ChartIQ Nabs Ex-Bloomberg Product Guru Sorenson to Drive Expansion

Charting and analytics provider ChartIQ has hired former Bloomberg product management veteran Eugene Sorenson as VP of product management to extend the vendor’s expansion within financial services and into new industry sectors.

Sorenson spent 12 years at Bloomberg between 2006 and 2018, including as product manager for charts and technical analysis, and as director of product management for foundational applications. Before Bloomberg, he was VP of product development at interdealer broker Cantor Fitzgerald, and director of product marketing at data, analytics and trading technology vendor CQG.

Most recently, he founded Product Vision Consulting, an advisory firm targeting emerging fintech companies that need product management expertise, and served a brief stint as an MD at consultancy International Network Solutions before being approached by ChartIQ CEO and co-founder Dan Schleifer last year.

“I’ve known Dan for half a dozen years…. And when Dan came looking in the fall, it fit a number of things I wanted to do, and it fit my sweet spot around graphics,” Sorenson says. “I thought ChartIQ had a great vision, so I’ve watched them grow, and I’ve always been impressed by the technology they chose—a cross-platform solution all using HTML5,” which he says positions the vendor well to address opportunities to create “smart desktop” ecosystems and extend ChartIQ’s capabilities to other industries as firms ramp up their efforts to develop and use in-house and third-party applications in HTML5.

“Financial institutions are trying to build best-of-breed products and pull them together in a workflow where users can move fluidly between them… which is what we’re trying to do with our Finsemble application,” he says. “We’re not trying to be everything to everybody—we’re trying to be an environment that facilitates that workflow. Firms have built a lot of custom applications, but they need those internal apps to work nicely with other things that they get from outside the organization—and what brings those together is HTML5.”

Sorenson declines to comment on specifics of other industries that ChartIQ’s tools could be applied to, saying that the company is in the early stages of collecting information on possible areas of expansion, but notes that in this data-driven age, “everybody is collecting tons of data” that needs to be analyzed.

“What makes ChartIQ a great technological solution is that it’s independent of the data, and can be applied on top of any data platform…. Part of my role is to identify ways we can extend the product suite, both within the financial services space and beyond. I see this product role as defining that product vision, and delivering capabilities,” he adds.

His hire follows a recent $17.4 million Series B investment round that will fund significant hiring at the vendor.

“Our mandate is to grow every department within the company—so we are in the process of building out our engineering staff to bake all the ideas we’re dreaming up… and are on track to continue building the sales team, a strong marketing department, and a product team as well,” Sorenson says.