One of the most technically demanding roles of my career — I owned the full investment operations technology stack for Aberdeen, one of Europe's largest asset managers (formerly Standard Life Investments). This spanned four interconnected systems:
CRIMS (Charles River Investment Management System): Administered and maintained the cluster infrastructure for Aberdeen's primary trading platform. Investment directors used CRIMS to manage OTC derivatives, FX trades, equities, fixed income, and other instruments. I ensured platform stability, managed upgrades, co-ordinated disaster recovery, and provided 24/7 production support for the trading desk.
Trade Settlement & Back Office (CITI): Monitored and operated the critical messaging infrastructure between CRIMS and CITI (the custodian and back-office provider). Trades executed in CRIMS were transmitted to CITI via secure messaging queues. I monitored queue health in real time — a stuck message could mean a trade failing to settle, with significant financial and regulatory implications. When failures occurred I owned the remediation process end-to-end.
Overnight Batch Processing & Reconciliation: After market close, CITI returned end-of-day data over a secure channel and the critical batch cycle began. Using Markit EDM, data files were ingested and reconciled against the CRIMS database — validating positions, calculating compliance and risk metrics, loading cash balances, and ensuring the system was ready for the next trading day. I designed and implemented scheduler-based automation and recovery procedures so that even when individual batch steps failed overnight, the system could self-remediate or alert on-call engineers with the precise context needed to resolve issues within SLA.
Market Data Integration (Bloomberg & FactSet): Built technical integrations to pull pricing data, benchmark values, and reference data from Bloomberg and FactSet into Aberdeen's CRIMS database. These feeds underpinned NAV calculations, performance measurement, and compliance checking. Also worked on REIS (Real Estate Information System) and legacy mainframe applications that maintained specialist fund data.
Fund Reporting Suite: Developed automated fund reporting using Content Welder and Quarl templates for monthly, quarterly, and annual fund performance reports. Integrated data from multiple upstream systems to produce accurate, compliant investor reports distributed to thousands of clients.