Ben Lvovsky / Financial markets technology

Financial markets

Building for the markets since 1999

Domain expert, architect and technology leader

Financial markets technology is the main passion of my professional life. My first serious system pushed live market data to online traders. Since then I have built broker terminals, wealth and portfolio platforms, money-markets and hedge-fund systems. I have traded my own money through all of it, and I have never stopped writing my own research software. This page sets out that record in full. I am based in Melbourne and open to Sydney. My general CV covers the cloud and integration architecture of the last decade.

CV — technology leadership CV — solution architect ben@lvovsky.com LinkedIn

Three roles in one person

Markets technology fails in the gaps between people: the trader who knows what they need but not how the system works, the analyst who writes down half of it, the architect who designs for the half that was written down, and the manager who is far from both. I have done each of those jobs, and I am most useful where they meet.

Domain expert and business analyst. I take requirements directly from fund managers, business owners and operations staff. I don't need instruments, market data or portfolio mechanics translated for me, because I trade them with my own money.

Architect. I hold design authority across systems and teams: event-driven integration, golden-source client data, real-time market data distribution, and cloud platforms on Azure and AWS. I build the proof of concept myself before I ask a team to build the real thing.

Leader. I have built engineering teams from zero, onshore and offshore. I brought an outsourced cloud function back in-house as Head of Cloud, and I have reported to managing directors and C-level executives on technical and commercial decisions.

Architecture and leadership today, 2024 – present

The problems in my current work are the ones markets technology has: golden-source client data, event-driven integration across many systems, and running a cloud engineering function.

Senior Solution Architect Slater and Gordon

Aug 2025 – present

  • Proposed and designed the firm’s master data platform — my own concept, approved as the firm’s architecture direction for client and contact data, with the first horizon in production and the full roll-out approved for the next horizons.
  • Author and owner of the firm’s Azure cloud and integration strategy, written for the CTO, Head of IT and Information Security Officer.
  • The platform is the sole system of record: other systems submit create and update requests, and it decides and distributes the canonical record. That is the same discipline a bank needs for client onboarding, counterparty and reference data.
  • Hub-and-spoke synchronisation across five systems on Azure Service Bus. I designed and proved the initial load myself: a validated full run in UAT consolidated over a million source records in 17 minutes with zero load errors.

Head of Cloud iSelect (Corporate Travel Management group)

Mar 2025 – Aug 2025

Led the cloud and DevSecOps function — seven people across AWS and Azure — and brought it back in-house from an outsourced provider. Technical Lead for the internal shared services and real-time data pipeline before that, from January 2024.

2022 – 2024: Senior Software Engineer at Leidos Australia on Bureau of Meteorology programs — see the general CV.

Banking, payments and a financial group, 2015 – 2022

IT Manager & Solution Architect Ubertas Financial Group / TwigTech

2018 – 2022

  • Ran IT for the financial group, reporting directly to the Managing Director and C-level on technical and commercial decisions.
  • Designed and built card-to-crypto and bank-to-crypto payment services, including transaction privacy.
  • Built TwigTech from nothing to a live commercial platform on AWS, covering trust accounting and short-stay distribution. I built the engineering team onshore and offshore.

IT Architect / Lead Developer Ippon Australia, for ANZ

2017

Built a custom OpenID Connect token issuer: the identity layer that lets a bank’s clients verify the end user and retrieve their profile from the authorisation server.

Enterprise Architect / Java Lead Odecee (Cognizant), for ANZ and NAB

2015 – 2017

Solution architecture and hands-on delivery of banking service engines across authentication, payments, customer profile and contacts.

2017 – 2018: Solutions Architect at Australia Post (contract) — see the general CV.

Payments, wealth, portfolio and money markets, 2004 – 2010

Senior Java Developer VEDA Advantage

2010

A high-performance multithreaded financial application for multi-core hardware, using ultra-lightweight threads and zero-copy message passing between them.

Senior Java Developer National Australia Bank, Money Markets

2009

The LoanIQ loan-servicing project. Java with test-driven development, continuous build pipelines, and Oracle PL/SQL and query optimisation.

Project and Team Lead Ubertas (Kongari) Asset Management, a hedge fund

2007

I did the business analysis and architecture and built the fund’s portfolio management platform for FX and equity markets hands-on. It included a management console for adding and editing rules and markets, and overnight back-end services that refreshed the market data. I introduced test-driven development, iterative delivery and the team’s first continuous-integration pipeline.

Senior Application Programmer National Australia Bank, Money Markets

2006 – 2007

Analysis, enhancement and support of the money-markets division’s applications. I also contributed to the review and redesign of its processes. .NET, SQL Server and BusinessObjects Data Integrator.

Senior Software Engineer Avanteos, Commonwealth Bank group

2005 – 2006

Portfolio management systems: the JBWere Goldman Sachs project, a wrap platform for financial advisers covering superannuation, shares, managed funds, unlisted investments, cash and margin lending. C#, .NET and SQL Server.

Senior Software Engineer OnQ / BillExpress and Securency

2004 – 2005

At ASX-listed OnQ I owned the architecture, design and implementation of Posh3, a from-scratch, high-load distributed transaction server for bill payments that replaced a system no longer able to carry the volume. At Securency, the Reserve Bank’s banknote joint venture, I built a load-balanced distributed transaction server for high-intensity real-time data feeds from production machinery.

2010 – 2015: Solution Architect for ADP’s ATO payroll products, then architect roles at NetBusiness, NEC Australia and IBM — see the general CV.

Market data and trading systems, 1999 – 2003

Solution Architect Paritech Financial Data Solutions

2002 – 2003

Responsible for the technology, design and development of two broker systems for CommSec.

  • PULSE, a live-data broker terminal built to replace IRESS at CommSec.
  • Professional Trader, CommSec’s retail trading product, which replaced the IMEDIA system previously used by TD Waterhouse.
  • Live data from the ASX, and international futures and FX from Reuters. Multithreaded real-time systems in C++ and C#, with networking, synchronisation and SQL Server back ends.

IT Manager, Internet Broadcasting Technology Online Trading Systems

1999 – 2002

I joined as a contractor and became the permanent manager of the broadcasting technology, leading the project and owning its architecture, design and programming.

  • Designed and built the Broadcaster: a distributed, high-performance server that takes live market data from diverse feeds and re-broadcasts it over the internet to a large number of clients, with a relatively small load on the server.
  • Made it relocatable and scalable. It ran as a DCOM service on a machine separate from the feed server, and the administrator could move the active broadcaster for a feed as resource demands changed.
  • Built the clients: event-driven ActiveX components for desktop applications, and Java clients delivering live prices into web pages.
  • The technology is the subject of my provisional patent for internet broadcasting.

On the other side of the screen

I have traded equities, exchange-traded options, futures and FX personally since 1999. I run advanced options structures and seasonal strategies, and I build the tools I trade with, including the portfolio optimiser I use for my own investments. It is the reason I can sit with a trading desk and follow the conversation, and the reason I am sceptical of any backtest until I have seen its controls.

Research, 2012 – 2026

  • Market Synthesis — market-synthesis.lvovsky.com, 2026. An adversarial multi-agent LLM system that discovers macro-financial events from real news feeds and runs a structured debate between specialised agents. It emits auditable signals with full provenance. It detects gaps between market narrative and structural reality at about 0.75 precision out of sample: 51 signals from 2023 onward, with every look-ahead path removed. The precision holds across five macro regimes over twelve years.
  • Markowitz portfolio optimiser — benlvovsky.github.io/markowitz, 2026; first Python version 2017. An interactive efficient frontier and capital market line over 116 cross-asset ETFs. A Python quadratic-program pipeline feeds a static React front end, and a walk-forward backtest runs on point-in-time universes that include delisted securities.
  • Trading-edge research, 2026. Empirical studies testing specific crypto and equity trading edges against realistic costs and correctly specified null models.
  • Machine learning for financial markets — ml.lvovsky.com. Instrument predictions from roughly 330 attributes: commodity and world-index moving averages, FX, and calendar and option-expiry effects. The model is an SVM recompiled for GPU execution. I rebuilt it in 2023–24 as a Python batch pipeline on AWS.
  • Open-source market tooling — github.com/benlvovsky, 2012 – 2021. A portfolio manager, a look-ahead bias test, stock data mining, historical market data, and portfolio optimisation back ends.

The business training behind it

I hold a double master’s degree from Swinburne University of Technology: an MBA and a Master of Information Systems Management, completed in 2008. The MBA gives me the business side of the conversation: strategy, finance and the economics of a decision. The MISM covers the layer between the business and the build: Contemporary Issues in Business Analysis, Managing the IT Capability, Managing IT-Enabled Transformation, IT Effectiveness and Information Systems Project Management.

Together with a Master of Computer Science and Engineering, Oracle Certified Master Java EE Enterprise Architect certification and my current PhD in software engineering at RMIT University, the degrees let me argue a business case and a system design in the same meeting.