Meet one of the technical founders

My name is Greg Bataille. I have spent the last decade working in startup and scale up environments to build SaaS offerings, and to build the teams that build those products.

I have worked in a few industries, from medical devices, to food safety and engineering, but by far my largest expertise is in wealth management and finance.

Fresh out of school, I started to work for the Wealth Management branch of JP Morgan. This was a great learning experience where I was confronted to a very deep domain and a very large existing IT system. I was able to interact with many parts of the value chain including end of day and end of month processes, order management and hedge funds and private equity management. I was also in contact with various stakeholders across the world, who each brought their culture and experience to the mix and helped me grow a lot as an engineer and a solution finder.

But as I grew, I became a bit disillusioned with the way IT was treated (as a tool rather than an enabler), how projects were limited by old technology and old ways of organizing around technology. That was the time also where technologies like AWS were appearing and companies like Spotify were starting to talk about their culture and showing another way to organize product development.

I therefore left the banking environment to try a much different startup environment. In there I enjoyed a lot the agility and efficiencies of the teams, the focus on finding solutions to problems, the more manageable company sizes, and the ability to apply the latest and best technologies and practices to the problems we were trying to solve.

This means that already 10 years ago, I was managing a SaaS cloud software that was running on the public AWS cloud. It was used by thousands of users, processed millions of pictures. We were releasing to production every single day, without any interruption of service. And during the 4 years I was there, we had only one real outage that lasted only one hour. This was a refreshing change from what I had known before.

So when 18 months ago I was contacted by a former colleague to start what would become Light Frame, I did not hesitate long. It was a way for me to return to this complex business that I enjoy which is finance, while still working in an environment and culture that I like and that I'm convinced is more prone to delivering real value and solving real problems. And if the product or the domain did not suffice, the team that was assembled is brilliant and makes a difference between Light Frame being a good idea and Light Frame being a sure success.

Rethinking wealth management technology from the ground up, starting with the Core Banking System is really what the sector needs to see deep impacting changes and I'm delighted to have been given the opportunity to be a part of this future.