About Michael Lobb

Michael is an accomplished Technologist, Senior Business Analyst, Development Manager and Project Manager with 20+ years of international experience. He is a Subject Matter Expert in the technology of investment research, knowledge management, workflows and XML in Financial Services. His focus is the delivery of easy-to-use systems to time pressured people.

Michael gained his Subject Matter Expertise designing and implementing large-scale Content Management Systems and workflows in global investment banks. Michael began work in 1989 at Barclays de Zoet Wedd, Japan as a research editor and DTP operator.  Afterwards, he started his own consultancy in Japan specializing in building bilingual research publication systems. He had successful contracts with a number of firms in Tokyo, including Salomon Brothers, Baring Securities, Schroder Securities, SmithNew Court Securities and Credit Lyonnais Securities. In 1995 he was hired by Salomon Brothers NY as a consultant to help with their research publication issues. He was eventually employed permanently to help architect and build the Firm’s new bilingual CMS and workflow solution.  It was adopted globally and kept by the firm until 2006 (by then CitiGroup). Michael moved to Goldman Sachs NY in 1999 to help restructure their Research technology group. He moved to Deutsche Bank AG LDN at the end of 2000 and headed up the firms Equity Research Website. At DB, Michael served as the company representative on the RIXML industry consortium, where he played a lead role on the technical committee. During Michael’s time at DB the bank won numerous web awards, including broker website of the year. When the IT bubble burst, Michael was restructured and he used the opportunity to found Seventh Wave Systems Limited in September of 2002.

As founder and Chief Technology Officer of Seventh Wave Systems, Michael was responsible for the strategic and technical direction of the firm. He designed and built a market leading software platform and developed the firm’s full technical delivery process, including code reviews, continuous builds and issue and feature tracking. The software platform resolved technical and business related issues by exploiting industry XML standards. The software platform he designed and built helped brokers and fund management firms deal with the distribution, management and quantification of investment research, specifically dealing with FSA unbundling regulations. The software platform was a highly efficient and sophisticated XML application server with a very easy to use Internet enabled client front end. It was classed as a Distribution and Content/Knowledge Management System. At its height, the platform took in twenty-four live real-time data feeds from global brokers and transformed them into a fully exploitable implementation of the RIXML 2.0 industry standard. It accomplished this by using abstraction layers to transform the research of each firm contributing content into a standardized and normalized RIXML dataset. Both internal and externally created research could be loaded and then searched for very efficiently. The platform also captured and quantified the usage of research, allowing fund management firms to meet their reporting obligations under FSA unbundling regulations.

Since leaving Seventh Wave at the end of 2007, Michael has worked for HSBC Bank, London and for Fortis Bank, Brussels as a Senior BA. Michael is currently working at Lloyds Banking Group where he has the interesting title Head of Research & Ideas IT.