancy firms like Adaptive need in order to sustain and drive growth, Cassina says.

“The biggest challenge is how you structure yourself as a company,” he adds “It’s how you manage the complexity of a company—having multiple teams deployed, having multiple clients, and working on multiple asset classes, [but] then keeping the business simple and effective.” 

Joining Cassina on the board, L’Huillier also has more than 20 years of industry experience. He has served as CIO of Tradition, the interdealer broker arm of Compagnie Financière Tradition (CFT), since 2010, prior to which he was CIO at London Stock Exchange-owned MTF Turquoise. Before joining Turquoise in 2007, he was CIO at the Boston Stock Exchange and Level ATS, and previously served as a senior development manager at the Toronto Stock Exchange. Before that, he held technical roles at Societe Generale, Euronext, and Credit Agricole, having begun his career as a system engineer at Credit Lyonnais. He also serves as board chairman of French FPGA technology vendor Enyx.

At Adaptive, he will be responsible for developing and shaping the provider’s technology architecture and adapting the products to the maturing marketplace. His role will oversee areas such as production, deployment and client usage. He will also help to evolve Adaptive’s Hydra development software, which enables clients to quickly build and launch new technology platforms, such as matching engines, trading platforms and ecommerce solutions.

“I am a technologist to start with. Before being the head of IT for global organizations, I was a software development manager in various different financial organizations and exchanges. So developing software, developing and shaping architecture of software is one of my strong backgrounds, coupled with the financial aspect of the technology,” L’Huillier says.