SteelEye to Hire CME Reg Reporting Talent

SteelEye is in close talks with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to pluck several employees from its regulatory reporting businesses, as the exchange group will wind down these services by November 30. The vendor is engaging directly with CME’s human resources, management team, and the employees themselves to negotiate terms that will ensure critical personnel are on hand to administer the scale-back and enable staff to transition smoothly to a new role at SteelEye following the cut-off.

“One thing I want to be conscious of as we do this, is that we don’t take people who are critical for the natural transition and wind-down of CME before it’s time. They need those people to support that business, and if we take them out, our clients, their clients, or our future clients will suffer from that,” says Matt Smith CEO of SteelEye. 

“So what we’re trying to do is work with the CME team to help them support the agenda of winding down the business, do it with them in a very orderly way, and engage with them on finding the right people for the right jobs at SteelEye.”

The decision to work with CME was also influenced by the fact that the vendor started to receive an influx of applications for roles, as the news broke in mid-May that the group would be dissolving some of its regulatory reporting units. These include NEX Abide, NEX Regulatory Reporting, and its European and Australian trade repositories.

• READ MORE: With over five months to go until CME unwinds its regulatory reporting businesses, competing firms are pushing to fill the service gaps and grab a slice of the market share. Click here to read more.

The roles being filled are primarily in the UK and Europe, including senior executives, specialists, and junior personnel, and these jobs stretch across the entire business in regulatory reporting and operations.

SteelEye is hiring multiple positions, including product managers specializing in surveillance, communications, and regulatory reporting, as well as business analysts, front-end developers, site reliability engineers, tech integration professionals, and sales support.

Having spoken to employees at CME’s NEX Abide unit, Smith says many have the experience and are a good cultural fit to work with a new fintech, something they signed up for during the early days of Abide Financial, which has weathered previous acquisitions, such as NEX/ICAP taking over Abide in 2016, to CME acquiring NEX in 2018.

CME declined to comment or disclose how many of its employees in the regulatory reporting units will be transferred to new roles within the business or made redundant.

As the hiring process is still being negotiated, with some discussions in the later stages, Smith could not share how many people from CME will be appointed to new roles within the vendor. But he says he intends to grow its workforce from 46 to 60 by the end of the year, with potential for more, if profits continue to grow. He adds that roles will be open to all applicants for the positions.

Some timelines for staff transitioning to SteelEye have still to be finalized, as many will be critical to supporting the wind-down, in functions like offloading clients and shifting historical reporting data and personal client information for Mifid II over to the new vendors and service providers. Sales staff, on the other hand, could move more quickly, as CME will no longer be selling new regulatory reporting products or services in those businesses.

But whether it is waiting a few weeks or a few months, SteelEye is eager to recruit the right talent.

“There are very strong people at Abide today who will be there until the end, and we’ll wait for good people. We can engage with them now and work on plans, and when they’re out of their contractual obligations, we will certainly welcome them to the SteelEye family,” Smith says.

Strike When the Iron is Hot

Following a Series A funding round in February 2020, raising $10 million, SteelEye set out to invest it in growing its teams, developing new products, and expanding internationally. When the virus outbreak worsened in March, the vendor pulled the brakes on non-essential spending for up to two weeks. But in that timeframe, the business showed no signs of slowing down; in fact, the investment freeze only penalized its growth strategy, Smith says, and so the hiring was resumed.

“As soon as I was comfortable that the commercial landscape was not deteriorating but becoming stronger, we started investing almost immediately back into our hiring funds for growing the business,” he says.

SteelEye has ambitious plans for growth over the next two years. In 18 to 24 months, it wants to expand to North America, Canada, Asia Pacific, and Australia. As part of its growth plans, it expects to continue hiring and building out its workforce internationally.

The firm is currently headquartered in London, with development shops in Portugal and Bangalore, and a flexible satellite office in Paris, where there are two sales staff. Smith sees Portugal as a hotspot for talent in data science and artificial intelligence and hopes to build out those strengths there.

• READ MORE: Following the CME’s lead, Deutsche Börse plans to offload its regulatory reporting businesses due to a pricing war and cost pressures. Click here to read more. 

SteelEye currently has its main offices in South Bank in London, but Smith says the space has been too small to accommodate the growing firm for some time now. Late last year, he rented a 10-person WeWork space to help with the overflow, and this year he planned to sign a deal for new office space. However, in the same week that he was meant to finalize the contract, lockdown came into force in the UK on March 23, and he decided not to take the deal. 

Now, as Smith is starting to look for new office space again, there are more competitive options to choose from. He says prices are dropping because many firms are beginning to downsize their office real estate and more people are looking to work remotely for good.

But looking for space in current conditions is not straightforward. For many firms like SteelEye, it’s somewhat of a Goldilocks dilemma: If it is too much, its wasted cost, but if it is too little, it can stifle scalability.

“My big issue right now in terms of planning this is, we are trying to lease out office space that has enough capacity to grow into, but I don’t know what that will be. If I plan to have 60 people at the end of this year and grow to 70 or 80 into next year, which was the original plan, what happens if the business goes a lot better than we had anticipated and we need twice that space, which is very realistic?” Smith says.

“How do I balance that without locking myself into another three- to five-year contract for space that may not be big enough, and how do we cater to that? But at the same time, you shouldn’t take more space than you need.”

SteelEye’s lease for its South Bank offices expires at the end of September, and Smith intends to have a contract for new offices signed by the end of August, so staff can have the opportunity to move in before September.