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[ I N D U S T R Y P R O F I L E C itadel Securities, the market making business of Ken Griffin’s giant hedge fund, is a frequent poacher of the best tal- ent in the industry. It is constantly making moves to acquire the best personnel in technology and trad- ing as it looks to compete with the top investment banks. It was therefore no surprise that last year it hired electronic trading expert Nicola White as it new chief operating officer for fixed income, currencies and commodities (FICC). White, whose career prior to joining Citadel Securities spanned 13 years entirely at Morgan Stanley, has become a leader in combining trading and technology together, two business areas which have traditionally remained separate. After graduating from the Uni- versity of Waterloo with a bach- elor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, she enrolled in the co-op programme and interned at Morgan Stanley, joining full time in 2003. “Within a couple of years of grad- uation, I had developed real-time mortgage pricing software and launched an electronic trading desk,” she describes. “The breadth of experience I gained during my time at the University of Waterloo catalysed how fast I could bring extensive value to a firm and the industry at large.” In 2005 she was asked to move onto the trading desk, becoming a US Treasuries trader, despite her speciality being in software. Her role within the bank became amplified with the onset of Dodd- Frank, which shifted trading of 66 TheTrade Summer 2017 | N I C O L A W H I T E ] derivatives and other asset classes from the trading floor onto elec- tronic platforms. After being asked to head up its electronic trading and market structure team for US rates trading in 2010, White decid- ed to utilise her experience on the technology front and apply it to the fixed income world. “Starting in technology and mov- ing into trading really set the base for me to move into an electronic trading role, and to combine the technological and trading aspects of the business. That is where I have focused my career over the last six to seven years,” she says. “Prior to the financial crisis, there was not a natural combination of those two elements in the fixed income industry. Technology plays of desk becoming more involved in front-and back-office technol- ogies in order to streamline their processes and build sophisticated trading tools,” she adds. In 2014 White became global head of electronic rates trading, and then a year later global head of electronic fixed income trading, in which she led the bank’s trading activities in order to keep up with the Dodd-Frank landscape. “After Dodd-Frank, dealers had to move quoting and trading systems from pricing within minutes to pricing within seconds through a SEF (swap execution facility), which was no small task. Having to look at the whole chain and figure out how to take each piece down the sub-second was a massive para- “We have been able to use the work we did in the swaps space as our foundation for this build as we think there are many synergies between off- the-run Treasuries and swaps.” a more critical role in enabling and driving trading now than it has ever before.” According to a recent report from Greenwich Associates, the number of investors trading fixed income electronically has grown year-on- year, with 46% now stating they trade at least some of their volume electronically. “People in fixed income are being more technically savvy and inter- ested in technology. For example, we are seeing traders and heads digm shift for banks and other mar- ket participants,” White explains. A perfect pairing It was this rapid rise through Morgan Stanley’s hierarchy that also coincided with the expansion of Citadel Securities. The result of Dodd-Frank meant that new non-bank market makers with more advanced, flexible technology could enter the space to replace banks that were shrinking their business. Citadel Securities