TECHNOLOGY
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Wendy Chen began her career in finance . She worked as a trader for both Barclays and Jane Street Capital , largely specialising in ‘ quant ’ trading : large transactions involving the sale and purchase of thousands of shares at once . “ I was doing quant trading for a while ”, Chen recalls , “ and I saw this opportunity to bring that same type of thinking to enterprises in Asia ”.
With her trading experience , Chen saw an opportunity to levy her skills and experience from the finance sector and apply them to a new market and a new company . Reflecting on the genesis of Omnistream , Chen confides that “ what ’ s really interesting about the quant trading business is that so much of the secret sauce is in how you operationalize the algorithms - how you think about business continuity and operational data .”
She founded Omnistream in 2013 with the goal of using a ‘ quant ’ trading ’ s algorithmic , machine learning-powered methods to provide a statistics-driven retail analysis service , capable of keeping up with “ how fast things are changing ” in South East Asia and other emerging markets .
“ Speed and automation are quite important ”, Chen explains . “ Given infinite time and infinite humans , you could probably replicate a lot of analytics . However , you ’ re talking about customers who want solutions in five days , not five months ”.
“ It ’ s very hard for Western enterprises to service South East Asia . A lot of it is just costs structure .
JANUARY 2019