Evangelos Papadopoulos, CEO of TheMarketsTrust, has been interviewed by PaperJam, the leading business newspaper in Luxembourg. Here is the full translation.

Read the original article at www.paperjam.lu/questions/notre-solution-est-unique-sur-le-marche

PAPERJAM.LU 3 QUESTIONS TO … EVANGELOS PAPADOPOULOS (CEO AND FOUNDER, TheMarketsTrust )

 

« Our solution is unique in the industry »

By moving from Technoport to the Lux Future Lab incubator, TheMarketsTrust (TMT), a Luxembourg-based start-up, has entered a new stage in the development of its activities which, thanks to the addition of new expertise and skills, are now attracting the interest of foreign customers. State of play with Evangelos Papadopoulos, the CEO and Founder.

By Frédéric Antzorn

Evangelos, you are the founder and CEO of TheMarketsTrust (TMT), a start-up company dedicated to financial risk management solutions. The company just moved from Technoport to Lux Future Lab, the Luxembourg-based incubator sponsored by BGL/BNP-Paribas. First of all, can you explain to us what TMT does?

« As of today, TheMarketsTrust is the sole FinTech start-up in Luxembourg. The company is articulated into two business units, both fast-growing: a technological unit that develops a platform for financial risk management (TheMarketsTrust-Leopard), and a consulting unit dedicated to companies and institutions in the financial industry (TheMarketsTrust-Advisory).

TMT customers are banks, asset managers, insurance companies, hedge funds and clearing houses.

TheMarketsTrust-Leopard, our technological unit, develops a financial risk management platform. The platform will integrate two risk engines: a traditional quantitative risk engine, and a behavioural risk engine. This combination makes our solution unique in the industry. Moreover, our technology is to a large extent based on open-source components, the platform architecture is non-intrusive, allowing it to be deployed alongside existing systems.

Our commercial offer will be declined into two versions: LeopardWorkstation, the Enterprise solution, will be offered to banks and asset managers. LeopardOnline, the Portal/cloud solution, will be available as of beginning of 2016. Our targeted customers for this Online solution are small- and middle-sized financial institutions, as well as companies and municipalities treasury departments.

TheMarketsTrust-Advisory is our consulting unit specialized in strategy, enterprise architecture and financial risk managements. Its team of multidisciplinary experts can help organisations define their strategy as well as accompany them in their operational implementation. To this end, TMT has built its own method, the Practical Strategic Assessment, integrating principles developed at Harvard Business School (Strategy Map, Balanced Scorecard) and also the contribution of the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF).

What does this move to Lux Future Lab mean for you? What will be the consequences for your activities?

« Being part of Lux Future Lab allows us to benefit from an expert support from BNP-BGL in many topics, such as, for instance, our marketing strategy. BNP-BGL also gives us access to a network of companies and future partners at European level, and various internal training.

Moreover, BNP-BGL allow us to benefit from advices from Domain Experts, so as to test and validate with them our ideas for new services, in an iterative process of agile development.

Finally, Lux Future Lab is located at the centre of financial institutions. TheMarketsTrust is therefore closer to its customers and will be able to serve them better. For our associates, access to the office is much easier and facilitated by public transportation.

How do you see the future development of your start-up company? Do you have a defined business model, and if so what is it?

« As of today, I am very satisfied by our development, and we are even in advance on our business plan. We recently attracted interest from Bloomberg and Red Hat, who now accompany us on a technical level. As for our customers, we also attracted interest from three financial institutions outside Europe, in Australia, the U.A.E. and South Africa. All these players are highly interested by the development of our products and the innovation they offer.

Finally, of great interest to our investors is the fact that we are building an ambidextrous organisation. Our consulting business allows us to finance our activities in research and innovation. Our business model takes the long view of creating durable jobs, especially for young graduates. At a five-year horizon we aim at hiring 200 people, of which 140 in Luxembourg. »

Translation (c) TMT 2014