Beacon, Risk’s FinTech Startup of the Year
Kirat Singh, co-founder of Beacon, the institutional quant platform, and Risk’s FinTech startup of the year 2017, shared insights about his journey at our first Tokyo FinTech Meetup at the NYU School of Professional Studies on Wednesday, June 21.
After a long and successful career on Wall Street with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America, Kirat and his co-founder Mark Higgins started Beacon in 2014 with the goal to leverage state-of-the-art technology to build an integrated infrastructure, analytics, and financial services platform company. Beacon enables their clients to accelerate technology and analytics projects with a strong focus on derivatives analytics.
SecDB, long viewed as Goldman’s “secret sauce”, tracks risks across the firm and calculates 23 billion prices daily across 2.8 million positions and 500,000 market scenarios (based on this 2015 investor presentation). Kirat stressed the open source nature of SecDB, which runs a single code base and allows all quants open access to each other’s algorithms, a design pattern that is also foundational to Beacon.
At JPMorgan Chase, Kirat built a small core group which implemented and deployed a global risk and trading system (“Athena”) to replace existing third party systems. Finally, at Bank of America, Kirat designed and built an integrated derivatives and securities trading, risk, analytics and applications platform (“Quarts”). Allegedly, although Kirat would not comment on this during our session, Bank of America invested more than half a billion dollars into the platform.
Hence, Beacon represents a startling development in the democratization of the quant space. No longer are such huge investments required that only the bulge bracket firms could afford. Beacon has been designed with maximum flexibility in mind. The source code and client data are securely segregated and permissioned. Different micro-services can be used independently of each other, such as a data warehouse that comes with a large set of market data and suite of financial analytics, job schedulers, a dependency graph and enterprise controls that keep tight reins on business-critical applications while still allowing a firm’s developers to be nimble and experimental.
Having been successful with anchor clients such as Global Atlantic Financial Group, several hedge funds and energy traders, the firm has expanded its footprint into Tokyo earlier in the year with country head Ryo Shimizu, another Goldman Sachs veteran, and formalized its partnership with Simplex. The firm expects to double global headcount from 30 to 60 this year.
This was a great start for the Tokyo FinTech Meetup, with more than 50 disruptors joining for the evening. Our next event is planned for July 19, please join the community and/or the event here.
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