Simon Leighton-Porter, the former equity operations chief at Citigroup, and Julian Hensman, who was formerly with workflow and CRM specialists Pegasystems in the UK, are two of the partners in a new consultancy set up by five securities industry experts to specialise in financial services operations.
The new consultancy, called seOrb, will concentrate on business process automation projects that aim to reduce risk and increase efficiency. “Our highly sought-after, broad-spectrum of experience makes us uniquely placed to deliver thought leadership, impartial advice and mentoring to all sizes of organisation,” says Toby Corballis, senior partner at SeOrb. “In turn, this enables organisations to realise rapid and measurable efficiencies from their IT investments. We make intellectual investment in IT a reality, leveraging our clients’ own talents through the tailoring of our proprietary methodology, PRIME. By mentoring clients’ own employees, seOrb increases the return on investment that organisations make in their people.”
The firm says the “se” in the consultancy’s brand name stands for “sprinkling excellence.” Which means its consultants will not only assist in project direction but also adopt a hands-on approach to provide client employees with “on-the-job” knowledge transfer.
With a combined experience approaching 100 years, the five seOrb partners have been “sprinkling experience” in a broad range of sectors including securities, wholesale finance, asset based finance, retail banking, healthcare, domestic insurance, energy trading, company mergers and acquisitions, electronic point of sale and telecommunications.
Two senior partners, Toby Corballis and Julian Hensman, will head the practice. Corballis, an independent consultant, has over 18 years IT experience and aims to specialise in bridging the gap between IT and business risk assessment on large-scale projects.
Hensman has become a specialist in rules-based process automation and workflow technologies in the securities industry, with 20 years experience in payments, foreign exchange, securities and reconciliations.
The three remaining partners are Paul Gunovsky, Nigel Thomas and Simon Leighton-Porter. Gunovsky was recently head of client technology management for EMEA and Asia at JP Morgan Investor Services and served on the executive committee of the International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC) Europe between 2001-2004 and was founder of the ISITC Technology Working Group. He is an acknowledged expert on SWIFT messaging and client delivery/reporting interfaces.
Thomas is a business consultant and financial operations executive with over 22 years financial sector expertise. As an authoritative speaker on the subject, he is a leading advocate of Straight Through Processing (STP) and is also a former vice chairman of the executive committee of ISITC Europe. Leighton-Porter specialises in the design and implementation of trade processing solutions covering equities, fixed income and derivative products. With extensive knowledge of FIX protocol and data processing, he is a member of the FIX Allocations Working Group – ISOWG8, chairman of the RDUG Entities and Funds Committee and founder of the SSI Fresh Initiative.
seOrb is a limited liability partnership based in the City of London.