Product Specialist, Charles River Development, Officer

Company Profile: Charles River provides an end-to-end solution to automate front and middle office investment management functions across asset classes on a single platform. Delivered as a hosted service, the solution improves data quality and investment professional productivity, controls risk and lowers technology costs. Charles River serves more than 350 investment firms in over 40 countries in the institutional asset and fund management, private wealth, alternative investments, insurance, banking, and pension markets. Charles River was acquired by State Street in October 2018.

Background: Strong candidates are generally experienced in:

• Providing business/functional support for investment management or trading systems
• Handling complex and challenging application problems

Responsibilities:

• Working in a team providing application support for the Charles River IMS via e-mail, telephone and WebEx.
• Identifying client requirements, devising solutions, defining product enhancement requests and suggesting workarounds where applicable.
• Continually deepening your product, business and industry knowledge through role exposure, keeping up to date with new features, relevant internal training sessions and personal development (e.g. CISI certifications funded by Charles River).
• Making astute use of all available resources to progress investigations: self-expertise, system documentation, knowledgebase, product specialists, implementation consultants, product engineers.
• Providing best practice guidance, solution design, and instructions to clients and colleagues.
• Taking responsibility for both technical and functional investigations.
• Proactive management of client cases to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction.
• Managing client expectations.
• Appropriately escalating significant issues to line manager.
• Liaising with the product engineering team to detail software enhancement requests and document potential defects.

Skills, Experience & Qualifications Required:

Business/Personal.

• Essential: University degree. Preferably in Business/Financial/Economics discipline. Potentially Computer Science/Engineering.
• Exposure to and knowledge of the investment industry from a buy-side perspective – largely financial instruments and workflows. Knowledge of major players and trends are a bonus.
• Drive to progress personal knowledge.
• Experienced in dealing with users or clients from both a business and technical perspective.
• Ability to perform under pressure and prioritise tasks appropriately.
• Excellent communication skills - verbal and written.
• Self-motivated and able to demonstrate initiative.
• A desire to own issues to resolution.
• Enjoys complex problem solving and investigation.

Highly Desirable:

• Experience with Order Management Systems (OMS).
• Previous application support experience within the Front Office/buy-side.
• Financial certification (CFA L1 or higher, IMC, Claritas Investment Certificate, CISI Investment Operations Certificate, …).
• General understanding of financial services technologies including integration, development, and data management.
• Exposure to supporting SaaS delivery model.
• Fluency in a second European language.

Technical.

• Essential: Experience with relational databases preferably Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle.
• Minimum of Beginner-level proficiency in SQL.

• Desirable: Intermediate to Advanced-level proficiency in SQL.
• Experience in tackling complex application problems.
• Past exposure to any scripting or coding language e.g. Java, C#, Python, Perl, C++, VBA.