Beacon Platform is pleased to announce the creation of a Canadian business entity, the company’s next step in expanding service and support to this important and innovative market for financial technology. Formalizing a Canadian presence will help Beacon and local companies work together to navigate the growing trends in quantitative trading, derivatives, and alternative assets, and improve their whole-portfolio risk management capabilities. 

Financial institutions in Canada have a long history of technology adoption and innovation. Beacon’s Canadian customers already include some of the country’s large banks and pension funds, such as a multinational investment bank and TD Asset Management Inc., a member of the TD Bank Group, as they look to accelerate new business opportunities, research and develop enhanced applications and analytics, and extend functionality to handle more complex financial transactions. 

Beacon has deep and growing roots in the Canadian fintech market. Mark Higgins, Beacon’s co-founder and Chief Analytics Officer, grew up in Canada and attained his BSc and PhD from Queen’s University in Kingston. The company has several Canadian team members across technical, marketing, and business roles who work from locations in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. A critical mass of Canadian customers, an excellent market for potential talent, and a robust banking, pension, and investment community are encouraging the company to take this step.

James Corrigan, who recently joined the company as its first President, has decades of experience working with Canadian pension plans and capital markets institutions  in his prior roles as Executive Vice President & Managing Director of SimCorp and his various leadership roles at FIS in their Global Trading business.  

“I am excited to be guiding Beacon during this stage of the company’s growth and geographic expansion,” said Mr. Corrigan. “Canadian financial institutions and pension funds are ahead of the curve in many areas, and Beacon can help them leverage modern fintech tools and techniques as they look for better ways to produce yield from derivatives and alternatives.”

About Beacon

Beacon Platform ushers in the future of financial markets with secure and scalable quant technology, elastic cloud infrastructure, and front-office applications. Its unique integrated development environment and web application framework make developing fintech applications faster and accessible to clients beyond the largest investment banks. Bringing decades of collective experience developing trading and risk management systems for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs, Beacon Platform offers its clients the robustness of these powerful tools with an unprecedented new layer of flexibility and security. To learn more about Beacon’s next-generation platform for enterprise-scale analytics, trading, and risk management, visit at www.beacon.io.