W—01
Finance · Europe
An institutional trading floor, rebuilt as a single surface.
- The problem
- A top-ten European bank's discretionary trading desk operated across 41 systems, 11 spreadsheets and three vendors. Latency was measured in conversations, not milliseconds.
- The thinking
- We didn't start with the screens. We started with the question every trader asks at 6:43am — 'where do I stand?' — and worked backwards from the shape of that answer.
- The approach
- A two-year program. New data spine. Real-time risk model. One trading surface designed around the human, not the asset class.
- The innovation
- An agentic layer that pre-stages morning packages, surfaces drift, and writes the first draft of every compliance note before a trader sits down.
- The outcome
- Time-to-first-trade dropped from 22 to 4 minutes. Compliance exceptions fell 71%. The desk's headcount stayed the same. Its capacity nearly doubled.
- The lesson
- The right interface isn't a feature on top of a system. It is the system.