Witad Awards 2022: Startup professional of the year—Michelle Zak, Qomply

Qomply co-founder and CEO Michelle Zak has never been afraid of taking a leap of faith into unknown waters. Born in Canada, she studied math and computer science before moving to London to work at a startup at the height of the dot-com boom. Within a year, the startup was in trouble, and Zak found a job at the BBC, developing news platforms in C#. She credits her boss there with encouraging her to explore new areas, which is how she found her next job on the trading floor at UBS, developing systems to help the bank electronically value CDO structures.

After two years she moved to BNP Paribas, developing algorithmic trading models for statistical arbitrage trading in the bank’s proprietary trading group, and soon became head of Rapid Application Development for credit derivatives trading.

“It was very uncommon to see women in these roles on the trading floor, and it was frustrating because when I was hiring for my team, I wanted diversity—people who would bring different views,” she says. “So I started to challenge recruiters not just on gender, but also on race and background.”

In 2015, after seven years at BNP, she co-founded Propcision, a fintech company that applied analytical models used in proprietary trading to buying and selling property. The startup worked in terms of creating useful data and identifying ways that real estate agents would game property portals, driving up prices in certain areas—not dissimilar to flash orders—but wasn’t commercially viable. So she took a job as COO at Kyte Broking, responsible for overseeing the firm’s implementation of Mifid II.

“So I was watching this all go down and seeing firms struggle to comply by the deadline, and that’s what gave us the idea to set up Qomply,” she says.

Initially, Zak and co-founder Stuart Hartley initially focused on the personally sensitive data aspects of Mifid II, and were working with a large investment bank and data vendor, but pivoted sharply when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and firms’ budgets dried up to focus on transaction reporting compliance, which represented a bigger headache for a broader audience. The initiative immediately gained traction, and Qomply signed up 10 clients last year.

“There are 30,000 pages of Mifid regulations … and 28 technical regulatory standards that accompany that. There are 65 fields in a transaction report … and roughly 250 validation rules put forward by the European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma) about what they expect for each field,” Zak says. “Just because a regulator accepts your reports doesn’t mean they’re accurate. If you under-report, you get fined. If you over-report, you get fined. If you don’t report accurately, you get fined.”

Qomply validates firms’ transaction reports, and charges based on trade volume, which Zak says makes the service accessible to smaller firms without large compliance resources. The platform is built with independent rules engines specific to each reporting regime, and Zak plans to expand it to cover the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation in Europe and Australian Securities and Investments Commission regulations in Asia-Pacific.