The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has indicated that when its current chief technology officer, Vincent Hilly, retires in July next year, ex-Lehman Brothers chief information officer, Bridget O’Connor, will assume his role. Until that time, the two will be working together to ensure a smooth handover, says the vendor, which is currently ramping up its efforts in the OTC derivatives space.
O’Connor will also assume the role of managing director and be responsible for overseeing the IT infrastructure at DTCC, including core networking services, processing and messaging systems, distributed systems and business continuity. She will report to William Aimetti, DTCC’s chief operating officer and president.
DTCC has recently been touting its Trade Information Warehouse as the answer to a central repository for derivatives data, as the regulatory community is seeking to impose more transparency in this opaque corner of the market. The vendor has also recently launched a new platform with Markit Group, dubbed MarkitServ, which combines DTCC’s DerivServ workflow platform and the (ex-Swapswire) Markit Wire trade confirmation platform.
The vendor is hoping that O’Connor will bring her experience in developing and maintaining infrastructure systems and business continuity programmes, for which she was responsible at Lehman, to bear in her new role. She will need to maintain the certainty and reliability of DTCC’s post-trade processing capacity, which currently exceeds 850 million transactions in a single day.
Aimetti explains the importance that the vendor places on the role and the challenges O’Connor will likely face: “Our technology infrastructure organisation plays a key role in helping the broker-dealers, banks, mutual funds, insurance carriers, buy side community and other third party financial intermediaries who make up DTCC’s customer base, lower the cost to access their trading parties and leverage our services through what is essentially a networked community of users. And as our customers increasingly are headquartered in Europe as well as the US, we face new challenges both in extending the reliability and low cost infrastructure to new customer segments and in supporting new asset classes of financial products worldwide.”
O’Connor was previously chief information officer and global head for business continuity for Lehman Brothers Holding, a position she had held since 2006. She was responsible for all aspects of technology at the firm, and had operational management of the global business continuity organisation. The technology organisation consisted of more than 6,500 people in four major locations globally. While at Lehman, she aligned IT objectives with the broader business objectives and created an ongoing partnership between business and technology leaders.
During her 19 year career with Lehman, she served in a number of other key technology management positions. From 2002 to 2006, she served as chief technology officer and from 1997 to 2002, as senior vice president and global head, e-Commerce technology. She was the architect of the firm’s web portal as a standard delivery vehicle for all of Lehman’s electronic processes. The Lehman Live portal delivered more than 450 applications. Prior to joining Lehman Brothers, O’Connor worked from 1985 to 1991 as an applications architect for AT&T Bell Laboratories.
