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Curriculum Vitae
| Name: | Jim Chapman |
| Date of Birth: | 1 November 1965 |
| Place of Birth: | Richmond, Surrey, United Kingdom |
| Nationality: | British Citizen |
| Marital Status: | Married |
| Academic Qualifications: | B.A. Hons. (Cantab) (Class 2:1) |
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Other Qualifications: |
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| Driving Licence | |
| SFA Registered Representative (SFDR) |
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Address: |
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| Kennington | |
| London | |
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Telephone: |
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| +44 7956 322 226 (mobile) | |
| +44 20 7582 0323 (evenings) |
| Credit Suisse | Apr 2009 | to | Present | ||
| JP Morgan | Apr 2007 | to | Apr 2009 | ||
| BNP Paribas | Oct 2002 | to | Apr 2007 | ||
| Commerzbank | Aug 1999 | to | Oct 2002 | ||
| Tokai Bank Europe | Nov 1997 | to | Aug 1999 | ||
| HSBC Midland | Mar 1994 | to | Nov 1997 | ||
| Merrill Lynch | Mar 1992 | to | Mar 1994 | ||
| Financial Times | Oct 1989 | to | Mar 1992 | ||
| SD-Scicon | Sep 1988 | to | Oct 1989 | ||
| GEC Research | Jul 1987 | to | Sep 1988 |
| Area | Experience | |
| Unix (HP, Sun and PC) | 5 years | |
| Windows (from 2.x to 8/RT) | 12 years | |
| C | 6 years | |
| C++ | 5 years | |
| C# | 3 years | |
| SQLServer/Sybase | 4 years (DB design, tuning, coding) | |
| Fortran | 1 year. Never again! | |
| Pascal | 1 year | |
| Lisp, Prolog | 1 year |
Aside of my work in Investment Banking IT, I also develop for Windows Phone and Windows 8. I'm the author of the free ebook reader, Freda, for those platforms. I'm working at the moment to add features relating to the social aspects of reading.
Running a small team of business architects across the Investment Bank's major programmes, I am responsible for the coherence of the front-to-bank process architecture. A key tool that we have developed for this is the Business Capability Model - a description, in business-accessible language, of the things that the Investment Bank has to do, to perform its business.
In addition to programme-level responsibilities, my key deliverable in the post has been to establish effective business architecture governance forums (such as the 'Design Authority'), maintaining active participation across all business areas, and ensuring that these forums are making practical, relevant decision that have a real impact on the ground.
The Strategic Derivatives Infrastructure Initiative (SDII) was a multi-year programme to address control and operational risk issues in the bank’s derivatives trading and risk-management infrastructure, which had historically been heavily reliant on spreadsheets . Several hundred people were engaged in the programme, with an annual budget in excess of $100m.
I led the Programme Office group in London, reporting to the Global Programme Office head in New York. The team was responsible for ensuring the success of the programme, establishing and maintaining effective governance, change management, risk and issue management, planning and reporting of project status and KPIs (delivery metrics). The team's work went far beyond the typical 'PMO' responsibility; we provided senior Derivatives IT Management with an independent assessment of programme health, and followed through actions to ensure continued programme success.
Following the completion of the SDII programme, I set up a 'Results Management Office' (RMO) group, leveraging the governance and delivery management practices we had developed in SDII. The RMO’s mission is to help deliver complex initiatives by providing the necessary transparency on each initiative’s alignment to its business, architectural and organizational goals and its ability to successfully execute its book of work. It acts as the eyes and ears of the Investment Bank’s CIO, providing him with an early warning system, and actionable recommendations, to ensure the key initiatives deliver real value to the business.
Once the RMO was established, I transitioned into the IT Business Architecture role.
I joined JP Morgan with a Programme Management remit covering Pyramid (the strategic trade processing and risk system for Equity and Credit Derivatives). I was responsible for a range of governance, portfolio management, reporting and PMO tasks and took specific responsibility for programme managing two key initiatives. My role also included a strong element of advocacy and establishing best practice, to establish a 'project mind-set' across Pyramid application development, infrastructure and operations teams.
I undertook the programme management of the 'Pyramid Next Generation' programme. This strategic programme was to fundamentally alter the Pyramid platform, introducing new technical approaches for:
The programme had a budget in excess of $10m, with a delivery roadmap stretching over several years. In order to maintain focus on business delivery, we used an Agile development approach. I set up governance and organisation around the programme, and coordinated the recruitment of new members for the team.
For 2007, my top priority was to define the governance approach for the various business-aligned Pyramid programmes, and to kick off the key 'inward investment' programme. This multi-year programme aimed to address some systematic weaknesses around stability, operability and scalabality, and to improve the development process around Pyramid. Its specific deliverables included:
In the summer of 2006, the senior management of BNP Paribas launched a strategic programme to implement the ‘one bank’ vision – a convergence (ultimately, a unification) of the technology platforms and supporting organisation for all the capital markets business lines across Fixed Income, Equity Derivatives, ALM and Commodities. A task force consisting of twelve senior programme managers was set up to define a shared vision of the functional/organisational target, and to drive forward the projects needed to implement it.
I was appointed as the team leader of this task force. In addition to my team leadership responsibilities, I was also personally in charge of the parts of the convergence programme relating to risk (both Front Office/trading risk, and also the control functions for market, credit and operational risk), and of the exercise to select a new Project Portfolio Management tool to be used across all the IT units of Capital Markets.
I was a direct report to the head of capital markets IT, regularly called on to present our work to the business line heads and COOs, and to the head of capital markets. The task force had a direct budget of several million Euros, and in addition it was expected to manage a ‘project envelope’ consisting of 5-10% of the total IT and Organisation budget for the capital markets business lines.
Reporting to the Head of Maîtrise d’Ouvrage (Change The Bank) for Fixed Income, I defined, set up and managed development programmes implementing a range of improvements to the business' systems and processes. The scope of my responsibility covered all requirements and processes front-to-back for OTC interest rate products including swaps, interest rate options and exotics. The Maîtrise d’Ouvrage group was created in 2002, to address various concerns of Fixed Income management, by putting in place a transparent and efficient project governance model – an area where we had perceived failings, particularly for multi-stakeholder or multi-system projects. I made a major contribution to this initiative.
I had direct management responsibility for a global team of around fifty programme managers, project managers and business analysts, plus project/matrix responsibility over around one hundred IT development personnel. My key focus was the completion of a number of system consolidation/migration projects, together with initiatives to improve our STP rate for vanilla business, and to move ahead with the execution, confirmation and matching of business by means of platform-neutral transaction representations such as FpML.
Since one of the core tasks of the group was Business Analysis, I also sought ways to improve our service at this level. During 2006, we rolled out a programme of training and re-orientation for our business analysis teams, in order to improve in this area.
Reporting to the Head of IT in London, I was responsible for meeting all the IT needs of the derivatives business of Commerzbank. My key accountability was to the head of the Derivatives trading business, and I addressed the business' requirements by means of an account management function based upon a mixture of tactical and strategic development initiatives. I managed a team of around fifty development staff, tasked with meeting the needs of the Derivatives business for system development, integration and delivery.
I also participated at a senior level in the management of the IT Department; my responsibilities included acting as Deputy to the Head of IT in London.
Reporting to the global head of risk control, I was charged with defining and guiding the implementation of an IT strategy to support the risk control function of Commerzbank. In this role, I was responsible for contributing an IT perspective to policy and methodology discussions within the risk control group and providing the key point of contact for consultation and liaison with the IT department for risk-driven developments and support. In addition to my responsibility for project oversight and management, I acted as the principal point of contact with system vendors and solution providers for risk control applications.
I was the Head of Quantitative Development, responsible for the ongoing development of quantitative software used by Tokai Bank Europe's risk advisory services team and the client derivatives desk. I managed a team of six, which included software engineers and quantitative analysts. My team provided software and analytics for a variety of purposes, including:
My most significant project was to design and implement a new system for the valuation of exotic interest rate derivatives. The system consists of a general-purpose valuation algorithm, with a graphical front-end for inputting deal structures. The user-interface is sufficiently powerful that it can represent any deal type (bond, swap, swaption, knockout inverse floater, index amortising swap, ... ); deals can be constructed on-screen, building up structures using simple 'building blocks'.
Combined with the general-purpose valuation algorithm, this system permits the pricing of a wide range of structured deals, and in particular will let traders or marketers price up entirely novel structures with no need for programming work.
I have also been involved in prototyping work and ad hoc implementations to support various marketing initiatives.
During much of 1995, I worked on the development of a new front-office system for handling all the deals done within the Specialised Derivatives Group. This involved the use of C++ and Sybase on a Unix (HP) platform. I was involved in all aspects of this project, but was mostly concerned with developing a class hierarchy to represent, value and manage all types of transaction carried out by the Specialised Derivatives Group.
My main responsbility was the development of a consistent toolkit of pricing software for use by salespeople and traders in HSBC Midland's derivatives business.
I was also responsible for monitoring and coordinating analytics and research activities in the front office, and for assisting in the development and management of new products.
While with Merrill Lynch, I worked on designing and coding a wide range of systems for the pricing and risk-management of interest rate and FX derivatives. As well as vanilla products, these included quanto swaps and swaptions, interest rate caps and differential caps, knock-in and knock-out FX options and other exotic products. I implemented valuation algorithms using Black-Scholes, Binomial Lattice, Monte Carlo and Arrow-Debreu methodologies.
This involved working with traders, mathematicians, institutional sales staff and back office personnel.
I also provided consultancy and support to a team implementing a new back office system based on a Motif GUI and Sybase back-end, coded in C++. My work in this area centred on assisting in the selection of personnel for the team and inspecting the system specifications and designs produced by the team.
At the FT, I was team leader, responsible for all phases of two business-critical applications which featured the use of a Sybase database to capture and store data from real-time feeds. The work included managing our relationship with third party software suppliers and integrating their software packages into our systems.
The data managed by these systems was used to compile the FT's back pages of market information, and also in data-feeds transmitted by the FT to client organisations.
I was also involved in a number of smaller projects. These included:
My work at SD-Scicon included programming, design, specification, estimating, user-documentation, presentations to clients and maintenance of QA documentation. During my employment with SD-Scicon, I was promoted to Senior Analyst/Programmer.
I worked on a range of platforms, including Microsoft Windows PCs using C, Sun equipment running Lisp, and Prolog and Pascal software on DOS PCs. The majority of work I did with SD-Scicon was for clients within the Ministry of Defence.
I worked on systems for network management, network connectivity analysis and for decision support.
My first employment after university was in the Information Processing Systems Division of GEC Research. The work I did there included specification, design, documentation and programming of systems.
I was involved in two major projects, both of them funded by the EC's Esprit Programme. The first project was an object-oriented AI system for understanding spoken French, while the second project aimed to implement that system on a parallel machine with content-addressable memory at each processor node.
As part of the latter work, I co-authored (with Dr. K Asanovic) a paper which was given at the 1988 Conference on Parallelism.
The Cambridge Computer Science Tripos is a very rigorous course with a heavy emphasis on the theoretical basis of computer systems and algorithms. This is by no means at the expense of practical experience; all the courses are backed by assessed classwork and workshops, and a one-year project contributes 20% to the course's final result.
Theoretical courses included: the theory of computation, compiler design, operating system design and optimisation (studying MVS, Unix and Tripos), networking, formal verification methods, artificial intelligence, logic, database theory, system security, numerical techniques and fundamental algorithms.
This was backed up by practical work in the following languages: Pascal, BCPL, 6502 and IBM/370 Assembler, Lisp, Prolog, Cobol, Fortran, Snobol, Simula, ML.
Time and again in my subsequent career, I have found the subject matter from the Tripos of immediate relevance to the job in hand. On several occasions, a seemingly obscure result from the theory of graphs, or some recondite sorting algorithm has turned out to be essential in solving a practical implementation problem.