Our Velocity Is Your Compounding Advantage

Why I Joined Ridgeline to Lead Product Strategy

Years ago, when I was an FX trader in Sweden, my pager would beep when a position started to dip. I’d get in my car, drive to the office, and physically put in the trade. Sometimes at two in the morning. That workflow feels almost unfathomable now. But is it?

Much of investment management remains stuck in inefficient processes, held back by legacy systems that make change feel impossible. Firms still re-key the same data into multiple systems, wait for overnight batch jobs before they can see a complete picture, and devote countless hours to manual reconciliations. Ridgeline is changing that story, and quickly. I know because I’ve used and helped build products through each stage of this industry’s transformation.

In 2001, I joined Advent Software as one of the early employees in Europe. I wore a variety of hats, from consulting, project management, solutions consulting and support to product management, as the company grew from a handful of clients into a market leader. When Advent was acquired by SS&C, I stepped into global product strategy and leadership roles, eventually overseeing operations across EMEA and APAC.

That experience showed me both the potential of modern technology and the challenge of bringing it to life in established environments. You can build something new, but scaling it at the pace the industry needs is incredibly difficult.

Ridgeline offered me something I had never had before: a true clean slate. Instead of navigating through layers of existing constraints, Ridgeline was designed from the ground up to remove friction and enable true high velocity innovation.

I look for three things in any company, what I call the three P’s: platform, people, and process. The platform is the technology being built, the people are those creating it, and the process is the culture of how work gets done. Do right by people, and you can do right by clients, which fuels long-term growth. That thinking is woven into Ridgeline’s DNA, starting from the beginning with founder Dave Duffield and his championing of core values that guide the company.

This philosophy, paired with Ridgeline’s architecture, convinced me it was the right fit. The beauty of being cloud-native is the velocity we can move at. There’s no more waiting a year for an upgrade or years for a feature. We have one platform that allows all functions across the firm to seamlessly collaborate. And when one platform can also serve as your data strategy, you can finally build AI efficiently and accurately.

I’ve seen enough cycles in investment management to know when the ground is shifting. Today, incremental improvements are no longer enough. Adaptability and speed of innovation will separate the firms that grow from those that stagnate. Ridgeline’s cloud-native architecture and unified data model give it the agility to move at the same pace as its customers, something legacy systems can no longer do as client expectations and demands evolve. And it’s that same foundation that unlocks the industry’s biggest opportunity today: applying AI in ways that actually move the business forward.

I have four kids, so over the past 20 years I’ve probably seen every kids’ movie imaginable. In The Smurfs (2011), there’s a scene between Sofia Vergara’s character and Neil Patrick Harris’s character that stuck with me. She says to him, paraphrasing: “Don’t give me what I ask for. Give me what I want.” That’s exactly how I think about the potential of AI when used well.

AI innovation shouldn’t be about checking the box on customer requests. It should be about anticipating their needs, helping them uncover what they truly want, delivering a wow factor, and enabling them to do the same for their clients. That’s the opportunity we have in front of us at Ridgeline: to use technology not to meet expectations but to exceed them.

Imagine speaking to an AI agent and asking it to prepare you for a meeting. Within moments, it draws in the data, retrieves notes from prior communications, and organizes everything into a clear, easy-to-digest format. But it doesn’t stop there. Because it has access to all of the data relevant to your relationship with the client, it can surface the most valuable insights, highlight what truly matters to your client, and even anticipate the questions you should be asking, not just the ones you planned to.

With real-time, connected data, firms can truly operate as one team, whether it’s viewing current positions and cash in a model session or having a transaction immediately persist across the platform. And the use cases for AI continue to grow, with agents taking on more and more work, freeing teams to focus on the high-value tasks that matter most to build lasting relationships with clients

My career has been shaped by moments where technology redefined what was possible, from late-night drives to the trading desk with a pager in hand to building one of the first cloud-native products at a global incumbent. Joining Ridgeline is the next chapter in that story, and one I believe will be the most transformative yet. The DNA of Ridgeline is different. We’re reimagining investment management to ensure our customers thrive.

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