Roberto Rivero, former Head of Sales & Marketing at the London Stock Exchange’s Information Services division and Mike Hodgson, Product Development Manager at the same unit, have formed a consulting practice specialising in providing advice to the Financial IT industry: Information & Software Vendors, Banks with their own trading & information products and those Exchanges aiming to increase revenues from information or IT. They have called it Intelligent Growth.
The company aims to provide advice on Product & Business Development, Marketing and Sales and conduct audits on behalf of information owners like exchanges.
Rivero and Hodgson are joined by 5 other consultants with experience in the industry with companies such as Bloomberg, LIFFE, Thomson Financial and Virt-X- as well as experience from user firms like HSCB, F&C and WestLB.
“Collectively, we have over 150 years’ experience in the disciplines we are consulting in,” says Rivero. “Roughly half of that time has been spent in Financial IT, 30% in the financial industry and the balance in general IT.”
Before joining the LSE, Rivero was with royalblue financial as Marketing Director, fidessaNet and prior to that with Primark as Product Marketing Director- in charge of product development and marketing communications. At Primark Rivero led the development of the firm’s very successful range of trading products.
Hodgson was with Extel Financial for 2 years before embarking on a 14 year stretch with the LSE. At the LSE Hodgson gained extensive experience of strategic planning, the development of financial information products, trading and information technology, pricing and contracts.
Intelligent Growth is not in a position to discuss individual clients but is already at over 55% of capacity. “Within our niche, we already have an interesting mix of assignments and a diverse list of customers,” comments Rivero.