Dvir Yosef, VP R&D, leads our R&D Centre – the powerhouse and brains behind Sharegain’s category-defining technology – in Netanya, Israel. In this article, Dvir writes about the distinctive startup tech environment, how his team solved a dizzying problem of scale, and what Sharegain has in common with a 15th century German inventor.

Solving market needs

Working for a startup gives developers the opportunity to collaborate incredibly closely with the business and product teams, as well as the chance to see the fruit and impact of your work on a daily basis. As a scaleup, Sharegain has worked hard to retain this rewarding dynamic – what we have changed is the mindset.

Tech startups usually develop products that answer specific questions in their environment, to find and refine a product/market fit. Relying on this model for too long, however, risks limiting yourself to navigating the quirks of your first few clients. That’s why three years ago we pivoted to a new ‘north star’: how do we develop technology to solve the needs of an entire market?

We quickly realised that pushing the envelope was no longer enough, we had to invent something entirely new. Most tech companies – for example in cyber or AI – have hundreds of competitors, so they can research what others have done, then adapt, emulate or improve on their work. We, on the other hand, had to find solutions to problems that never existed, invent brand-new moving parts, and then figure out how to combine them to make a sum greater than its parts.

For inspiration, we looked to the artic explorers Scott and Amundsen – we would need to investigate and map our own undiscovered country.

The journey to scale

Sharegain sells an entire business line that’s digitised and automated through technology. We are the first to do this because we cracked the problem of scale: how do you aggregate and securely and transparently manage all your client’s underlying clients, their portfolios and each position within them? We’re talking about millions of positions that shift and change, as well as the reconciliation processes and controls through the entire loan lifecycle.

To arrive at managing data and flows at this scale, we worked iteratively. First, we identified the bottlenecks in the system – all of them. There were bottlenecks we knew about, but there were also ones we assumed might exist and ones we didn’t anticipate. So, like any frontier explorer, we worked through and mapped it out systematically. We then created solutions, tested them, and implemented the best ones. But every system has dependencies: when you solve one bottleneck, you impact another part, giving rise to a new problem, so you follow the same logic again – and rinse and repeat.

To manage this process in the fastest and most efficient way, each of our R&D squads took ownership of one domain ‘neighbourhood’. The squads ran in parallel, solving bottleneck after bottleneck within their own neighbourhood, until all the neighbourhoods within a domain were cleared and, thus, ready for scaling.

Change the tools, change the world

The result: Securities Lending as a Services (SLaaS), a technological enabler on the scale required by companies with millions of clients. Wealth managers, private banks and online brokers no longer need to hire desks of people to extract the full value of their portfolios. We’ve unlocked for them a new, sustainable revenue stream – particularly important now with the volatility we’re seeing in the markets.

In the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg’s novel ‘moveable block typeface’ quickly replaced the manual and laboursome method of writing books and documents by hand. By mechanising and standardising the production process, Gutenberg made books cheaper and, for the first time in history, available to virtually everyone. His invention heralded an information revolution and became the foundation for our knowledge-based economy.

Sharegain’s technology digitised and opened up securities lending in a similar way, but we’re not content on just holding this position. Our R&D squads are now mapping other regions within capital markets. One bottleneck, one neighbourhood at a time, as we scale to ever larger numbers and new ecosystems.

Interested in joining one of our R&D squads? Visit our Careers site.