We’re committed to providing indispensable guidance tools to our clients, ensuring they possess the insights and support required to navigate the structured products landscape with confidence and make informed investment decisions: Volodymyr Gubskyi of IVM Markets Inc USA

“Ildar Farkhshatov (co-founder) and I spent five years working together at Deutsche Bank and later launched IVM Markets to empower structured products distributors to offer tailored investment options.”

IVM Markets Inc USA is an AI-driven structured products software platform designed to aid in idea generation and product optimization. IVM’s clients are distributors of equity-structured products, including brokers, asset managers, private banks, and insurance companies.

IVM’s AI can curate thematic index and stock lists based on investors’ desires and quickly generate the most optimal basket and trade ideas out of thousands in seconds. The platform handles the complexity of modeling structured products efficiently, allowing financial institutions to send the best ideas for final auction with multi-issuer platforms and marketplaces of structured products, many of which are also IVM’s clients.

IVM Markets Inc USA was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Dover, Delaware.

The Silicon Review reached out to Volodymyr Gubskyi, co-founder and CEO of IVM Markets Inc USA, and here’s his response.

Interview Highlights

Please tell us about the circumstances or events that led to the founding of IVM Markets Inc USA.     

Throughout my career, I have focused on democratizing and personalizing investing. I discovered structured products during my studies at the London School of Economics. A seminar by a bulge bracket bank trader piqued my interest, revealing that investors can customize their investments. Today, it’s a $7 trillion market, larger than ETFs and hedge funds combined, growing at 30% annually.

My goal became to empower people to design personalized investments while using bulge bracket banks for execution. I gained experience in derivatives and special solutions at top banks like Merrill Lynch, RBS, and Deutsche Bank.

Ildar Farkhshatov (co-founder) and I spent five years working together at Deutsche Bank and later launched IVM Markets to empower structured products distributors to offer tailored investment options. Frustrated by a few banks controlling product content and homogenizing it, we are actively reshaping the finance industry. Our mission is to enable financial institutions to design structured products before they proceed to buy the final product from the bulge bracket banks.

Q. What strategies do you have in place to encourage innovation in your company?

Diverse Brainstorming: We actively seek diverse perspectives, dedicating 80% of brainstorming sessions to external discussions and 20% to internal team members for a well-rounded approach.

Client-Centric Innovation: We prioritize listening to clients’ needs, avoiding assumptions, and ensuring our solutions directly address real-world problems.

Social Media Innovation: We utilize social media for rapid idea testing and data collection, engaging daily to gather valuable insights.

Flat Structure: IVM maintains a flat organization, promoting open communication and idea flow across all levels and valuing input regardless of position.

Idea Sharing Incentives: We incentivize idea sharing through collaboration channels like Teams, holding regular meetings to facilitate creative exchanges, and recognizing innovative contributions.

Agile Development: We embrace agile product and service development, adapting quickly based on user feedback and changing market dynamics to remain responsive and agile.

Q. Can you provide us with one or two success stories, detailing specific client challenges and how IVM’s solutions contributed to their success?

In the realm of electronic marketplaces for structured products, a cutting-edge multi-issuer platform was already equipped with the capabilities to conduct electronic auctions for equity-structured products. Additionally, they offered portfolio management lifecycle features for these products. However, a significant challenge arose before clients could dive into the auction process: they needed to explore a multitude of variations and possibilities. This exploration was driven by client requests, which often took the form of extensive lists of potential indices or stocks to test or broad thematic requests, such as sustainable transportation.

Sales teams at the platform found themselves spending hours scouring the market for relevant stocks to fulfill these complex requests. Once the stocks were identified, the arduous task of individually pricing each variation began. Pricing a single variation takes a few minutes, making it practically impossible to price the hundreds, or even thousands, of variations that could result from a client’s request. A list of just 10 stocks or indices could easily generate over 100 variations to be tested. A list of 20 expanded into a staggering 1,200, and when accounting for protection levels, maturity levels, and autocall levels, the number could balloon to a daunting 50,000 variations.

Enter IVM, the game-changer that revolutionized the multi-issuer platform’s operations.

IVM’s artificial intelligence capabilities empowered the platform’s sales and wealth advisor teams to search for stocks efficiently. They could now harness IVM’s AI to not only identify relevant stocks but also conduct in-depth research. This research included insights into why these stocks were a suitable fit, analyst consensus, and even running checks for negative news.

However, the true magic happened when it came to pricing. IVM’s optimization engine had the capacity to price thousands of variations in a few minutes, efficiently identifying the best among them.

This synergetic relationship between IVM’s AI and optimization and the multi-issuer auction platform allowed us to bring new wealth manager clients onboard during the first month and to continue thereafter.

Tell us what’s next for IVM Markets Inc USA.      

At IVM Markets Inc USA, our future vision revolves around democratizing finance through customized portfolios, prioritizing each client’s unique needs. Structured products are the key to achieving this personalization, allowing investors to create distinct investment strategies with each transaction.

The recent surge in multi-issuer platforms and electronic access to equity-structured products propels our journey forward. While these platforms simplify product purchases, a crucial missing component is a comprehensive framework to guide investors towards optimal personalized investment choices before they buy. We view this as an opportunity for significant impact, given our strong synergy with many of these marketplaces, several of which are our clients.

Our next steps involve leveraging AI to bridge this gap further. We are committed to providing indispensable guidance tools to our clients, ensuring they possess the insights and support required to navigate the structured products landscape with confidence and make informed investment decisions. Our ongoing focus is on establishing a market standard where IVM is the AI-powered search and recommendation engine, creating more and better-quality idea flow for all the players in the structured products industry. Idea flow goes from advisors to their executing marketplaces, brokers, asset managers, and private banks, and from these ‘resellers’ to the issuer banks that manufacture the structured products, thereby growing the market for structured products and generating more deals for everyone.

Leadership IVM Markets Inc USA

Volodymyr Gubskyi, Co-founder & CEO: Volodymyr has 18 years of cross-asset derivatives and structured products experience. He previously held the position of regional head of structured products at Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Merrill Lynch.

Ildar Farkhshatov Co-founder, CTO: Ildar has 15 years of experience in derivatives trading, including Deutsche Bank, and 16 years of tech experience, including AllianceBernstein and Deutsche Bank.

“Our mission is to enable financial institutions to design structured products before they proceed to buy the final product from the bulge bracket banks.”