Q2 2021

6 APAC / Issue Q2 2021 , Finding New Life For FinTech Financial services is an area of the business world that requires lightning-fast communication. Currencies and exchange rates can change incredibly rapidly, and the necessity for technology that can keep up is becoming ever more present. So, we spoke with Stefan Ott at Confinity Solutions to find out more about howhis firm is tackling this need. In doing so, it has been crowned 2021’s Most Innovative Global FinTech Startup. Discover more as part of our interviewwith Stefan about the work and success of Confinity Solutions. For five years now, Confinity Solutions has been changing the game and upping the level of excellence delivered in the financial technology and financial services sector. As has already been mentioned, the work of the financial industry moves at a pace that is significantly more rapid than many others, with split-second decisions being the difference between money gained and money lost. People’s very livelihoods hinge upon decisions that are made in very high-intense pressure environments. In these scenarios, it is imperative that those people making these crucial decisions have access to the fastest possible technology that allows them to keep up with what is happening out in the world of financial transactions. This is exactly where Confinity Solutions comes into the picture. Founded by Stefan following his decision to buy out software from IBM in 2016, the work of Confinity Solutions is focused around developing high-volume and low-latency messaging solutions. Perhaps the greatest example of this, and the firm’s key success to date, is Confinity Low Latency Messaging (CLLM), which is the successor product of IBM’s WebSphere MQ LLM. Having moved on from working at IBM to then founding his own business with a clear vision of what the future of financial technology should be, Stefan is a rare example of someone being correctly described as a visionary. His understanding of the industry and his desire to make the world of financial technology better has pushed Stefan to achieve bigger and better things with the software that he acquired from IBM. We at Corporate Vision had the privilege of being able to speak with Stefan about his role in starting the business, and how his involvement with the technology goes back many years beyond the foundation of Confinity Solutions. Upon beginning the interview with Stefan, it soon became abundantly clear that his passion for the technology and work of Confinity Solutions was seemingly limitless. “Confinity Solutions was established in 2016 to acquire the source code of two products from IBM, namely WebSphere Front Office (WFO), a market data distribution infrastructure, and WebSphere MQ LLM, a low-latency messaging software. Together with the products, Confinity Solutions also took over responsibility for the service and support of IBM’s customers using one of these products. Confinity Solutions was considered a FinTech start- up, but with two mature software products and an established customer base. I was working at IBM before, and was familiar with both pieces of software.” Unfortunately for those working with the IBM software, various decisions were made that meant the software fell into a sort of obscurity. Product strategies were bandied around, and new product names were created, but they were not names that Financial Markets’ clients and customers were familiar with. Not content to leave the software in the lurch, Stefan took it upon himself to found Confinity Solutions and created a brighter future for the two products and the Fintech industry. Now, almost five years on from the company’s inception, Stefan has engineered Confinity Solutions into a place where it is fully deserving of the title of 2021’s Most Innovative Global FinTech Startup from Corporate Vision Magazine. Jan21004 Stefan kindly elaborated further on the beginnings of the firm. “Initially, I wanted to call it Confinity as an amalgamation of consulting, financial, and IT. However, the founder of Paypal actually wanted to call his product Confinity, and still had the domain. Instead, the Solutions was added and Confinity Solutions was born. Since 2016, I’ve also worked with IBM in a partnership to ensure that they can actually still market and resell our two products, Confinity LLM, or CLLM, and Confinity Market Data System, or CMDS. This is all we do, and around these two products, there is also consultancy and other various forms of excellence. When I founded the firm, we were focused on owning the IP and utilising the knowhow to establish partnerships with a number of worldwide companies that could serve customers on a global basis.” Perhaps the greater of the two products that Confinity Solutions now offers is its low- latency messaging service, or the Confinity Low Latency Messaging (CLLM), which is the successor product of IBM’s WebSphere MQ LLM. Having